day proportionable to their six of labour.* From this time also their year had a new beginning (Exod. xii. 2; xxiii. 16; xxxiv. 22); so that although in respect of their civil affairs they began their year, month, and day, as they did before the exodus, yet in the new ecclesiastical year they began their day at sunset, and reckoned the evening to be the former part of the day. That the Jewish artificial day of daylight consisted of twelve hours is deduced by him from Acts ii. 15, and Matt. xxvii. 45. Now, he proceeds, as Moses put back the account, to begin the Sabbath-day at the evening before, namely from six o'clock in the evening wherein Israel departed from Egypt, to continue to six o'clock in the evening of the next ensuing day,—"so Christ re-assumed and brought forward all that day-light, and put it to the next day, with which [day-light], together with the night following, he made a new distinct day, by rising early in the morning of that new-made day; having put an end to the Jewish Sabbath; Matt. xxviii. 1: 'in the end of the Sabbath' (Christ then put an end to the Jewish Sabbath) 'when it began ipox, to dawn' with some light towards the first day of the week; ' in which rising Christ ceased (as learned Weems notes, according to Heb. iv. 10) from his own works, as God did from his.'" (P. 60.) To the objection that Gen. i. 5, &c., indicates that from the beginning the artificial night was set before the artificial day as part of the natural day, he answers that the days there mentioned were not natural but creational days, peculiar to the creation, and neither measured out by the sun (which was not created till the fourth), nor differing, as natural days do, in the times of their beginnings and endings, at different parts of the earth. And Moses having penned the book of Genesis after the exodus, it would have seemed, had he written "The morning and the evening were the first day," &c., that he “disliked the said change appointed by God as aforesaid, of making the evening the beginning of each day after their coming out of Egypt." (P. 70.)

The reasons assigned by Dr Homes why the Jews were to change the beginning of the day, and so, as he thinks, the day itself from Sunday to Saturday, are-first, that a memorial of their deliverance out of Egypt might be established; and secondly, that as the heathens dedicated the former day to the Sun, and worshipped that luminary on it as a god, there was an evident expediency in shifting the Jewish day of worship to another. In endeavouring to prove that the Gentiles did worship the Sun on the first day of the week, he assumes it as highly probable that the Patriarchs both before and after the Flood observed that day in honour of the Creator of "that wonderful frame of heaven, and in it that transcendent shining planet the Sun;" this day being chosen by them in imitation of his resting on the seventh day of the creation, "which is urged in the Fourth Commandment as to a seventh-day Sabbath, if not to the

The command in Lev. xxiii. 32, refers only to the annual day of atonement, though it has generally been applied to the weekly Sabbath. It is only by interpolating this word that I can make the passage intelligible.

seventh-day Sabbath which we now observe as our Lord's Day. The Patriarchs that were before the Flood no doubt called and accounted God to be their Sun in a figurative sense, as the Patriarchs that were after the Flood, and their succeeding generations, did likewise (Numb. vi. 25; Deut. xxxiii. 1, 2; Psal. viii.; xxxi. 16; lxvii. 1; lxxxiv. 11; Mal. iv. 2). Now, as 'tis true that the pious Patriarchs of old, in a figurative sense calling and accounting God to be as their Sun, did call and account their weekly solemn day of their solemn worship of him by the name of Sunday, or Sun's day, or Day of the Sun; so it is as true that idolatrous heathen, of very ancient times, and downward, in imitation of the Jews' worshipping the true God, their metaphorical Sun, did, on the said Sunday, worship the material and natural Sun, and upon that account called it their Sunday, or Day of the Sun." But it is not imaginable that those who worshipped the whole host of heaven would dedicate any other day to their greatest god, the Sun, than the day which the Patriarchs before the Flood dedicated to the Creator of the Sun; "and moreover, seeing the idolaters assigned to every of their seven planet-gods one of the seven days in the week, no considering sober man can think otherwise but that they would dedicate and celebrate to their greatest god, the Sun (whom they called God of gods and Lord of lords), the day formerly observed and celebrated to the great and true God of heaven and earth, rather than to the Moon or Mercury, or other their inferior gods." (Pp. 74-82.)

