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because it was ancient, but because it embodied conceptions which had taken a remarkable hold over the popular mind.
Of these two factors which have produced our week, the Jewish is, at first sight at any rate, the more important. We measure our time in cycles of seven days primarily because the Jews, by the time of our era, had come to attach vast importance to the religious observance of one day in seven; because the first Christians were Jews; because, though Paul at any rate abjured the Sabbath for his Gentile converts, as strongly as he abjured circumcision, the Church still clung to the practice of meeting once every seven days; because thus the Christian Lord's day acquired something of the sanctity of the Sabbath, with which indeed so many people still confuse it; and finally because this religious institution has been found to have a civil value. But the planetary week of the pagan, in which not only one day is sacred, but each of the seven is held to be under the dominion of one or other of the seven bodies which 'wander' through the heavens, has been a contributory factor in various ways and the evidence of this is written unmistakably in the names of the days.
That our week-day names represent the planets may be regarded, I presume, as an accepted fact, though I have come across highly educated people, and indeed distinguished scholars, who were ignorant of it. It is indeed
