1. The fathers are so far from testifying that the apostles told them Christ changed the Sabbath, that not even one of them ever alludes to the idea of such a change. 2. No one of them ever calls the first day the Christian Sabbath, nor indeed ever calls it a Sabbath of any kind. 3. They never represent it as a day on which ordinary labor was sinful; nor do they represent the observance of Sunday as an act of obedience to the fourth commandment. 4. The modern doctrine of the change of the Sabbath was therefore absolutely unknown in the first centuries of the Christian church.[440] But though no statement asserting the change of the Sabbath can be produced from the writings of the fathers of the first three hundred years, it is claimed that their testimony furnishes decisive proof that the first day of the week is the Lord’s day of Rev. 1:10. The biblical argument that the Lord’s day is the seventh day and no other, because that day alone is in the Holy Scriptures claimed by the Father and the Son as belonging in a peculiar sense to each, is given in chapter eleven, and is absolutely decisive. But this is set aside without answer, and the claim of the first day to this honorable distinction is substantiated out of the fathers as follows:— The term Lord’s day as a name for the first day of the week can be traced back through the first three centuries, from the fathers who lived toward their close, to the ones next preceding who mention the first day, and so backward by successive steps till we come to one who lived in John’s time, and was his disciple; and this disciple of John calls the first day of the week the Lord’s day. It follows therefore that John must have intended the first day of the week by the term Lord’s day, but did not define his meaning because it was familiarly known by that name in his time. Thus by history we prove the first day of the week to be the Lord’s day of Rev. 1:10; and then by Rev. 1:10, we prove the first day of the week to be the sacred day of this dispensation; for the spirit of inspiration by which John wrote would not have called the first day by this name if it were only a human institution, and if the seventh day was still by divine appointment the Lord’s holy day. This is a concise statement of the strongest argument for first-day sacredness which can be drawn from ecclesiastical history. It is the argument by which first-day writers prove Sunday to be the day called by John the Lord’s day. This argument rests upon the statement that Lord’s day as a name for Sunday can be traced back to the disciples of John, and that it is the name by which that day was familiarly known in John’s time.