382 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590
Catholic countries, and Christian princes and magistrates onlj too frequently give it the sanction of their example.
Ecclesiastical legislation in like manne'- prohibited needless mechanical and agricultural labor, and the attending of theatres and other public places of amusement, also hunting and weddings, on Sunday and on feast days. Besides such negative legislation, to which the state must confine itself, the church at the same time enjoined positive observances for tlie sacred day, especially the regular attendance of public worship, frequent communion, and the payment of free-will offerings (tithes). Many a council here confounded the legal and the evangelical principles, thinking themselves able to enforce by the threatening of penalties what has moral value only as a voluntary act. The Council of Eliberis, in 305, decreed the suspension from communion of any person living in a town who shall absent himself for three Lord's Days from church. In the same legalistic spirit, the council of Sardica,' in 343, and the Trullan counciP of 692, threatened with deposition the clergy who should unnecessarily omit jDublic worship three Sundays in succession, and prescribed temporary excommunication for similar neglect among the laity. But, on the other hand, the councils, while they turned the Lord's Day itself into a legal ordinance handed down from the apostles, pronounced with all decision agamst the Jewish Sabbatism. The Apostolic Canons and the council of Gangra (the latter, about 450, in opposition to the Gnostic Manich^an asceticism of the Eustathians) condemn fasting on Sunday.' In the Greek churcli this prohibition is still in force, because Sunday, commemorating the resurrection of Christ, is a day of spiritual joy. On the same symbolical ground kneeling in prayer was forbidden
' Can. xi. appealing to former ordinances, comp. Can. Apoat. xiii. and xiv. (xiv and XV.), and the council of Elvira, can. xxi. ITefele: Conciliengcscb. L p. 610.
' Can. IxxiL
* Can. Apost. liii. (alias lii.) : " Si quis episcopus aut presbyter aut diaconus in diebus festis non suuiit camera aut vinum, deponatur." Comp. ■can. Ixvi (Ixv.) and Const Apost. V. 20. The council of Gangra says in the 18th canon: "If any one, for pretended ascetic reasons, fast on Sunday, let him be anathema." The same council condemns those who despise the hause of God and frequent schismati^nl assemblies.
§ 75. THE CIVIL AND KELIGIODS SUNDAY. 3S5
on Sunday and through the whole time of Easter until Pentecost. The general council of iNlicaea, in 325, issued on this point in the twentieth canon the folio win o; decision : " Whereas some bow the knee on Sunday and on the days of Pentecost [i. e., during the seven Aveeks after Easter], the holy council, that everything may everywhere be uniform, decrees that prayers he offered to God in a standing posture." The Trull an council, in 692, ordained in the ninetieth canon : " From Saturday evening to Sunday evening let no one bow the knee." The Poman church in general still adheres to this practice.' The New Testament gives no law for such secondary matters ; the apostle Paul, on the contrary, just in the season of Easter and Pentecost, before his imprisonment, following an inward dictate, repeatedly knelt in prayer.^ The council of Orleans, in 538, says m the twenty-eighth canon: "It is Jewish superstition, that one may not ride or walk on Sunday, nor do anything to adorn the house or the person. But occupations in the field are forbidden, that people may come to the church and give themselves to prayer." '
As to the private opinions of the principal fathers on this subject, they all favor the sanctification of the Lord's Day, but treat it as a peculiarly Christian institution, and draw a strong, indeed a too strong, line of distinction between it and the Jewish Sabbath ; foi-getting that they are one in essence and aim, though different in form and spirit, and that the fourth commandment as to its substance — viz., the keeping holy of one day out of seven — is an integral part of the decalogue or the moral law, and hence of perpetual obligation.* Eusebius calls
' Comp. the Corpus juris can. c. 13, Dist. 3 de consecr. Roman Catholics, however, always kneel in the reception and adoration of the sacrament.
' Acts XX. 36 ; xxi. 5.
' Comp. the brief scattered decrees of the councils on the sanctification of Sunday, in Hefele, 1. c. i, 414, 753, 760, 761, 794 ; ii 69, 647, 756 ; Neale's Feasts and Fasts ; and GilfiUan : The Sabbath, &c., p. 390.
* See the principal patristic passages on the Lord's Day in Hessey, Sunday, etc. p. 90 ff. and p. 388 ff. Hessey says, p. 114: "In no clearly genuine passage thai I can discover in any writer of these two [the fourth and fifth] centuries, or in any public document, ecclesiastical or civil, is the fourth commandment referred to aa the ground of the obhgation to observe the Lord's Day." The Reformers of the six* teeath centm-y, likewise, in their zeal against legalism and for Christian freedom, ei>