Peter Heylyn also marks the peculiar favor shown to the first day of the week in the western church; and while he declares at one time that it was near “nine hundred years from the Saviour’s birth before restraint of husbandry on this day [Sunday] had been first thought of in the east,” he elsewhere records the fact that in the fifth and sixth centuries general unanimity respecting the exaltation to divine honor was reached. He writes: “The faithful, being united more than ever before, became more uniform in matters of devotion, and in that uniformity did agree together to give the Lord’s day all the honors of a holy festival, yet this was not done all at once, but by degrees, the fifth and sixth centuries being fully spent before it came unto that hight which has since continued. The emperors and the prelates in these times had the same affections, both earnest to advance this day above all others; and to the edicts of the one, and to the ecclesiastical constitutions of the others, it stands indebted for many of those privileges and exemptions which it still enjoyeth.”—_Hist. Sab._, part 2, chap. 4, sect. 1. Thus it has been proved, by citations from men who have possessed the resources, as well as the disposition, to make themselves acquainted with the history of the first centuries of the Christian church, first, that the first day of the week was looked upon for a long time as a merely human institution; secondly, that the Edenic Sabbath was for centuries after the crucifixion of Christ quite generally celebrated; thirdly, that prejudice against it seems to have been strongest and to have originated earliest at Rome, where, in order to bring it into odium, it was made a day of fasting, while the Sunday was treated as a festival; fourthly, that after a struggle, which extended through hundreds of years, the ancient Sabbath was finally quite generally repudiated, and the Sunday, through the united efforts of prelates, councils, and emperors, was enthroned and enforced upon all. Into the details of this long and varying conflict, in which victory seems first to have favored the one side and then the other, we are restricted by the limits of our communication from entering. The intelligent reader can readily fill in the outlines which have been given, and will not be slow to perceive that the contest, from the very nature of things, must have been one of intense interest and heated debate. If he would satisfy himself most fully that the gentleman is mistaken in saying that it has left no traces, we refer him for a more full discussion to the authorities quoted.