cter also, for He blessed it and
made it holy. To deny the difference between common days and the holy
day is to say that when the great Creator blesses and makes holy, it is
a vain performance. That cannot be. It would take away all hope of
holiness or salvation for men. The blessing is upon the day, as every
soul finds who keeps it by faith.

When men choose to set apart another day than that blessed and
sanctified of God, it is plainly a setting up of the humanly appointed
time against the divinely appointed time. It is exalting man's sabbath
against God's Sabbath. It is man exalting himself "above all that is
called God." 2 Thess. 2:4.

This was what made the Roman Papacy. The apostle Paul wrote that in his
day the spirit of lawlessness was already working. He said it would lead
to a "falling away" from the truth of God, and the full exaltation of
the man of sin. 2 Thessalonians 2. The falling away came. As Dr. Killen
(Presbyterian), of Ireland, says in the preface to his "Ancient
Church:"

[Illustration: THE SABBATH FROM EDEN TO EDEN

Blessed and sanctified in Eden. Gen. 2:3. Christ the Lord of the
Sabbath. Mark 2:28.

Written by God in His law. Ex. 20:8-11. To be observed in the new earth.
Isa. 66:23.]

"In the interval between the days of the apostles and the
conversion of Constantine, the Christian commonwealth changed
its aspect.... Rites and ceremonies, of which neither Paul nor
Peter ever heard, crept into use, and then claimed the rank of
divine institutions."

In his "Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine," Cardinal Newman
(Roman Catholic) tells how rites and ceremonies were borrowed from
paganism:

"Confiding then in the power of Christianity to resist the
infection of evil, and to transmute the very instruments and
appendages of demon worship to an evangelical use,... the
rulers of the church from early times were prepared, should the
occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or sanction the existing
rites and customs of the populace, as well as the philosophy of
the educated class."--_Pages 371, 372._

Thus along with other adaptations came "the venerable day of the sun"
(Sunday). It was by gradual process that it supplanted the Sabbath. Sir
William Domville wrote:

"Centuries of the Christian era passed away before Sunday was
observed by the Christian church as a Sabbath. History does not
furnish us with a sin