Besides their nocturnal assemblies, another considerable cause of Christian unpopularity was the Hebraic origin of the religion. Among the peoples subdued by the Roman arms the Jews were conspicuous for the vigor and tenacity of their resistance. A corresponding hostility was excited. in the minds of the conquerors, which Jewish exclusiveness and want of deference to Roman arrogance did not tend to diminish. The Romans in their judgment visited the sins of the Jews upon the Christians. And as Christianity spread among the Gentiles, this identification of the two appears to have been felt as an obstacle to its progress, and accounts for the gradual substitution of Sunday services for the Saturday night vigils, the total abandonment of the Scriptural Sabbath, and the readiness of the Christians to adopt the sacred day of the sun-worshipers as their own. Some of the early Christian writers, indeed, betray a disposition to represent Christianity as a refined, spiritualized, sublimated version of the religion of Mithra. It is curious to find these men, for the sake of popularity, and in order to commend their cause to the minds of others, willing to be confused with sun-worshipers in the minds of the superficial, while strenuously endeavoring—as witness the frequent decrees of councils against "Judaizing" by the observance of the Sabbath—to emphasize the completeness of their separation from that race to which their Founder belonged, and whose Sabbath was the only one he knew.

It has been observed that the anti-Christian movement toward a union of Church and State was the result of the unChristian lust of the clergy after wealth and honor. Of course as soon as that union was effected, they began to use it for their own worldly aggrandizement. Now the collection-box is, so to speak, the center or cog-wheel of the machinery for clerical aggrandizement. But, in order that people may put their money in the collection-box, they must first go to church. It was perceived that to force them to go

to church would be a difficult and costly experiment of police. Yet something might obviously be accomplished by calling them off from their regular occupations. The enforced idleness would naturally lead to contemplation, and contemplation might suggest that one way of "killing the time" was to go to church. Moreover, the Jews had set the fashion for all time of the observance of a weekly sacred day. True, with the Jews there was no such indirect purpose of driving people to church and into the presence of the collection-box, on which last their clergy were not dependent. The Hebrew

Sabbath was quite as much a day of rest for priests as for the people generally. It was "set apart" with no such sinister purpose as Sunday has been set apart, but in plain goodfaith, that all might pause in the race of life to ponder the mystery of a creative and protective Deity.1

When the union of Church and State was accomplished under Constantine, almost its first fruit was the first Sunday law (A. D. 321). This commanded that judges and people of the cities and artificers should rest, but specially provided that agricultural labor might be prosecuted as on other days, "lest by neglect of opportunity, the bounty granted by divine foresight be lost." The name given to the day in this famous edict is remarkable, and sheds a flood of light on the character of him who promulgated it, and of those who asked him for it. The day is called "the venerable day of the sun.

A new, exalted, and transcendental type of the ancient sun-worship contended with Christianity during three hundred years for the mastery of the European mind. Constantine had no religion; but he was, like many other men of powerful minds, deeply tinctured with superstition. And of the superstition of sun-worship, or Mithraicism, as of every

1 But it seems that this "spiritual" purpose of the Sabbath, while it is distinctly set forth in one of the versions of the fourth commandment, was little regarded by the Jews; and that the national and historical aspect of the anniversary, which concerned them particularly, gave it its chief importance in their eyes.

other superstition of his day, he had imbibed a goodly share. Moreover, he was subtle and politic in a high degree, and it was his practice to play one of the contending parties, Christian and pagan, against the other, and thus preserve a peaceful balance of forces in his empire. Now, "the venerable day of the sun" was the great sacred day of the Mithraicists; and to set it apart "under the name by which they knew and "observed" it, to bestow this especial state recognition on their holy day could not but be accepted by them as a great compliment to their religion and as an official acknowledgement, if not of its sole verity, at least of its superiority to all rival cults. The use of this phrase, then, was characteristic of the wily Constantine. But what shall we say of those who, for the honor of the Master, would stoop to such hypocrisy? What of those who were willing to have the day they professed to know as "the day of the Lord" honored through their instrumentality as "the venerable day of the sun"? What of those who dressed Christ in the robes of Mithra? Shall they not one day stand with those who robed him in purple and put on him a crown of thorns, and spat in his face? 1

1 The brutal pagan, Constantine, granted religious toleration to his Christian subjects soon after his alleged conversion. And later, he gave them the first Sunday law, as stated in the text, in the name of Mithra. Says Mr. Milman, "The rescript commanding the celebration of the Christian Sabbath [sic] bears no allusion to its peculiar sanctity as a Christian institution. It is the day of the sun which is to be observed by the general veneration. . . . The believer in the new paganism, of which the solar worship was the characteristic, might acquiesce without scruple in the sanctity of the first day of the week."—"History of Christianity," book iii, chap. i.