He goes on to adduce evidence for the proposition that the Sun was worshipped by the heathen Gentiles in all countries and generations of old (pp. 83-93); after which he undertakes to prove "that our Sunday or Lord's Day was, with the heathen Gentiles, the seventh day of the week, for their solemn day of worship." This he upholds " partly by reason, and partly by quotation of learned authors, both Christians and heathens." On the ground of reason, it is argued that, doubtless, Adam "learned, from the standard of God's working six days and resting the seventh, what was a day, a week, and the boundary thereof, and thereby measured out the time of his life, and so it was kept, and left upon record for after ages. Months and years, among several nations, have much varied; but never was the week counted to be more or less than seven days with any people." The authors quoted are Homer and the other Greek poets formerly referred to (see above, vol. i. pp. 113, 221), with Josephus and Philo (vol. i. pp. 116, 117, 225), and several modern writers, the strongest assertion by whom is that of Aug. Steuchius, who, "affirmeth the seventh day to have been venerable and sacred in all ages among all nations." Now, says Homes, this veneration of the ancient Gentiles for the Sunday, they could not have from the Books of Moses; for these were not translated into Greek till many centuries after Homer, and the early Jews thought it a profaning of Moses's writings to communicate them to the heathens. "Therefore it must needs follow that the heathen Gentiles had that honourable opinion and spake so laud

ably of the Sunday, by very ancient successive tradition amongst themselves. Now this seventh day, of which they so well thought and spake, could not be the Jews' Saturday Sabbath; for the heathen utterly disliked it, and disdainfully counted it an innovation brought in by Moses, and therefore the poets would commonly have one lash or another at it, and never spoke honourably of it. Therefore it must be the ancient Sunday (before Moses's time, and after that among the heathen,) that was by the heathens honoured as the seventh day of the week, the high day of their prime and solemn worship every week." In answer to those who deny that the Gentiles venerated any seventh day but the seventh of the month, which, among some at least, was sacred to Apollo or the Sun (see above, i. 118), Dr Homes refers to the application made of some passages in the Greek poets by Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius to the seventh day of the week, and denies the existence of any mention at all of the seventh day of the month in the Greek calendar. In the same chapter, a superfluity of evidence is heaped up to show that the "Sunday" of the Gentiles was the "Lord's Day" of the early Christians. (Pp. 94-108.) From the whole discussion it is concluded :—

"1. That the morality of the Fourth Commandment is stamped, impressed, and fixed, rather on the Christians' Sunday, Sabbathday, Seventh-day, or First-day, than upon the Jews' SaturdaySabbath.

"2. That the Jews' artificial Sabbath-day of daylight, and the Christians' artificial Sabbath-day of daylight, were in the same horizon, and materially as to daylight the very same, at the very first change of the Sabbath, Exod. xii. 42. They are numerically the same day, although variously named; viz., the seventh day, because it followed our six days' labour; and the first day, because the chief day of the week from Adam to us, and the chief day of Christ agitating on earth for our salvation, viz., the day of his triumphant resurrection, which, in the letter of the original, is not called the first day of the week,' but μía caßßárov and raßBára (Mark xvi. 2; John xx. 1; 1 Cor. xvi. 2.) And, "3. That both Sabbath-days-the Jews' and ours-upon several accounts are the same." (Pp. 116-118.)

In regard to the first of these conclusions: The resurrection of Christ on Sunday, and "his several appearances on that day of the week to his apostles at their devotions," together with the approval with which the apostles regarded the churches' meetings on that day, are held to have "new stampt" the original Sabbath-day, which, because it could plead prescription and seniority, had never become void, and therefore needed no formal re-establishment.

The second and most important conclusion is advocated thus:"If we grant what is before undeniably proved, that both the Jews and Gentiles, before the change of the Sabbath, observed our Sunday, whose daylight began, both with Jew and Gentile, at sunrising; and at the institution of that change of the Sabbath, God commanded the Jews to take into their Sabbath the next preceding

evening; then either we must say the Jews' Sabbath began the evening next afore our Sabbath-day-light began, or else that the Jews' Sabbath began at the evening after our Sabbath-day-light began. If we say after, then one whole day is lost in the computation of time. If we say afore, then we have that we contend for." (Pp. 133.)

