The Theological Repository – Joseph Priestley

Edward Evanson’s Arguments Against and For the Sabbatical Observance of Sunday gathers a controversy that first ran through the pages of The Theological Repository, the periodical Joseph Priestley edited until it closed in 1788. The 1792 volume reprints the exchange as it stood—letters by the pseudonymous Eubulus, Philander, Subsidiarily, and Priestley himself under the name Hermas—together with a new preface and a closing reply to the Doctor. Its subject is narrow and its stakes are not: whether Christians are bound to keep Sunday as a day of rest, or whether the whole observance is a human invention dressed in apostolic clothes.

The Case Against a Christian Sabbath

The Editor’s Preface and the Quarrel with Christie

The volume opens with a preface “To the Reader,” in which the Editor explains how the controversy came to be republished. The letters had all appeared collectively in the Theological Repository except the one addressed to Dr. Priestley, which ran through the last six numbers before the journal closed in July 1788. That closure left the Editor—who had written on one side under the name Eubulus—unable to answer the letter signed Hermas, which Priestley had publicly acknowledged as his own. Dissatisfied with the Doctor’s manner of arguing, the Editor wrote asking whether he might reprint the whole exchange together with a reply, and received a courteous answer granting full permission to use any part of the Repository.

Domestic circumstances delayed the project, and in time the Editor grew indifferent to it. If a man of Priestley’s stature could be led by habitual prejudice to defend an institution ordained by the founders of the anti-Christian Church and nowhere commanded in the Gospel, he reasoned, lesser men could hardly be expected to shake off their own. Friends whose judgment he trusted assured him that Eubulus’s arguments had never been answered by Priestley’s letter, so a reply seemed unnecessary, and he resolved to let the matter drop.

What roused him was Mr. Christie’s Letters upon the French Revolution. A note there, on the hour of the National Assembly’s Sunday sitting, accused the author of the objections in the Theological Repository of rashness and thoughtlessness, and implied he was a foe to piety and humanity. Christie justified the French legislators for suspending Sunday observance under urgent circumstances, predicted that the succeeding legislature would restore respect for “one of the most ancient and most venerable institutions,” called Sunday excellent as a political institution, and said Priestley had ably summed up and answered the rash writers. The Editor concludes that Christie never read the Eubulus letters and knew the controversy only through Priestley’s Hermas. He protests at being severely censured by a partial judge who heard one side only, and insists his objections were deliberate, aimed at promoting true Christianity and human welfare.

He turns Christie’s own plea against him: the appeal to antiquity, venerability, and political usefulness is exactly what Christie would refuse to allow Mr. Burke on behalf of the monasteries abolished by the National Assembly. Both the “Divine Humanity” system and the monks, he observes, are prior in date to Sunday rest. Politics and religion, he urges, must be kept apart—render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s—and men should first settle whether the Gospel is true or a political fiction like Mahomet’s Koran or Numa’s revelations. If it is revealed, it came complete from its author, and no human legislature has more right to regulate it than citizens have to alter the laws of the state. To praise the political benefit of an institution that annihilates a seventh of human industry he calls absurd: in France superstition immured perhaps a hundred thousand healthy citizens, but Sunday’s intermission of labour amounts to imprisoning three and a half million. Sunday schools for labouring children are the only instance of political use he can find, and they were obtained by breach rather than observance of a sabbath. Might not parents, he asks, innocently spend their leisure in honest occupation rather than in tippling, sauntering, or yawning over Books of Piety?

The Letter to the Directors: No Positive Precept

The letter to the Directors opens by asking their channel to draw attention to an observance held sacred by all professed Christians, though reason has small chance against inveterate and universal prejudice. The author is convinced he is discharging the duty of a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. The observance in question is the keeping of the first day of the week as a Jewish sabbath—a day of cessation from all worldly business—which, he argues, produces no valuable ends not easily attained without it, costs a seventh of industry, and drives the majority to misspend the time in dissipation and intemperance that lead on to vice and crime.

The first point in investigating any religious observance under the gospel is whether it owes its origin to the positive injunctions of the authorised publishers of revelation. If it does, all argument ends; if it does not, it carries no religious obligation and strict observance is mere superstition. There is not one positive precept in the New Testament for keeping a sabbath. Christians keep it neither in obedience to gospel authority nor to the fourth commandment, since no Jewish law binds a Christian further than the gospel repeats it, and they keep another day to which that commandment has no reference. It is pretended that the practice may be inferred from scripture and early writers—that the apostles and primitive Christians assembled on the first day and transferred the sabbatical cessation in honour of the Lord, who rose and repeatedly showed himself on that day. To a close-reasoning mind this gives up the point: so important an institution requires the lawgiver’s express command, and the fatal apostasy and antichristian superstition were themselves effected by fallacious inferences from particular passages and by zeal for magnifying the Messiah’s honour. The apostles and first disciples are nowhere said to have distinguished the first day; only two passages mention their assembling—John xx. 19 and Acts xx. 7. In the first, the meeting could not have been for religious observance but to confer on the testimony of the resurrection, and from the lateness of the hour at which the two disciples must have returned, the argument runs on.

