"The law was given to the children of Israel for this purpose, that they might profit by it, and RETURN _to those virtuous manners_, which, although _they have received them from their fathers_, they had corrupted in Egypt by reason of their intercourse with a barbarous people. Finally, also, those _ten commandments_ on the tables _teach nothing new_, but _remind_ them of _what had been obliterated_--that righteousness in them, which had been put to sleep, might revive again as it were by the afflatus of the law, after the manner of a fire [nearly extinguished]."--_On the Jewish Meats_, chap. iii. It is therefore certain that in the judgment of Novatian, the ten commandments enjoined nothing that was not sacredly regarded by the patriarchs before that Jacob went down into Egypt. It follows, therefore, that in his opinion the Sabbath was made, not at the fall of the manna, but when God sanctified the seventh day, and that holy men from the earliest ages observed it. The Sunday festival with its varied names and titles he never mentions. CHAPTER IX. Cyprian--Dionysius of Alexandria--Anatolius--Commodianus--Archelaus. TESTIMONY OF CYPRIAN, BISHOP OF CARTHAGE. Cyprian wrote about A. D. 255. I find only two references to Sunday in his works. The first is in his thirty-second epistle (the thirty-eighth of the Oxford edition), in which he says of one Aurelius that "he reads on the Lord's day" for him. But in the second instance he defines the meaning of the term, and gives evidence in support of his application of it to the first day of the week. He is arguing in behalf of infant baptism, or rather in controverting the opinion that baptism should be deferred till the child is eight days old. Though the command to circumcise infants when eight days of age is one of the chief grounds of authority for infant baptism, yet the time in that precept according to Cyprian does not indicate the age of the child to be baptized, but prefigures the fact that the eighth day is the Lord's day. Thus he says:-- "For in respect of the observance of the eighth day in the Jewish circumcision of the flesh, a sacrament was given beforehand in shadow and in usage; but when Christ came, it was fulfilled in truth. For because the eighth day, that is, the first day after the Sabbath, was to be that on which the Lord should rise again, and should quicken us, and give us circumcision of the Spirit, the eighth day, that is, the first day after the Sabbath, and the Lord's day, went before in the figure; which figure ceased when by and by the truth came, and spiritual circumcision was given to us."--_Epistle_ lviii. sect. 4; in the Oxford edition, _Epistle_ lxiv.