In the West we find also that the Sabbath was a day of special religious observance; but there was a variety of local usage in regard to the mode of its observance. At Rome the Sabbath was a fast-day in the time of St Augustine[12]; and the same is true of some other places; but the majority of the Western Churches, like the East, did not so regard it. In North Africa there was a variety of practice, some places observed the day as a fast, others as a feast. At Milan the day was not treated as a fast; and St Ambrose, in reply to a question put by Augustine at the instance of his mother Monnica, stated that he regarded the matter as one of local discipline, and gave the sensible rule to do in such matters at Rome as the Romans do[13]. In the early part of the fourth century the Spanish Council of Elvira corrected the error that every Sabbath should be observed as a fast[14]. As to the origin of the Saturday fast we are left almost wholly to conjecture. It has been supposed by some to be an exhibition of antagonism to Judaism, which regarded the Sabbath as a festival; while others consider that it is a continuation of the Friday fast, as a kind of preparatory vigil of the Lord’s day. It is outside our scope to go into this question. A relic of the ancient position of distinction occupied by Saturday may perhaps be found in the persistence of the name ‘Sabbatum’ in the Western service-books. Abstinence (from flesh) continued, ‘de mandate ecclesiae,’ on Saturdays in the Roman Church. For Roman Catholics in England it ceased in 1830 by authority of Pope Pius VIII. This seems a convenient place for saying something as to the use of the word _Feria_ in ecclesiastical language to designate an ordinary week-day. The names most commonly given to the days of the week in the service-books and other ecclesiastical records are ‘Dies Dominica’ (rarely ‘Dominicus’) for the Lord’s Day, or Sunday; ‘Feria II’ for Monday; ‘Feria III’ for Tuesday, and so on to Saturday which (with rare exceptions) is not Feria VII but ‘Sabbatum.’ Why the ordinary week-day is called ‘Feria,’ when in classical Latin ‘feriae’ was used for ‘days of rest,’ ‘holidays,’ ‘festivals,’ is a question that cannot be answered with any confidence. A conjecture which seems open to various objections, though it has found supporters, is as follows: all the days of Easter week were holidays, ‘feriatae’; and, this being the first week of the ecclesiastical year, the other weeks followed the mode of naming the days which had been used in regard to the first week. A fatal objection to this theory, for which the authority of St Jerome has been claimed, is that we find ‘feria’ used, as in Tertullian, for an ordinary week-day long before we have any reason to think that there was any ordinance for the observance of the whole of Easter week by a cessation from labour[15].