Eubulus on Sabbath-Breaking and Sunday Schools

Eubulus closes his letter by pointing to the many criminals who attribute their ruin to “Sabbath-breaking,” and to the present efforts to establish Sunday schools in the metropolis and other populous towns, as proof of the mischief wrought by the weekly abuse of sabbath idleness among the lower ranks. Such schools benefit only the children actually instructed in them, who gain useful knowledge instead of lounging or doing mischief; they cannot touch grown people. Because humans are creatures of imitation, the scholars, once past attending age, will blend back into the general mass of their rank, frequent the same pernicious assemblies at public houses, and be initiated in the same weekly vicious excesses or expensive dissipation—which must ever be destructive of practical moral virtue, the sole object of the genuine religion of Jesus Christ.

Philander’s Reply: The Sabbath as Holy Convocation

Philander takes up the defence. He argues, first, that the Jewish Sabbath was intended not merely as rest from bodily labour but for public and social religious worship—a holy convocation. On it the people were not to do their own ways, find their own pleasure, or speak their own words: not to pursue secular employments, indulge in recreations, or talk of worldly business, but to spend the day in religious meditation and devotion. Dr. Jennings and others, he says, sufficiently proved this, and the prophets severely reprehended the Jews for violating or neglecting the Sabbath. If God appointed one day in seven to be so kept, threatening disobedience with excision, there is the highest reason to suppose the wisdom of the Deity saw it necessary for spiritual improvement that one day a week be devoted to religion without interruption from temporal concerns; and since human nature remains the same, it is a fair presumption that God intended mankind to allot a seventh of their time to religion under all his dispensations.

Second, the Christian dispensation arose out of the Jewish, derived part of its evidence from fulfilled Jewish prophecies, and was introduced by a person educated a Jew and sent to none but his own nation. Any practice he did not expressly abrogate, but himself conformed to after being invested with his public character, he must be regarded as acknowledging still obligatory on his countrymen. He appears to have kept the Jewish Sabbath and did not object to the Jews keeping it according to their law; he condemned the superstitious pretence that acts of beneficence were forbidden on that day, but nowhere charged his disciples with fault for attending temple or synagogue worship or for employing the part spent at home religiously. Though the particular reason for the seventh day prescribed to the Jews does not affect others, so that gentile converts were not bound to keep the same day, yet his employing the seventh part of his time according to his country’s custom, and giving no hint that it was too much, shows he did not think it too large a proportion for religion. Had he intended to shorten it, we might expect some intimation on the occasions when he was accused of breaking the Sabbath, especially as he claimed to be Lord of the Sabbath. Giving none, his conduct must have led the Jews to conclude he was not commissioned to release them from the law’s obligation to abstain from worldly business and pleasure on the Sabbath and keep it holy. It was not necessary for him to ratify afresh an injunction of the law by express command; his uniform compliance was a full acknowledgement that it remained in force for the Jews, at least till the dissolution of their civil polity, if not afterwards. He censured the false glosses and absurd traditions that made the law void, but objected not to the law itself, saying he came not to destroy it. Perhaps, foreseeing the overthrow of the Jewish state, he might not esteem it necessary to command Jewish converts to observe the Sabbath after that event, when they would be forced to discontinue some ceremonies; foreseeing they would either look on themselves as bound by the law and his example, or keep some other day holy to God equally calculated to answer all religious and moral purposes, he might not think it needful to caution them against such a change. But had he—whose zeal for his heavenly Father’s honour was so great as to scourge from the temple those who profaned it by making it a place of merchandize—been aware his followers would cease to regard one day above another, in direct opposition to his own example and to a practice infinite wisdom had solemnly enjoined on all his nation, he would doubtless have been particularly careful to guard them against so unprecedented and dangerous a conduct.

Third, the apostles after the Lord’s ascension acted as he had during his lifetime. It was Paul’s manner in particular, that champion for the liberty of gentile converts, to attend the synagogues every Sabbath-day. In his speech before Festus he declares that against the law he had offended nothing at all. Can we suppose the apostles would have continued to do as their master had done if they had received private instructions from him, or been directed by the Spirit, to weaken by degrees the Jewish converts’ attachment to such a practice—one in which they had been brought up but which, being in fact superstitious and injurious, was to be abominated?

