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‘I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.’
Rev_1:10
I. That it was not regarded as the true successor of the old Sabbath there are clear signs in Apostolic times. In the concessions made to the Judaic Christians by the advanced party in the Apostolic Church would, we doubt not, be included the joint observance of the two days—the last and the first. The double observance was long continued in the Eastern Church. It should, moreover, not be forgotten that the application of the name ‘Sabbath’ to the Christian rest-day is of modern origin. It is true that St. Augustine uses the phrase ‘Our Sabbath’; but this is only a parallel with such a phrase as ‘Christ our Passover.’ The word first appears in a treatise issued in 1595. We owe the name to Puritanism, and in recognising our indebtedness to this source, we may seasonably reflect that the Reformers had left untouched the pre-Reformation abuses of the Lord’s day.
II. The immediate followers of our Lord had no inclination to secularise their new rest-day of evangelic freedom.—A duty that none show a disposition to neglect it is needless to enforce. If we hear so little in the Apostolic records and writings of the Christian obligation of hallowing the Lord’s day, we believe the main reason of this to be, that those early believers in the ardour and devotion of a fresh young faith, were prone rather to turn every weekday into a Sunday of holy fellowship and service than feel the slightest wish to make secular the weekly day of rest. Passing to the early testimonies subsequent to New Testament times, we have no hesitation in affirming that there is no historical fact enjoying better proof than this—that the observance of the day by intermission of toil and by special religious exercises was the constant practice of the Christian Church from the days of the Apostles.
III. On the vexed practical question of allowable or unallowable pleasure-taking on Sunday we cannot embark.—Keeping to the Apostolic principle, ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind,’ we shall not stray far from the right and the true. But one prefatory reflection is offered here which may help us in settling details. Before we are capable of appreciating the true worth of the Christian’s Sunday, can it ever be a really pleasurable day? Ought we to try to make it the happiest day of the week to those whose whole lives are one long ‘grieving of the Holy Spirit of God,’ between whose souls and the Divine source of all truest happiness there stretches ‘a great gulf fixed,’ unbridged, or, being bridged, uncrossed by their reluctant feet? And may we not be deterred from the attempt to render this good gift of our Father acceptable to the Christless by reflecting that the same principle that would make it pleasurable to them, while thus, would turn heaven itself into a paradise for worldlings, and degrade its pure joys into the hollow pleasures of selfish fashion? The Church’s work is surely other than this: it is not to bring down the things of God to the level of the world, but, through her ceaseless ministries of loving suasion, to lift men up towards the altitude of the things of God.
—
Bishop A. Pearson.