“The Roman church regarded Saturday as a fast day in direct opposition to those who regarded it as a Sabbath. Sunday remained a joyful festival in which all fasting and worldly business was avoided as much as possible, but the original commandment of the decalogue respecting the Sabbath was not then applied to that day.”[584] Lord King attests this fact in the following words:— “Some of the western churches, that they might not seem to Judaize, fasted on Saturday, as Victorinus Petavionensis writes: We use to fast on the seventh day. And it is our custom then to fast, that we may not seem, with the Jews, to observe the Sabbath.”[585] Thus the Sabbath of the Lord was turned into a fast in order to render it despicable before men. Such was the first great effort of the Roman church toward the suppression of the ancient Sabbath of the Bible. CHAPTER XVII. THE NATURE OF EARLY FIRST-DAY OBSERVANCE. The history of first-day observance compared with that of the popes—First-day observance defined in the very words of each of the early fathers who mention it—The reasons which each had for its observance stated in his own words—Sunday in their judgment of no higher sacredness than Easter or Whitsunday, or even than the fifty days between those festivals—Sunday not a day of abstinence from labor—The reasons which are offered by those of them who rejected the Sabbath stated in their own words. The history of first-day observance in the Christian church may be fitly illustrated by that of the bishops of Rome. The Roman bishop now claims supreme power over all the churches of Christ. He asserts that this power was given to Peter, and by him was transmitted to the bishops of Rome; or rather that Peter was the first Roman bishop, and that a succession of such bishops from his time to the present have exercised this absolute power in the church. They are able to trace back their line to apostolic times, and they assert that the power now claimed by the pope was claimed and exercised by the first pastors of the church of the Romans. Those who now acknowledge the supremacy of the pope believe this assertion, and with them it is a conclusive evidence that the pope is by divine right possessed of supreme power. But the assertion is absolutely false. The early pastors, or bishops, or elders, of the church of the Romans were modest, unassuming ministers of Christ, wholly unlike the arrogant bishop of Rome, who now usurps the place of Christ as the head of the Christian church.