In the second section it was shewn that the Jewish Sabbath had in the early years of our era obtained a curiously strong hold over a considerable portion of the population of the Empire and in particular that a belief had sprung up in some quarters that this Sabbath wasin reality a'Saturn's day,' in other words that the abstention from work practised thereon by the Jews was caused by their wish to avoid the influence of the dangerous planet Saturn. Two very different inferences might be plausibly drawn from these facts.
On the one hand it might be held that the popular reverence for the Sabbath was based entirely on this misconception and was nothing but a reverence for Saturn's day. The multitude, obsessed by the belief that the planets ruled on successive days, interpreted the Jewish observance in this sense, and called it Sabbath or Saturn's day very much at random. In this case the planetary feeling is the dominant factor and its coincidence with the Jewish observance is merely incidental.
On the other hand it may be suggested that the Jewish Sabbath is at the bottom of the whole
