from bonds_,—what should hinder that, with sufficient authority, a change should not be made, again transferring our Sabbath to the day which, in the resurrection of the Son of God, saw the _redemption of the spiritual Israel from the grave_? Besides, an avowed end of the Jewish Sabbath was as a protest against false religions. The pious Israelite was distinguished from the idolaters among whom he dwelt, by his close observance of the sacred day:—why may not our Lord have ordained a change in the Sabbath of the Christian, as a protest against the continuing obstinacy of the Jew? Of course, these are no more than conjectures, and though sustained by names of great weight, they leave the fact to be judged of only as we should judge of all other facts; namely, by a reasonable and sufficient amount of historic evidence. And this we are thought to have, even in the scattered notices found in the sacred narrative itself,—in the frequent allusions to religious meetings on the first day of the week, in the choice of this day by our Lord for two successive manifestations to his disciples, in the selection of it for the first miraculous effusion of the Holy Spirit, in the special mention of it by Paul as that on which he preached the Word and administered the sacraments, in the directions given to the Churches of Galatia and Corinth to lay by their alms that they might make an offering of them to God on the first day of the week,—all passages proving, as clearly as anything can, that, among the New Testament Christians, a character of separation and sacredness was attached to the _first_ day, which was not accorded to any other. To these revealed notices is to be added the testimony of other authorities, which, however lightly we might esteem them on any question of _doctrine_, are quite competent to give their witness on a matter of _fact_. Such, for example, are the well-known letters of the younger Pliny, the universal consent of our Ecclesiastical historians, and the constantly recurring allusions to the day by all the Apostolic Fathers, under the familiar and apparently well-understood designation of THE LORD’S-DAY. These proofs seem to bear out the conclusion that, from the very morning of the Lord’s resurrection, the first day of the week came to be held of the Christian world in all sanctity and reverence as the ordained Gospel Sabbath. And as we may be quite sure that the apostles would never have made such a change on their own responsibility, we naturally refer it to some express though unpreserved direction from Him, who, repudiating all unnatural and constrained austerity on the one hand, and yet having regard to the unchanging sanctity of moral ordinances on the other, declared, _The Sabbath was made for man_, _and not man for the Sabbath_.