Thirdly the several respects in which the Jewish and Christian Sabbath-days are the same are these: 1. They are the same materially, as to daylight; 2. They are the same reputatively, i.e., they are reputed and esteemed the same day of the week in number, both Jews and Christians keeping their Sabbath on the same day of the week, viz., the seventh; and "the reason why the seventh day of the week with the Jews comes to be almost a day sooner than it doth with the Christians is, because the Jews began their week near a day sooner than they did formerly before the change of it at their coming out of Egypt, and sooner than the heathen Gentiles did and the Christians now do." 3. Both Sabbath-days are the same boundarily, each being bounded by six days' labour. "The Sabbath must either relate to the six days of God's work of creation, or to the six days of man's labour in his vocation. Now it cannot relate to the six days of God's work of creation, and so to the day of God's rest; for then, either the day of God's rest and the Jews' Sabbath must be the same, beginning in all places at sunsetting, wherever the Jews did or ought to observe their Sabbath-which cannot be, except the earth were all a flat (and not a round globe), as we see by sense, both on the globe and on the hills and mountains of the earth, how their roundness makes the day begin successively over the whole earth; Or else the day of God's rest did at the first, and still doth begin in this computation of a seventh, sooner in some places than in other; and so first at one particular place, whiles it was nowhere else the day of God's rest; either of which are so against sense and reason, that no understanding man can rationally imagine it. Therefore the bounding and measuring out of the Sabbath must relate to the six days of man's labour in his vocation, as it is directed in the Fourth Commandment; immediately after which six days of our labour follows the seventh day for rest. So that in this respect, also, the Jews' Sabbath and our Sabbath are the same." (Pp. 137-139).

The main purpose of Dr Homes appears to have been to satisfy the Saturday-Sabbatarians (or Seventh-day Baptists) that the "seventh day" of the Fourth Commandment is the very day which other Christians observe, and so to "bring them out of that discomfort and those encumbrances that attend the practice of their erroneous opinion." It is unlikely, however, that many converts were made by a treatise where the weight of the evidence adduced is so remarkably small in proportion to the magnitude and multiplicity of the conclusions. We are totally ignorant which half of the natural day was considered by the patriarchs to be the former half, and have just as little information about changes of reckoning at

Israel's departure from Egypt, and at the resurrection of Christ. Had any such changes been made, would they not have been intelligibly recorded? In regard to the worship of the Sun, we know that some early Gentile nations (and the Jews also, for a long time after Moses) were greatly addicted to it; but whether the first, or any, day of the week was set apart for its performance, and whether, in early times (as, doubtless, in the second century of the Christian era), the first day of the week was called Sunday, we are wholly in the dark. The notion that the early Gentiles regarded the seventh or other day of the week as holy, has already been shown to need better evidence than any yet adduced for it. (See vol. i., p. 113.) In deciding against the relation of the Sabbath to the six days of God's work, Dr Homes overlooks a kind of relation which, I presume, is recognised by the Westminster divines where they teach that "from the beginning of the world to the resurection of Christ, God appointed the seventh day of the week to be the weekly Sabbath," (above, i. 233): As God rested on the seventh day of the week of creation, so did the Jew rest on what was the seventh day of the week in his calendar where he lived; and this without his being concerned to know whether, at the moment when his day began, the sun was setting also in the other parts of the earth.

Of all the arguments directed by Dr Homes against the Seventhday Baptists, certainly the least effective is his interpretation of the words, "in the end of the Sabbath."

The general idea, however, that the Sabbath-day was originally Sunday, but was shifted to Saturday at the giving of the Law, and came back to Sunday at the resurrection of Christ, has continued to have advocates down to the present time. The works of Chafie (1692), Smith (1694), Bedford (1730), Kennicott (1747), and Dr Samuel Lee, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge (1833), are all in favour of this opinion; and a recent anonymous writer conceives it to be "fully proved" by appealing to the bare assertion of some unnamed Jewish Rabbis, that the primeval Sabbathday was altered at the exodus, and would at the coming of the Messiah be restored to its original day! (Sunday the Sabbath-day. By a Believing Israelite. Edin. 1857. P. 20.) If any of the Rabbis have so expressed themselves, their words may have suggested to Dr Homes or others the theory now under consideration. Bishop Horsley, in his 23d Sermon, pronounces it to be "a mere conjecture, of which the sacred history affords neither proof nor confutation."

If the conjecture is true, the primeval Sabbath was superseded by that of Moses; if erroneous, was absorbed by it. "I marvel much," says Sir William Domville, "whether those Sabbatarians who think that a new seventh day was appointed for the Mosaic Sabbath, ever ask themselves the question, What in that case became of the old seventh day? They insist upon it, and it is of the very essence of their tenet in regard to a creation Sabbath, that God blessed and sanctified not only the seventh day in which he rested, but also every succeeding seventh day. Every seventh day,