“The rescript commanding the celebration of the Christian Sabbath, 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 courts were to be closed, and the noise and tumult of public business and legal litigation were no longer to violate the repose of the sacred day. But 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.”[737] And he adds in a subsequent chapter:— “In fact, as we have before observed, the day of the sun would be willingly hallowed by almost all the pagan world, especially that part which had admitted any tendency towards the Oriental theology.”[738] On the seventh day of March, Constantine published his edict commanding the observance of that ancient festival of the heathen, the venerable day of the sun. On the following day, March eighth,[739] he issued a second decree in every respect worthy of its heathen predecessor.[740] The purport of it was this: That if any royal edifice should be struck by lightning, the ancient ceremonies of propitiating the deity should be practiced, and the _haruspices_ were to be consulted to learn the meaning of the awful portent.[741] The _haruspices_ were soothsayers who foretold future events by examining the entrails of beasts slaughtered in sacrifice to the gods![742] The statute of the seventh of March enjoining the observance of the venerable day of the sun, and that of the eighth of the same month commanding the consultation of the _haruspices_, constitute a noble pair of well-matched heathen edicts. That Constantine himself was a heathen at the time these edicts were issued, is shown not only by the nature of the edicts themselves, but by the fact that his nominal conversion to Christianity is placed by Mosheim two years after his Sunday law. Thus he says:— “After well considering the subject, I have come to the conclusion, that _subsequently to the death of Licinius in the year 323_ when _Constantine_ found himself sole emperor, _he became an absolute Christian_, or one who believes no religion but the Christian to be acceptable to God. He had previously considered the religion of one God as more excellent than the other religions, and believed that Christ ought especially to be worshiped: yet he supposed there were also inferior deities, and that to these some worship might be paid, in the manner of the fathers, without fault or sin. And who does not know, that in those times, many others also combined the worship of Christ with that of the ancient gods, whom they regarded as the ministers of the supreme God in the government of human and earthly affairs.”[743]