“From the apostles’ time until the council of Laodicea, which was about the year 364, the holy observation of the Jews’ Sabbath continued, as may be proved out of many authors; yea, notwithstanding the decree of that council against it.”[767] And Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, about A. D. 372, uses this expostulation:— “With what eyes can you behold the Lord’s day, when you despise the Sabbath? Do you not perceive that they are sisters, and that in slighting the one, you affront the other?”[768] This testimony is valuable in that it marks the progress of apostasy concerning the Sabbath. The Sunday festival entered the church, not as a divine institution, but as a voluntary observance. Even as late as A. D. 200, Tertullian said that it had only tradition and custom in its support.[769] But in A. D. 372, this human festival had become the sister and equal of that day which God hallowed in the beginning and solemnly commanded in the moral law. How worthy to be called the sister of the Sabbath the Sunday festival actually was, may be judged from what followed. When this self-styled sister had gained an acknowledged position in the family, she expelled the other, and trampled her in the dust. In our days, the Sunday festival claims to be the very day intended in the fourth commandment. The following testimonies exhibit the authority of church councils in its true light. Jortin is quoted by Cox as saying:— “In such assemblies, the best and the most moderate men seldom have the ascendant, and they are often led or driven by others who are far inferior to them in good qualities.”[770] The same writer gives us Baxter’s opinion of the famous Westminster Assembly. Baxter says:— “I have lived to see an assembly of ministers, where three or four leading men were so prevalent as to form a confession in the name of the whole party, which had that in it which particular members did disown. And when about a controverted article, one man hath charged me deeply with questioning the words of the church, others, who were at the forming of that article have laid it all on that same man, the rest being loth to strive much against him; and so it was he himself was the church whose authority he so much urged.”[771] Such has been the nature of councils in all ages; yet they have ever claimed infallibility, and have largely used that infallibility in the suppression of the Sabbath and the establishment of the festival of Sunday. Of first-day sacredness prior to, and as late as, the time of Chrysostom, Kitto thus testifies:—