“As often as the anniversary comes around, we make offerings for the dead as birth-day honors. We count fasting or kneeling in worship on the Lord’s day, to be unlawful. We rejoice in the same privilege, also, from Easter to Whitsunday. We feel pained should any wine or bread, though our own, be cast upon the ground. At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign (of the cross). If for these and other such rules, you insist upon leaving positive Scripture injunctions, you will find none. Tradition will be held forth to you as the originator of them, custom, as their strengthener, and faith, as their observer. That reason will support tradition, and custom, and faith, you will either yourself perceive, or learn from some one who has.”—_De Corona_, sects. 3 and 4. The reader will at once observe that tradition is the foundation which is here laid for that kind of Sunday observance for which Tertullian was so great a stickler. Not only so, but the fact is brought to light, also, that the men whom he represented were in the habit of offering prayers for the dead; of signing themselves with the sign of the cross; and going through other ceremonies, which to us, at the present time, are not only ridiculous in the extreme, but bear upon their face the impress of the man of sin so unmistakably that none will be deceived. If Tertullian was indeed a fair specimen of the Christian men of his time; if his writings have not been tampered with; and if the opinions of the men of his day, as expressed by himself, should have weight with us in the decision of religious questions, where shall we stop in our acceptance of their creeds? If, because they believed with him in the change of the Sabbath from the seventh to the first day of the week, this fact should have weight with us in bringing us to the same conclusion, independently of Scripture proof, then how can we stop short of their faith in other particulars? such as the acceptance of tradition in doctrinal matters, prayers for the dead, the sign of the cross, etc., etc. In fact, how can we avoid becoming papists ourselves, in the largest sense of the term, since, having gone as far as we have for the purpose of making out Sunday sanctity, we have surrendered nearly all the distinctive principles of Protestantism?