(c) The assemblies connected with the Lord's Day were two : the vigil in the night between Saturdaj' and Sunday, and the celebration of the Liturgy on Sunday morning. One reason for meet- ing at such times was most probably the need for precaution in times of persecution and dithculty. An interesting account of Sunday worship of Christians at Jerusalem in the 4th cent, is to be found in a letter written by a Gallic lady who went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The document, written in the vulgar Latin, is given by Duchesne in his Origines dii culte chretien, App. 5. No doubt the picture reflects in the main a usage
I which had existed from much earlier times. A
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crowd of people ('all who could possibly be there ') gathers at the church doors ' before cock-crow ' when the doors are first opened, then streams into the church, which is lit up by a large number of lamps (himinana infinita). (Not that such zest in church attendance was universal in the early cen- turies. In a Homily on the Lord's Day by Eusebius of Alexandria [5th cent. ?] the slackness of people in coming to church is humorously treated and re- buked. ) The worship includes inter alia the recita- tion of three psalms, responses, prayers, and the reading of the gospel story of the Resurrection. Justin Martyr's account of worship on the Lord's Day is also w-ell known (Apol. i. 65-67), while — to go still further back to the very fringe of the Apos- tolic Age — we have Pliny's famous letter to Trajan wherein he describes Christians meeting early in the morning to sing hymns to Christ and (v.l. 'as') God, and joining in a sacramental act and a common meal. This took place, he says, stato die, and no doubt that fixed day was the first day of the week.
(d) Very possibly the sacramental meal ( ' break- ing of bread') was the earliest distinctive feature in the Christian observance of the Lord's Day, the other exercises of prayer, reading, etc., being added later. ' To the sacramental meal of apos- tolic times, understood as a foretaste and assurance of the "Messianic banquet" in the coming Par- oasia, there was soon prefixed a religious exercise — modelled perhaps on the common worship of the Synagogue— which implied just those preparatory acts of penance, purification, and desirous stretch- ing out towards the Infinite, which precede in the experience of the growing soul the establishment of communion with the Spiritual AVorld ' (E. Underbill, The Mystic Way, London, 1913, p. 335).
5. Modern names for Lord's Day. — The varying names by which the day has been known in later times reflect the confusion which has attended the history of the Lord's Day as a Christian institution.
(a) To speak of the day as ' the Sabbath ' (even the expression ' Christian Sabbath ' is only admis- sible on the ground of analogy) is to use a modus loqtiendi that primitive Christians could never have used. Tlieir distinction between Sabbath and Lord's Day was as clear as between the first and the seventh day. It arises from the mistaken identification of the weekly festival of the Resurrec- tion of Christ with the Sabbath of the Jews and of the Fourth Commandment in the Decalogue. The sanctions for the observance of the Lord's Day were wrongly sought in OT prescriptions (see Richard Baxter's treatise on ' The Divine appoint- ment of the Lord's Day proved, etc.,' in Works, ed. Orme, London, 1830, xiii. 363 ff.).
Less than ever is it of service now to appeal to the Fourth Commandment as an authority in urg- ing the due maintenance of the Lord's Day ; though, indeed, the Mosaic institution has its full value as a venerable exemplification of the naturally Avise provision for a weekly release from daily business and toil. Christians must rely on other sanctions, and chiefly the definite association of tiie day with the Resurrection of our Lord, the true instinct by which with great spontaneity the first little Chris- tian communities set the day apart, the continuous usage of the Church, the provision for the function of worship. Others wlio may be uninfluenced by specific religious considerations, and for wiiom the very term ' Lord's Day' may have no significance, may yet very well recognize the value of the under- lying natural principle of the ' day of rest.'
(6) Again, the persistence, or survival, of the pre- Christian and pagan designation 'Sunday' is a matter of interest, especially since, being tacitly denuded of its ancientassociationswithsun-worsliip, it has come to be invested to the Christian mind
with all the meaning attached to ' Lord's Day,' and used interchangeably with that name. We have seen how careful primitive Christians were to dis- tinguish between the pagan name and that which they took for their own particular use. But the old nomenclature held its ground in the civil calen- dar notwithstanding the spread of Christianity. When Constantino (A.D. 321) publicly honoured the Lord's Day by enacting that it should be kept as a day of rest, he spoke of it as dies venerabilis soils, in the latter part of the 4th cent. , in one of the laws of Valentinian II., there occurs the phrase : ' On Sunday, which our forefathers usually and rightly called the Lord's Day (Doniinicuin) ' — a further evidence as to the triumph of the ancient name. It is curious to see ' Lord's Day ' referred to as an old name that had fallen into abeyance (see Bingham, op. cit. XX. ii. 1).