the faithful had assembled on the first day
of the week to break bread, but also to increase the solemnity of that
function and betoken a spiritual joy, may be lawfully inferred from every
thing we know about the manners of the ancient Jews, from whom the church
borrowed the use of lights in celebrating her various rites and
festivals."--(_Hierurgia_, p. 372.)

It is really difficult seriously to answer such extraordinary suppositions
as that the seven candlesticks, expressly mentioned as types of the seven
churches, should be an allusion to the physical lights used in the worship
of those churches, and not to the moral and spiritual light which they
were spreading amongst Jews and Gentiles. Such an explanation appears to
me nothing better than that tendency to materialise the most abstract and
spiritual ideas to which I have alluded above, p. 126. With regard to the
passage in the Acts xx. 7, 8, which says that there were a great number of
lamps in the upper chamber where St Paul was preaching, I think that this
circumstance might have been considered as a religious rite if the apostle
had been preaching at noon; but as it is expressly said that he did it at
night, nothing can be more simple than the lighting of the upper chamber
with lamps. It was also very natural that there should be many of them,
because as St Paul was undoubtedly often referring to the Scriptures, his
hearers, or at least many of them, being either real Jews or Hellenists,
must have been continually looking to copies of the Bible in order to
verify his quotation. It was, therefore, necessary to have the room well
lighted, and consequently to employ many lamps. It is, indeed, curious to
see to what far-fetched suppositions a writer of so much learning and
ingenuity as Dr Rock is obliged to recur, in order to defend a purely
Pagan rite which has been adopted by his church, giving the simplest and
clearest things a _non-natural sense_, similar to that which some
Romanising clergymen have been giving to the precepts of a church which
they were betraying whilst in her service and pay.

The same author maintains that lights were employed from primitive times
at divine service, saying:--

"The custom of employing lights, in the earlier ages of the church, during
the celebration of the eucharist; and other religious offices, is
authenticated by those venerable records of primitive discipline which are
usually denominated Apostolic Canons."--(_Hierurgia_