~ 105 ~
rather than mourning[1]. In fact the Church has frequently, if not generally, celebrated the festivals of the saints on the days on which they were supposed to have died and entered into Paradise. When she instinctively took a different line in the case of her Master, was she subconsciously influenced by the mystery religions around her, in which the death of the god was treated as an occasion for mourning and his resurrection hailed with joy? Possibly so. But I should rather incline to think that the rival claims of Sunday and Friday were so closely balanced both on planetary and historical grounds, that the question was decided by some early convenience of usage which grew into a permanent institution, because from both points of view it would find adequate, if not overwhelming, grounds to support it.
There is one more consideration which I wish to put before my readers. Not only is it probable that the planetary week contributed to fix the day of the Christian assembly on one particular day of the seven, but we may also fairly ask whether it is not partly responsible for the recurrence of this Lord's day at intervals of seven days, or, in other words, for the fact that we have a week at all. When the Christian Church abrogated the Sabbath, it really
- ↑ Compare the most famous of the passion hymns, the 'Pange Lingua':
Pange, lingua, gloriosi praelium certaminis,
et super crucis tropaeum dic triumphum nobilem.
