It should be observed, however, that the earliest mention of Sunday as the Lord’s day, is in the writings of Tertullian; Justin Martyr, some sixty years before, styling it “the day called Sunday;” while the authoritative application of that term to Sunday was by Sylvester, bishop of Rome, more than one hundred years after the time of Tertullian. The earliest mention of Sunday as Christian Sabbath is thus noted by Heylyn:— “The first who ever used it to denote the Lord’s day (the first that I have met with in all this search) is one Petrus Alfonsus—he lived about the time that Rupertus did—[which was the beginning of the twelfth century] who calls the Lord’s day by the name of Christian Sabbath.”[793] Of Sunday labor in the eastern church, Heylyn says:— “It was near nine hundred years from our Saviour’s birth if not quite so much, before restraint of husbandry on this day had been first thought of in the east; and probably being thus restrained did find no more obedience there than it had done before in the western parts.”[794] Of Sunday labor in the western church, Dr. Francis White thus testifies:— “The Catholic church for more than six hundred years after Christ, permitted labor, and gave license to many Christian people to work upon the Lord’s day, at such hours as they were not commanded to be present at the public service by the precept of the church.”[795] But let us trace the several steps by which the festival of Sunday increased in strength until it attained its complete development. These will be found at present mostly in the edicts of emperors, and the decrees of councils. Morer tells us that, “Under Clodoveus king of France met the bishops in the first council of Orleans [A. D. 507], where they obliged themselves and their successors, to be always at the church on the Lord’s day, except in case of sickness or some great infirmity. And because they, with some other of the clergy in those days, took cognizance of judicial matters, therefore by a council at Arragon, about the year 518 in the reign of Theodorick, king of the Goths, it was decreed that ‘No bishop or other person in holy orders should examine or pass judgment in any civil controversy on the Lord’s day.’”[796] This shows that civil courts were sometimes held on Sunday by the bishops in those days; otherwise such a prohibition would not have been put forth. Hengstenberg, in his notice of the third council of Orleans, gives us an insight into the then existing state of the Sunday festival:—