The Argument Against a Divine Sabbath

Eubulus opens the exchange by pressing a practical objection: a universal religion that instituted a sabbath would annihilate one-seventh of mankind’s industry and condemn people to pass one-seventh of their lives in useless inactivity or the abuses of periodical idleness, which he calls pernicious to moral virtue. Nothing less than the express command of the religion’s author—as clear as the command for the seventh-day sabbath under the Jewish law or for the Lord’s supper under the gospel—could establish such an ordinance. Unless its defenders can produce that command, they accomplish nothing. He would not have drawn public attention to the matter, he says, but that it is demonstrable no such ordinance was observed by Christians till after the second century, and none was enjoined before the reign of Constantine, who by civil power established not the religion of Jesus Christ but an idolatrous, blasphemous superstition—the apostasy that is the object of almost all New Testament prophecies.

Philander does not deny that Constantine first publicly enjoined the sabbath, but concludes he found it already in Christian practice. Eubulus answers that had Constantine found it in general practice he would have established it universally, not in cities and large towns only; it is not improbable he found it among some professed Christians, as he found monastic celibacy, the sign of the cross, and veneration of saints and martyrs. Philander, he charges, confuses the first Christians assembling at an appointed hour on the first day with keeping the whole day as a sabbath, and then calls his inferences “proof and demonstration.” The question must be settled not by inferences but by the written evidence of second-century Christians themselves, who expressly aver that neither had the gospel enjoined nor did they practice any such observance.

Justin, Irenaeus, and the Second-Century Witness

Eubulus translates passages from Justin the martyr’s dialogue with Trypho. The Jew objected that Christians, though boasting of truth, differed in nothing from the heathen in manner of living, observing neither festivals nor sabbaths nor circumcision. Justin acknowledges the charge true and proves that under the new law the external signs of carnal circumcision and a temporal sabbath were unnecessary. The new law, Justin says, requires a perpetual sabbath; God is not pleased with fasting one day in idleness; ceasing from perjury, fraud, and adultery is the sabbath truly pleasing to God; the elements are never idle nor keep sabbath; neither circumcision nor sabbaths, festivals, and oblations were needed before Abraham and Moses, nor now after Jesus Christ. God did not teach these things to men who preceded Moses and Abraham, who were well-pleasing to him though uncircumcised and not observing sabbaths; and as circumcision began from Abraham and sabbath, sacrifices, and oblations from Moses—ordained for the nation’s hardness of heart—so they were to end in Jesus Christ. Eubulus notes that Irenaeus cites the same passages from Exodus and Ezekiel to prove the sabbath was ordained merely as a distinguishing sign of the Mosaic covenant, not for any moral purpose. The second-century Christians, he concludes, did not observe and had not received any such institution from the apostles, but understood the gospel to teach that the sabbath, like circumcision and every other Jewish ordinance, was abolished by the new covenant and improper to be adopted.

Answering Substitiarius: Acts and Corinthians

Eubulus then turns to Substitiarius, who acknowledges only three passages supporting apostolic sanction and leans on the argumentum ad verecundiam, confronting Eubulus with the names of Hallet and Locke. A sincere investigator of truth, Eubulus replies, is no respecter of persons and will not rely implicitly even on a Locke where he is competent to judge for himself. On Acts xx. 7 he argues that the historian, by mentioning the purpose of the assembly—to break bread—informs us of the time of day: either a common farewell-meal or the Lord’s Supper, both held in the evening, at the beginning of the Jewish day. If on the first day of the week, it must have been Saturday evening, since the next evening would be the second day. He leaves it to common sense whether Paul preached one whole night and set out Sunday at break of day, or continued two whole nights and the intervening day and set out Monday morning as Philander supposes. Substitiarius avoids this absurdity by making the disciples assemble Sunday evening, but since breaking bread on Sunday evening was the second day, he contradicts St. Luke. As to the difficulty about the word “morrow,” Eubulus asks him to read the first six verses of the fourth chapter of the same history, where “morrow” is used twice in opposition to the preceding evening.

On 1 Cor. xvi. 2, Eubulus notes that Substitiarius cites Locke and Hallet as inferring everyone was to bring to the congregation on that day what charity had laid aside, and that the apostle thereby ordered perpetual observance. Eubulus objects that this deduces by circumstantial inference, in direct opposition to the plain sense of the apostle’s words: Paul expressly orders everyone to lay up a portion of his gain by him at his own house—making a fund or treasure of what he had gained—which necessarily implies balancing accounts on that day for the preceding week, a business the Jewish converts would not have performed on the sabbath, and as inconsistent with detaching the day from secular engagements as Paul’s setting out to travel upon it. As for “the Lord’s day” in Revelation i, Eubulus notes the argument continues.