Concerning another incident which marked the Great Apostasy of the union of the Christian Church with the pagan State, Mr. Milman speaks as follows: "Constantine immediately commanded the famous labarum to be made, the labarum which for a long time was borne at the head of the imperial armies, and venerated as a sacred relic at Constantinople. The shaft of this celebrated standard was cased with gold; above the transverse beam which formed the cross was wrought in a golden crown the monogram, or rather the device of two letters which signified the name of Christ, And so for the first time the meek and peaceful Jesus became a god of battle, and the cross, the holy sign of Christian redemption, a banner of bloody strife."

In the paragraph following this description of the labarum, Mr. Milman observes of Constantine's alleged conversion to Christianity: "The irreconcilable incongruity between the symbol of universal peace and the horrors of war, in my judgment, is conclusive

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However they shall be finally judged, in their indifference to the means whereby their ends might be attained; in their willingness, nay eagerness, to adopt any subterfuge, to avail themselves of any false pretense, to crawl and wriggle to their goal through any by-way, however dark and foul; the advocates of this first Sunday law are in no whit distinguished from those who prate to-day of "a secular Sunday," and police regulations," and "sanitary legislation," in order to force a dogma of their religion down the throats of "free" Americans. Recently, Mrs. Josephine C. Bateham who, on behalf of the "Sunday-law combination" in the United States, was asking Congress to incorporate the dogma of Sunday idleness into a Federal statute, remarked that the phraseology of her measure would better be altered in one place, "in order that it may not have the appearance of

against the miraculous or supernatural character of the transaction." And in a foot-note to this paragraph he adds: "I was agreeably surprised to find that Mosheim concurred in these sentiments, for which I will readily encounter the charge of Quakerism." Yet Mr. Milman in the next breath speaks of “the admission of Christianity not merely as a controlling power and the most effective auxiliary of civil government” (an office not unbecoming its divine origin)[sic]. Of course there is a confusion of ideas here. A "controlling power cannot, strictly speaking, be "auxiliary" to any other power. But what Mr. Milman means is, in plain English, that a bargain whereby, on the one hand, the civil government was to force the people into external deference to certain dogmas, and compliance with certain ceremonial observances, as the same might be "settled" by councils from ime to time; and, on the other hand, the church was to frighten the people by threats of everlasting fire and brimstone, into doing anything that the civil government might order, that such a bargain as that was "not unbecoming" the divine origin of the Christian religion! On this point one need not apologize for preferring the authority of the Founder of Christianity to that of Dean Milman. But these last quotations have been introduced here mainly to show the extraordinary influence of the zeitgeist, or time-spirit, on character or abilities of very high order, cultivated to the utmost,-on such a character, if Dean Milman discerned the truth of the matter, yet lacked the manliness to write it down; on such abilities, if Dean Milman did not see that the great blasphemy of making the Master's religion a "controlling power" and "effective auxiliary" of "civil government" necessarily included the lesser blasphemy of converting "the meek and peaceful Jesus" into "a god of battle," since battles are liable at any moment to become the business of civil government, and therefore the business of any power," whether "controlling," or "auxiliary" to such a government; if he did not see that a Church united with the State must respond to the call to bless the banners that symbolize death, and give thanks for massacres and devastation, since this is part of the very business she is "admitted as a department of the government to do; - if he did not see, in short, that repeating rifles and Gatling guns are quite appropriate weapons in the hands of that Christianity which finds the wielding of the policeman's club “an office not unbecoming its divine origin."

what all Americans object to, a union of Church and State.' The idea was to accomplish the reality and to delude "all Americans" by the false appearance. So the anti-Christian conspirators with the unworthy Constantine doubtless observed to him and to each other: "Let us call it 'the venerable day of the sun,' that it may not have the appearance of what all these pagans would object to, a union of the Christian Church with the State."

After Constantine's edict, till the rise of Brownism, Sunday, while it was generally observed, lost some of its prominence, through the adoption of many other feasts, as well as many fast days, by the Church. And such observance as was given it, was unquestionably more like that of Catholic countries to-day than like the present American practice.1

1 At different times, however, decrees of council, etc., were passed, referring to the observance of Sunday. These will be found, together with Acts of Parliament, State laws, etc., in "Sunday: Legal Aspects of the First Day of the Week."