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Page:Colson - The Week (1926, IA weekessayonorigi0000fhco).djvu/118

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destroyed the raison d'être of the week. It is true that later Sabbatarianism has developed a doctrine, that though the day has been changed, the obligation to set apart one day in seven for religious observance is of divine institution. Such a doctrine might perhaps be reconciled with the vaguer conception of Sabbatical obligation which we find in Deuteronomy, but hardly with the law as laid down in Genesis ii and Exodus xx, at any rate in the eyes of Jews and Christians, They must have believed that the seventh day's rest had gone on continuously from the beginning, or, in other words, that the number of days which had elapsed between the beginning of the first day of creation and the end of any particular Sabbath was an exact multiple of seven. To assemble on the 7x+1th day instead of on the 7xth is not to keep the Sabbath, and the choice lay between keeping it on the proper day or not at all. Now it would have been perfectly compatible with the Pauline view of the law to take the former alternative. Paul might well have argued, as our Lord argued of the indissolubility of marriage, that the Sabbath was not of Moses' institution, but was from the beginning, and the fact that it alone of the ceremonial ordinances of the law has a place in the Decalogue, a point which no doubt has had great weight in modern feeling, would have confirmed this. But as a matter of fact, though Paul no doubt retained the Sabbath for himself, as