Primitive Practice and the Meaning of the Lord’s Day

Judged by their practice, the primitive Christians either did not observe the Jewish seventh-day sabbath or did not consider themselves absolutely obliged to refrain from labour on Sundays, possibly working in fields during harvest in uncertain climates; such work falls under “work of necessity,” like lifting an ox or ass from a pit, which even rigid Jews allowed. In Judea, regular seasons meant no inconvenience from constant seventh-day rest. It is improbable Constantine intended absolute cessation from all labour on Sunday, since his order respected Friday as much as Sunday, and two days’ abstention would have seemed too much; moreover Christians respected the Jewish sabbath, though less than the Lord’s day, holding assemblies on it.

Eubulus is mistaken, the reply continues, in asserting that with the Jews all business, travelling, and social or pleasurable intercourse were prohibited, each family confined to its dwelling except at temple or synagogue hours. No such precept is in Moses; Jews generally chose the sabbath for social entertainments. Reland says that on the sabbath they put on their best clothes in honour of it, using every expression of joy, especially in feasting. The author is surprised Eubulus imagines Jews spent sabbaths recluse and rigid, when Luke xiv. 1 shows Jesus invited to a feast at a chief Pharisee’s house on the sabbath; the company was large and of distinction. Christians of Tertullian’s time were far from the gloomy rigidity of the old Puritans; Tertullian, writing as a Montanist of the most rigid sect, says more doors without lights and laurels are found among Heathens than among Christians. Hilary says, “We on the eighth day, which is also the first, rejoice in the festivity of a perfect sabbath.” Sunday festivity did not consist in sports but in singing psalms and religious joy or cheerful society. Practices of apostolic times may be inferred from immediately succeeding times, since no difference is recorded; the apostles and Jewish Christians, used to a weekly day of public worship, would naturally continue it and recommend it to gentile converts, customs respecting Jewish synagogues being kept up in Christian churches.

Marks of regular assemblies on the first day of the week appear in the New Testament. The day was later called the Lord’s day, so the same term in Revelation likely means the same day. Evidence exists that Christians in large cities like Corinth and Ephesus assembled at mid-day on the Lord’s day—from Paul’s epistles distinguishing the church from private houses, the whole church coming together, women keeping silence, strangers present and converted, and from James ii. 2. Churches in private houses were assemblies independent of household members; epistles to whole churches were read in such assemblies. Their frequency appears from strangers attending and from Acts ii. 25, where Paul and Barnabas assembled a whole year with the church. If weekly, they were likely on the Lord’s day, both at Corinth and Troas. Regarding Corinth, though the apostle speaks of money laid up by individuals on the first day, the author thinks with Mr. Locke it was also deposited in one hand or place, to prevent gatherings when Paul came; the practice of collections in churches on the Lord’s day evidences apostolic origin.

The author has considered Eubulus’s opinion that Paul preached at Troas on the evening before the Lord’s day, not on the evening of that day, and finds it ill-founded. Acts xx. 6 shows Paul spent seven days at Troas; why preach on the first day if not the usual assembly time? He had choice of all seven days; probably the wind was not favourable for sailing, he did not choose to call the church together before their usual meeting time, and before that went from house to house. Eubulus stresses the Jews beginning the day on the evening. But Dr. Lardner, showing the women went to embalm Jesus’ body on the morning of the first day, not the evening of the seventh—though that morning, just before sunrise, is called in Matt. xxviii. 1 the end of the Sabbath—says all know the Jewish civil day began at sunset, but that day was divided into two parts, night and day, day meaning the natural day, the light part. Using “day” for daylight was customary with Jews as with us: Luke xxii. 6, “as soon as it was day,” though the Jewish day was then half expired; Ezra read from morning until mid-day; “next day” is used in opposition to the evening before in Acts iv. 2, yet Eubulus refers to this passage as favouring him. The author concludes that in Acts xx. 7 the assembly began in daylight of Sunday, the next day being Monday, especially as there was then no persecution inducing dark assemblies.

Justin’s Apology, Pliny, and Cyprian

Turning to Justin’s first apology to the Roman Emperors, which Priestley had translated, the author examines the inference that Sunday meetings occurred at midday and occupied a considerable part of the day.

