for the support of natural life, is not sinful even on the Lord’s day, when necessity is loud, and the laws of that church and nation where we live are not against it. This is what the first Christians had to say for themselves, in the works they did on that day. And if those works had been then judged a prophanation of the festival, I dare believe, they would have suffered martyrdom rather than been guilty.”[775] The bishop of Ely thus testifies:— “In St Jerome’s days, and in the very place where he was residing, the devoutest Christians did ordinarily work upon the Lord’s day, when the service of the church was ended.”[776] St. Augustine, the cotemporary of Jerome, gives a synopsis of the argument in that age for Sunday observance, in the following words:— “It appears from the sacred Scriptures, that this day was a solemn one; it was the first day of the age, that is of the existence of our world; in it the elements of the world were formed; on it the angels were created; on it Christ rose also from the dead; on it the Holy Spirit descended from Heaven upon the apostles as manna had done in the wilderness. For these and other such circumstances the Lord’s day is distinguished; and therefore the holy doctors of the church have decreed that all the glory of the Jewish Sabbath is transferred to it. Let us therefore keep the Lord’s day as the ancients were commanded to do the Sabbath.”[777] It is to be observed that Augustine does not assign among his reasons for first-day observance, the change of the Sabbath by Christ or his apostles, or that the apostles observed that day, or that John had given it the name of Lord’s day. These modern first-day arguments were unknown to Augustine. He gave the credit of the work, not to Christ or his inspired apostles, but to the holy doctors of the church, who, of their own accord, had transferred the glory of the ancient Sabbath to the venerable day of the sun. The first day of the week was considered in the fifth century the most proper day for giving holy orders, that is, for ordinations, and about the middle of this century, says Heylyn, “A law [was] made by Leo then Pope of Rome, and generally since taken up in the western church, that they should be conferred upon no day else.”[778] According to Dr. Justin Edwards, this same pope made also this decree in behalf of Sunday:— “WE ORDAIN, according to the true meaning of the Holy Ghost, and of the apostles as thereby directed, that on the sacred day wherein our own integrity was restored, all do rest and cease from labor.”[779] Soon after this edict of the pope, the emperor Leo, A. D. 469, put forth the following decree:—