“Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in days of idleness; for ‘he that does not work, let him not eat.’ For say the [holy] oracles, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.’ But let every one of you keep the Sabbath after a spiritual manner, rejoicing in meditation on the law, not in relaxation of the body, admiring the workmanship of God, and not eating things prepared the day before, nor using lukewarm drinks, and walking within a prescribed space, nor finding delight in dancing and plaudits which have no sense in them. And after the observance of the Sabbath, let every friend of Christ keep the Lord’s day as a festival, the resurrection day, the queen and chief of all the days [of the week]. Looking forward to this, the prophet declared, ‘To the end, for the eighth day,’ on which our life both sprang up again, and the victory over death was obtained in Christ.”[695] This writer specifies the different things which made up the Jewish observance of the Sabbath. They may be summed up under two heads. 1. Strict abstinence from labor. 2. Dancing and carousal. Now, in the light of what Origen has said, we can understand the contrast which this writer draws between the Jewish and Christian observance of the Sabbath. The error of the Jews in the first part of this was that they contented themselves with mere bodily relaxation, without raising their thoughts to God, the Creator, and this mere idleness soon gave place to sensual folly. The Christian, as Origen draws the contrast, refrains from labor on the Sabbath that he may raise his heart in grateful worship. Or, as this writer draws it, the Christian keeps the Sabbath in a spiritual manner, rejoicing in meditation on the law; but to do thus, he must hallow it in the manner which that law commands, that is, in the observance of a sacred rest which commemorates the rest of the Creator. The writer evidently believed in the observance of the Sabbath as an act of obedience to that law on which they were to meditate on that day. And the nature of the epistle indicates that it was observed, at all events, in the country where it was written. But mark the work of apostasy. The so-called Lord’s day for which the writer could offer nothing better than an argument drawn from the title of the sixth psalm (see its marginal reading) is exalted above the Lord’s holy day, and made the queen of all days! The Apostolical Constitutions, though not written in apostolic times, were in existence as early as the third century, and were then very generally believed to express the doctrine of the apostles. They do therefore furnish important historical testimony to the practice of the church at that time, and also indicate the great progress which apostasy had made. Guericke speaks thus of them:—