What the Controversy Is Really About

Strip away the Greek citations and the quarrels over whether a day begins at sunset, and the argument turns on a single question of authority. Eubulus stakes everything on it: a religious observance under the gospel must rest on the positive command of those authorized to publish revelation. Prove the command and the matter is settled; fail to prove it and strict observance is superstition. He searches the New Testament and finds no precept, and he presses the point that Christians do not even keep the day the fourth commandment names. Philander and Subsidiarily answer with a different account of how divine sanction reaches Christian practice. The Jewish law, they say, was a precise code delivered to a separated nation; the rites of the gospel were not set down as formal statutes but introduced incidentally, as occasions arose, and are known to be binding from the practice of the first churches. Baptism and the Lord’s supper, on this view, are divine institutions whose institution is nowhere recorded in the form of a command—so the absence of an express precept for the Lord’s day proves nothing.

The debate is also an argument about how to read silence. Eubulus treats the New Testament’s failure to command a sabbath as decisive; his opponents treat the silence of Christ and the apostles as permissive, even approving. Philander reasons that Jesus, educated a Jew and conformed to the sabbath, would have warned his followers had he meant them to abandon a weekly day of worship altogether. Subsidiarily adds a mediating refinement: the Lord’s day differs from the Jewish sabbath in design. For the Jew, rest was the leading object and the holy convocation secondary; for the Christian, worship is primary and rest only a consequence—which is why the day need not carry the rigour Eubulus attacks.

Idleness, Industry, and the Moral Case

Eubulus’s most original ground is economic and moral rather than textual. A universal religion that commands a weekly cessation annihilates a seventh of human industry; it consigns the labouring poor to a day of idleness that the majority spend in dissipation and intemperance, and he cites the criminals who blame their ruin on sabbath-breaking as evidence. Sunday schools, in his account, reach only the children taught in them and cannot touch the grown, who will drift back into the same public-house assemblies. His opponents answer that the abuse of an institution does not disprove its use—a mode of reasoning, the reply notes, that would prove too much—and that the day’s festivity, in the practice of the early Christians, consisted in psalms and religious joy rather than sports. The exchange opens a window onto a larger eighteenth-century quarrel: whether a legislator or a church may set aside a seventh of the people’s time, and whether religion is better served by rest or by work.

Scripture, Antiquity, and the Uses of Evidence

Much of the volume is a masterclass in contested reading. Three passages carry the weight—the disciples assembled on the resurrection day and again a week later in John, the midnight meeting at Troas in Acts, and the collection “on the first day of the week” in Corinthians—with the “Lord’s day” of Revelation hovering behind them. Eubulus argues that the Troas assembly, since it met to break bread, must have gathered in the evening, which by Jewish reckoning makes it Saturday night; his opponents reply that “day” in scripture often means daylight, and that Paul would hardly have preached a whole night and sailed at dawn. On the collection, Eubulus insists the apostle told each person to lay money by him at home, not to bring it to a public box—a reading that turns a supposed weekly custom into a one-off contribution for the famine in Judea. Subsidiarily counters that the force of the evidence lies not in the number of texts but in their manner: a fixed custom, mentioned in passing, running through churches at Troas, Corinth, and Ephesus.

Then comes the appeal to the second and third centuries. Eubulus sets Justin Martyr against the practice, quoting the dialogue with Trypho to show that Christians observed no sabbath and held the sabbath abolished with circumcision; he reads Pliny, Clement of Alexandria, and Cyprian as describing meetings for prayer and the supper that occupied an hour or two, not a day of rest, and he notes that even Priestley concedes the first day was called a festival, on which men were free to work. His opponents read the same writers as evidence of custom descending from the apostles, and Constantine’s decree as the public recognition of a practice already established. The argument over whether the fourth-century emperor found the observance or created it is, in miniature, the argument of the whole book.

A Contested Legacy

The volume closes with the editor’s reply to Priestley, and it is not gentle. He accuses the Doctor of self-contradiction—of admitting the primitive Christians observed the day much as it is observed now while denying any express command—and of arguing with a precipitancy unworthy of his talents. He traces the rigid English Sunday to the Puritans and to a decree of the Emperor Leo, contrasting the sixth-century council of Orleans, which left travel, food, and household work lawful on the Lord’s day and restrained only rural labour so that people might attend church. His parting claim is that in no European nation but England, and there not until after the reign of Charles II, has Sunday been kept with the severity that later preaching demanded—and that ordinary labour would serve morals better than sports and pastimes. Whether or not one accepts the case, the book preserves a remarkable thing: a sustained, learned, and stubbornly rational attack on an institution most of its readers took for granted, conducted in the plain light of scripture and history and unwilling to let piety excuse a weak argument.