ed as occurring on the first day of the
week was that held at Troas. (See Acts 20:6-13.) The context shows that
it was an evening meeting, after the Sabbath,--Saturday night, as we
would call it, for the Bible reckoning is from evening to evening. It
was the last time the believers were ever to see the apostle's face, and
as they lingered after the close of the Sabbath, he held an all-night
farewell meeting, breaking bread with the believers, and leaving at
daybreak Sunday morning for the eighteen- or twenty-mile journey afoot,
across country to Assos. And while he spent the first day traveling
afoot, his companions were journeying by boat.

Conybeare and Howson (of the Church of England), in that standard work,
"Life and Epistles of St. Paul," tell the plain fact of the inspired
record, save that manifestly they should not have applied the title
"Jewish" to God's Sabbath; for it was not the Sabbath of the Jews, but
"the Sabbath of the Lord thy God:"

"It was the evening which succeeded the Jewish Sabbath. On the
Sunday morning the vessel was about to sail."--_Chapter 20, p.
520._

Describing the road between Troas and Assos, they add:

"Strength and peace were surely sought and obtained by the
apostle from the Redeemer as he pursued his lonely road that
Sunday afternoon in spring among the oak woods and the streams
of Ida."--_Id., p. 522._

Once again the "first day of the week" is mentioned, in 1 Cor. 16:2. But
that scripture says no word of any sacredness of the day or of any
religious observance of it. The apostle was gathering a fund for the
poor at Jerusalem, and asked every believer to "lay by" something every
first day of the week, so that the money would be ready when he came. As
Dean Stanley (Church of England) comments:

"There is nothing to prove public assemblies, inasmuch as the
phrase [Greek: par heauto] ('by himself, at his own house')
implies that the collection was to be made individually and in
private."

And Neander's Church History says:

"All mentioned here is easily explained, if one simply thinks
of the ordinary beginning of the week in secular life."--_Vol.
I, p. 339 (German ed.)._

To meet the emergency of need in Judea, these believers were asked to
look over their business affairs at the beginning of each week, until
Paul should come, laying aside a gift as God had prospered them.

No Sunday Sacredness in the