“As scarcely any fragment of their history remains, all we know of them is from accounts of their enemies, which were always uttered in the style of censure and complaint; and without which we should not have known that millions of them ever existed. It was the settled policy of Rome to obliterate every vestige of opposition to her doctrines and decrees; everything heretical, whether persons or writings, by which the faithful would be liable to be contaminated and led astray. In conformity to this their fixed determination, all books and records of their opposers were hunted up and committed to the flames. Before the art of printing was discovered in the fifteenth century, all books were made with the pen; the copies, of course, were so few that their concealment was much more difficult than it would be now; and if a few of them escaped the vigilance of the inquisitors, they would soon be worn out and gone. None of them could be admitted and preserved in the public libraries of the Catholics, from the ravages of time and of the hands of barbarians with which all parts of Europe were at different periods overwhelmed.”[866] The first five centuries of the Christian era accomplished the suppression of the Sabbath in those churches which were under the special control of the Roman pontiff. Thenceforward we must look for the observers of the Sabbath outside the communion of the church of Rome. It was predicted that the Roman power should cast down the truth to the ground.[867] The Scriptures set forth the law of God as his truth.[868] The Dark Ages were the result of this work of the great apostasy. So dense and all-pervading was the darkness, that God’s pure truth was more or less obscured even with the true people of God in their places of retirement. About the year 600, as we have seen, there was in the city of Rome itself a class of Sabbath-keeping Christians who were very strict in the observance of the fourth commandment. It has been said of them that they joined with this a strict abstinence from labor on Sunday. But Dr. Twisse, a learned first-day writer who has particularly examined the record respecting them, asserts that this Sunday observance pertained to “other persons, different from the former.”[869] These Sabbath-keepers were not Romanists, and the pope denounced them in strong language. The Christians of Great Britain, before the mission of Augustine to that country, A. D. 596, were not in subjection to the bishop of Rome. They were in an eminent degree Bible Christians. They are thus described:—