“As often as the anniversary comes round, we make offerings
for the dead as birth-day honors. We count fasting or kneeling
in worship on the Lord’s day to be unlawful. We rejoice in the
same privilege also from Easter to Whitsunday [the Pentecost].
We feel pained should any wine or bread, even though our own,
be cast upon the ground. At every forward step and movement, at
every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes,
when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps,
on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life,
we trace upon the forehead the sign [of the cross].
“If, for these and other such rules, you insist upon having
positive Scripture injunction, you will find none. Tradition
will be held forth to you as the _originator_ of them, custom
as their strengthener, and faith as their observer. That reason
will support tradition, and custom, and faith, you will either
yourself perceive, or learn from some one who has.”[455]
This completes the instances in which Tertullian uses the term Lord’s
day, except a mere allusion to it in his discourse on Fasting. It is very
remarkable that in each of the three cases, he puts it on a level with
the festival of Whitsunday, or Pentecost. He also associates it directly
with “offerings for the dead” and with the use of “the sign of the
cross.” When asked for authority from the Bible for these things, he does
not answer, “We have the authority of John for the Lord’s day, though we
have nothing but tradition for the sign of the cross and offerings for
the dead.” On the contrary, he said there was no Scripture injunction for
any of them. If it be asked, How could the title of Lord’s day be given
to Sunday except by tradition derived from the apostles? the answer will
be properly returned, What was the origin of offerings for the dead?
And how did the sign of the cross come into use among Christians? The
title of Lord’s day as a name for Sunday is no nearer apostolic than is
the sign of the cross, and offerings for the dead; for it can be traced
no nearer to apostolic times than can these most palpable errors of the
great apostasy.
Clement taught a perpetual Lord’s day; Tertullian held a similar view,
asserting that Christians should celebrate a perpetual Sabbath, not by
abstinence from labor, but from sin.[456] Tertullian’s method of Sunday
observance will be noticed hereafter.
Origen, A. D. 231, is the third of the ancient writers who call “the
eighth day” the Lord’s day. He was the disciple of Clement, the first
writer who makes this application. It is not strange, therefore, that he
should teach Clement’s doctrine of a perpetual Lord’s day, nor that he
should state it even more distinctly than did Clement himself. Origen,
having represented Paul as teaching that all days are alike, continues
thus:—
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