“Though in later times we find considerable reference to a sort of _consecration of the day_, it does not seem at any period of the ancient church to have assumed the form of such an observance as some modern religious communities have contended for. Nor do these writers in any instance pretend to allege _any divine command, or even apostolic practice_, in support of it.... Chrysostom (A. D. 360) concludes one of his Homilies by dismissing his audience to their respective ordinary occupations.”[772] It was reserved for modern theologians to discover the divine or apostolic authority for Sunday observance. The ancient doctors of the church were unaware that any such authority existed; and hence they deemed it lawful and proper to engage in usual worldly business on that day when their religious worship was concluded. Thus, Heylyn bears witness concerning St. Chrysostom that he “Confessed it to be lawful for a man to look unto his worldly business on the Lord’s day, after the congregation was dismissed.”[773] St. Jerome, a few years after this, at the opening of the fifth century, in his commendation of the lady Paula, shows his own opinion of Sunday labor. Thus he says:— “Paula, with the women, as soon as they returned home on the Lord’s day, they sat down severally to their work, and made clothes for themselves and others.”[774] Morer justifies this Sunday labor in the following terms:— “If we read they did any work on the Lord’s day, it is to be remembered that this application to their daily tasks was not till their worship was quite over, when they might with innocency enough resume them, because the length of time or the number of hours assigned for piety was not then so well explained as in after ages. The state of the church is vastly different from what it was in those early days. Christians then for some centuries of years were under persecution and poverty; and besides their own wants, they had many of them severe masters who compelled them to work, and made them bestow less time in spiritual matters than they otherwise would. In St. Jerome’s age their condition was better, because Christianity had got into the throne as well as into the empire. Yet for all this, the entire sanctification of the Lord’s day proceeded slowly: and that it was the work of time to bring it to perfection, appears from the several steps the church made in her constitutions, and from the decrees of emperors and other princes, wherein the prohibitions from servile and civil business advanced by degrees from one species to another, till the day had got a considerable figure in the world. Now, therefore, the case being so much altered, the most proper use of citing those old examples is only, in point of doctrine, to show that ordinary work, as being a compliance with providence