Amongst the many immoral corruptions which the present superstition of Europe has entailed on the laboring man, few have a worse tendency than the compulsory exaction of one seventh of his time, which its priests have procured to be dedicated to their purposes alone; whereby he is compelled either to be idle, or to swell their vain pageant train to that shrine of hypocrisy called church. The observance of Sunday is, like everything else in Christianism, borrowed from the heathens; and is merely a continuation of the Pagan festival that was held in the temples of the Sun, in adoration of that luminary, as the name attests beyond all contradiction; with this difference alone, that the Fathers, as if it were to make the thing more expensive and intolerable in their Scripture traffic, changed it into a weekly festival, substituting the triune machinery of the church for that of the temple. But as the present observance of this day throughout Christendom is nowhere enjoined in the New Testament, it was customary with Christians, even in the fourth century, to perform their usual work on that day; and, according to Mosheim, many of them held Thursdays and Fridays to be as sacred as Sunday. The entailing upon human industry this weekly curse of idleness was reserved for, and was worthy of, the Emperor Constantine, a man who had the guilt of seven family murders upon his head: and as the priests of Paganism refused to expiate those crimes (so Zosimus and others say), he abandoned their religion, and adopted that of Christianity, whose less scrupulous priests absolved him, and white-washed his crimes to the purity of snow. In return for this scouring, the imperial murderer felt himself prompted by gratitude to do all in his power to establish a new hierarchy, who could make themselves so subservient to the purposes of tyranny; so he began by paving the way for finally depriving the industrious man of one seventh of his time, which was to be appropriated in promoting the importance, the riches, and the power of his newly adopted priesthood.