In this paragraph Tertullian explains the law of God in the clearest manner. He shows beyond all dispute that neither Joshua nor Christ ever violated it. He also declares that Christ did not abolish the Sabbath. In the next sentence he goes on to answer most admirably his own repeated perversion of Isaiah 1:13, 14, and to contradict some of his own serious errors. Listen to him:-- "Now, although he has in a certain place expressed an aversion of Sabbaths, by calling them '_your Sabbaths_,' reckoning them as men's Sabbaths, not his own, because they were celebrated without the fear of God by a people full of iniquities, and loving God 'with the lip, not the heart,' he has yet put his own Sabbaths (those, that is, which were kept according to his prescription) in a different position; for by the same prophet, in a later passage, he declares them to be 'true, delightful, and inviolable.' [Isa 58:13; 56:2.] Thus _Christ did not at all rescind the Sabbath_: he kept the law thereof, and both in the former case did a work which was beneficial to the life of his disciples (for he indulged them with the relief of food when they were hungry), and in the present instance cured the withered hand; in each case intimating by facts, 'I came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it,' although Marcion has gagged his mouth by this word." Here Tertullian shows that God did not hate his own Sabbath, but only the hypocrisy of those who professed to keep it. He also expressly declares that the Saviour "did not at all rescind the Sabbath." And now that he has his hand in, he will not cease till he has testified to a noble Sabbatarian confession of faith, placing its origin at creation, and perpetuating the institution with divine safeguards and additional sanctity. Moreover he asserts that Christ's adversary [Satan] would have had him do this to some other days, a heavy blow as it happens upon those who in modern times so stoutly maintain that he consecrated the first day of the week to take the place of the Creator's rest-day. Listen again to Tertullian, who continues as follows:--