on Sunday and through the whole time of Easter until Pente- cost. The general council of ]S icaea, in 325, issued on this point in the twentieth canon the following decision : " Whereas some bow the knee on Sunday and on the days of Pentecost [i. e., dui-ing the seven weeks after Easter], the holy council, that everything may everywhere be uniform, decrees that prayers be offered to God in a standing posture." The Trullan coim- cil, in G92, ordained in the ninetieth canon : " From Saturday evening to Sunday evening let no one bow the knee." The Roman church in general still adheres to this practice.' The New Testament gives no law for such secondary matters; the apostle Paul, on the contrary, just in the season of Easter and Pentecost, before his imprisonment, following an inward dic- tate, repeatedly knelt in prayer.^ The council of Orleans, in 638, says in the twenty -eighth canon : " It is Jewish supersti- tion, that one may not ride or walk on Sunday, nor do any- thing to adorn the house or the person. But occupations in the field are forbidden, that people may come to the church and give themselves to prayer." ' As to the private opinions of the principal fathers on this subject, they all favor the sanctification of the Lord's Day, but treat it as a peculiarly Christian institution, and draw a strong, indeed a too strong, line of distinction between it and the Jew- ish Sabbath ; forgetting that they are one in essence and aim, though different in form and spirit, and that the fourth com- mandment as to its substance — viz., the keeping holy of one day out of seven — is an integral part of the decalogue or the moral law, and hence of perpetual obligation.* Eusebius calls ' Comp. the Corpus juris can. c. 13, Dist. 3 de consecr. Roman Catholics, how- ever, always kneel in the reception and adoration of the sacrament. ' Acts XX. 36 ; xxi. 5. ^ Comp. the brief scattered decrees of the councils on the sanctification of Sun- day, in Hefele, 1. c. i. 414, 753, 760, 761, 794 ; il 69, 647, 756 ; Neale's Feasts and Fasts : and Gilfillan: The Sabbath, &c., p. 390. VSee the principal patristic passages on the Lord's Day in Hessey, Sunday, etc., p. 90 ff. and p. 388 fiP. Hessey says, p. 114: "In no clearly genuine passage ^^at I can discover in any writer of these two [the fourth and fifth] centuries, or in any pubhc document, ecclesiastical or civil, is the fourth commandment referred to as the ground of the obhgation to observe the Lord's Day."/xBe Reformers of the six- teenth century, likewise, in their zeal against legalism mid for Christian freedom, en y. '^'^^-S 384 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. Simdaj, but not tlie Sabbath, " the first and chief of days and a day of salvation," and commends Constantine for command- ing that