the end of the world"? Were there henceforth to be no ordered worship, no dignified official robes, no ritual year of festival and fast to commemorate the infinitely greater events of those "good tidings of great joy," of which the old feasts and fasts were but the dim foreshadowings? Knowing the atmosphere in which our Lord and His Apostles lived and moved, we are now in a position to see what importance the whole Church in the earliest days would naturally attach to these things as they were developed and carried over into the Church of Christ.

CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR IN THE

APOSTOLIC CHURCH

"Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast."-1 Cor. v. 7, 8.

"I must by all means keep this feast that cometh in Jerusalem."Acts xviii. 21.

"He hasted, if it were possible for him, to be at Jerusalem the day of Pentecost."-Acts xx. 16.

CONFINING ourselves now to the single question of the ritual year, it would at the outset seem most natural that the first converts, instead of rejecting, would Christianize the old sacred festivals when, as we have seen, they were not only religiously observed by their Lord, but also actually and deliberately connected by Him with the greatest events of His own life and work. Let us see then what glimpses we can get in the New Testament concerning how the Apostles actually regarded these ancient hallowed festivals from the standpoint, not of Judaism, but of the Church of Christ.

1. First of all we find S. Paul, twenty years after the descent of the Holy Ghost, telling his Jewish fellow countrymen in Ephesus, when they urged him to remain longer with them, that he "must by all means keep this feast that cometh [namely, Pentecost] in Jerusalem." 1 Four years later we find S. Luke telling concerning him that he "hasted, if it were possible for him, to be at 1 Acts xviii. 21.

Jerusalem the day of Pentecost."1 So too S. Paul himself, in his first letter to the Corinthians, writes, "I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost.'

"2

Now what was the thought uppermost in the mind of a man like S. Paul in the keeping of this feast of Pentecost? The older reason for its observance, namely, the giving of the law from Sinai and the birth of the Mosaic Church, was doubtless not forgotten. As a Jewish feast the day had still many sacred associations for him, 66 a Hebrew of the Hebrews." 3 But the new and greater reason for his keeping the feast as a Christian lay elsewhere. The marvellous giving of the Holy Ghost on this day some twenty years before, that He might "write the Law on men's hearts," 4 and gather in the "firstfruits of the harvest "5 of which our Lord Himself was the chief Sower, and bring to its birth the Church of the new Israel and new Jerusalem—this must have been the dominant thought in the Apostle's mind. It could not have been otherwise.

2. As regards the observance of Easter as a Christian festival by the Apostolic Church we have fewer intimations given us in the New Testament. The word occurs only once in our Authorized Version, where it is said of Herod that he "intended after Easter " to put S. Peter to death. But the word here in the original is simply "Pascha" or "Passover," and nothing can be inferred from it concerning the Christian observance of the day. It is very probable, however, that S. Paul is referring to the Christian observance of Easter when, writing to the Church in Corinth concerning a shameful scandal in that Church, he urges them to purge out the old leaven” of sin, "for," he adds, "Christ our Passover is sacri

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ficed for us, therefore let us [us Christians] keep the feast." 1

But however that may be, we know that the time of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection was kept as a great annual feast of the Church from the beginning. In fact so early and so universal was its observance, and so important was it regarded as a witness to the resurrection, that a difference in regard to the proper day for its observance was the occasion of the first schism in in the Church, some Eastern Churches holding that it should be kept on any day of the Paschal week, and others that it should be always on a Sunday as the first Easter had been.2 This controversy will be explained more in detail later on.3

3. And the observance of Sunday or "the first day of the week," instead of Saturday which the Jews reckoned as "the seventh," rests upon exactly the same authority as that of Pentecost and Easter, namely, the early and universal custom and tradition of the Church. Here the New Testament is perfectly clear. It is true we have nowhere the record of a command for the change by our Lord, though such a direction may have been given among those "things pertaining to the kingdom of God," that is, the Church, of which He spoke to the Apostles during the great Forty Days between His resurrection and His ascension.4 But the absence

11 Cor. v. 7, 8.

2 S. Mark xvi. 2.

See Chapters XII and XX.

Our Lord, so far as we have any record, uses the word "Church" only on two occasions and that in private (S. Matt. xvi. 18; xviii. 17) while He employs the phrase "kingdom of heaven" (S. Matthew only) or "kingdom of God" constantly. In the mouth of the Apostles after the Church is set up this proportion is entirely reversed. "The Church" now becomes the common designation; "the kingdom" uncommon. In the Acts, Epistles, and the Rev

of such a record makes the change all the more remarkable. Here was a provision, not of the ritual but of the moral law, the Fourth Commandment, requiring six days for labor, and a seventh for rest and worship; and for 1500 years or more the whole nation had been keeping what we call Saturday as the Sabbath. It was therefore most natural that Jews would come to think that Saturday and "the seventh day" must necessarily mean the same thing. To change to another "seventh" day would seem a breach of the moral law itself. But the Church in the New Testament and ever after, until the "Seventh Day Baptists" appeared 1600 years later, never showed the faintest hesitation on the subject. Sunday, or "the first day of the week," was adopted apparently at once as the weekly festival day commemorating and witnessing to the resurrection, just as Easter does as the annual festival day which witnesses to the same fact.

This does not imply that Saturday was no longer observed by Jews who became Christians. It was most natural, and we know it to be the case from early historians, that devout Jewish Christians observed both days, as they also continued to observe other customs of Jewish worship. These, however, were purely voluntary matters with them. They were not to be regarded

elation "kingdom" occurs 25 times, "the Church" III times. Our Lord's unequal use of the words is easily accounted for by the fact that while it was under the figure of a kingdom that the prophets foretold the new order, "Church," either in Hebrew (Aramaic) or in the Greek of the Septuagint, was the word in common use among the Jews for their present "household of faith." See Acts vii. 38 and Heb. ii. 12. Christ would therefore avoid all unnecessary clashing with Jewish prejudice, and only employs "Church" in speaking privately to His Apostles. But once the Church is set up openly, the day for consulting preiudice is past