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other constellations may have done much, perhaps everything, to invest the number seven with special sanctity. But it does not in the least follow that because men recognize this they should proceed to map out time in perpetual sequences of planetary hours or days. Different nations have had their pantheons of it may be five or ten or any number of deities: they have not created weeks to represent them. Europe has for many centuries adored three Persons in the Godhead: it has not produced successive trinities of days. It has reverenced twelve apostles, but though the fact that there are twelve months in our calendar might easily have suggested the idea that each apostle should preside over each month in turn, this also has not been done. On the contrary, it seems to me that the instinct of men is towards intensiveness in these matters and that they feel they can best shew their reverence by concentrating it on special days which do not recur too frequently.
Hitherto we have been dealing with negative evidence, but there is one piece of positive evidence which goes far to shew that the observance of a planetary cycle is not a thing of immemorial antiquity. The hour sequence on which the day sequence of the week is founded, is, as we have seen, that of what we have called the normal order of the planets, running down from Saturn to the Moon with the Sun in the centre. The planetary week therefore both of day and hour
