had anciently changed it from the Jewish Saturday.  This had taken place, had the Thursday voters not formed the minority.  Another asserted, that Sunday was a working day, and that Saturday was the perpetual Sabbath.[A] Some deemed the very name of Sunday profaned the Christian mouth, as allusive to the Saxon idolatry of that day being dedicated to the Sun; and hence they sanctified it with the “Lord’s-day.”  Others were strenuous advocates for closely copying the austerity of the Jewish Sabbath, in all the rigour of the Levitical law; forbidding meat to be dressed, houses swept, fires kindled, &c.,—­the day of rest was to be a day of mortification.  But this spread an alarm, that “the old rotten ceremonial law of the Jews, which had been buried in the grave of Jesus,” was about to be revived.  And so prone is man to the reaction of opinion, that, from observing the Sabbath with a Judaic austerity, some were for rejecting “Lord’s-days” altogether; asserting, they needed not any; because, in their elevated holiness, all days to them were Lord’s-days.[B] A popular preacher at the Temple, who was disposed to keep alive a cheerful spirit among the people, yet desirous that the sacred day should not pass like any other, moderated between the parties.  He declared it was to be observed with strictness only by “persons of quality."[C]

[Footnote A:  Collier’s “Ecclesiastical History,” vol. ii. p. 758.]

[Footnote B:  Fuller’s “Church History,” book xi. p. 149.  One of the most curious books of this class is Heylin’s “History of the Sabbath,” a work abounding with uncommon researches; it was written in favour of Charles’s declaration for reviving lawful sports on Sundays.  Warton, in the first edition of Milton’s “Juvenile Poems,” observed in a note on the lady’s speech, in Comus, verse 177, that “it is owing to the Puritans ever since Cromwell’s time that Sunday has been made in England a day of gravity and severity:  and many a staunch observer of the rites of the Church of England little suspects that he is conforming to the Calvinism of an English Sunday.”  It is probable this gave unjust offence to grave heads unfurnished with their own national history, for in the second edition Warton cancelled the note.  Truth is thus violated.  The Puritans, disgusted with the levities and excesses of the age of James and Charles, as is usual on these points, vehemently threw themselves into an opposite direction; but they perhaps advanced too far in converting the Sabbath-day into a sullen and gloomy reserve of pharisaical austerity.  Adam Smith, and Paley, in his “Moral and Political Philosophy,” vol. ii. p. 73, have taken more enlightened views on this subject.]

[Footnote C:  “Let servants,” he says, “whose hands are ever working, whilst their eyes are waking; let such who all the foregoing week had their cheeks moistened with sweat, and their hands hardened with labour, let such have some recreations on the Lord’s-day indulged to them; whilst persons of quality, who may be said to keep Sabbath all the week long—­I mean, who rest from hard labour—­are concerned in conscience to observe the Lord’s-day with the greater abstinence from recreations.”]