OF THE TABLES AND RULES FOR FINDING EASTER-DAY. BEFORE the change of style in England Easter-day was defined to be the first Sunday after the first full moon, which happens next after the one-andtwentieth day of March. In the case of the full moon happening on a Sunday Easter-Day was to be the Sunday after. The present rule is that laid down by the 24 Geo. II. cap. 23, A.D. 1751, when it was enacted that the day following the 2nd Sept. 1752 should be called the 14th Sept., and "that the said feast of Easter, or any of the moveable feasts thereon depending, shall, from and after the said second day of September [1752] be no longer kept or observed in that part of Great Britain called England, or in any other the dominions or countries subject or belonging to the crown of Great Britain, according to the said mode of supputation now used, or the said Table prefixed to the said Book of Common Prayer; and that the said Table and also the column of Golden Numbers, as they are now prefixed to the respective days of the month in the said Calendar, shall be left out of all future editions of the said Book of Common Prayer; and that the said new Calendar, Tables, and Rules, hereunto annexed, shall be prefixed to all such future editions of the said book, in the room and stead thereof." The object of the Act, as stated in the preamble to it, was the fixing the true OF THE By the statute of 5 & 6 Edward VI. c. 3, all the days in this Table, except the days of the feasts of the Conversion of St Paul and of St Barnabas, which are not mentioned, are commanded to be kept Holy-days. The same statute enacts that none other day shall be kept and commanded to be kept holy, or to abstain from lawful bodily labour. The different times, at which the observance of the feasts enumerated in the Table began, are given in the notes on the Calendar and the Collects. In the Unreformed Calendars there were many other Holy-days besides those enumerated in the Table. The observance of these was abrogated by the 5 & 6 Edward VI. before mentioned. In 1549 the only day named in the Calendar in addition to those mentioned in the last paragraph was St Mary Magdalene's. In 1552 this was omitted and four others were inserted,-St George, Lammas, St Laurence, and St Clement. In 1559 St Clement occurs alone in some editions. A Latin edition of the Prayer-book was put out in 1560, the Calendar of which gives a much larger number than is contained in our present Calendar, but omits Inv. of Cross, Trans. of K. Edw., Trans time of the celebration of Easter, so as the same shall agree, as nearly as may be, with the decree of the Nicene Council and with the practice of foreign countries. This object was effected by the tables annexed to the Act, which were taken from the Gregorian Calendar. But the tables were inconsistent with the Rule which the Parliament added in explana tion of them, and which now stands in our Prayer-book. The Rule needs the NOTE, That the Moon of this Rule is the Moon of the Ecclesiastical Calendar, and is to be taken as Full on its Fourteenth Day, the day of the Ecclesiastical New Moon being counted as the First Day of the Moon. De Morgan, in a paper "On the Ecclesiastical Calendar" (Companion to Brit. Alm. 1845), shows that, "1. The law which regulates Easter in Great Britain declares that whenever the full moon on or next after March 21 falls on a Sunday, that Sunday is not Easter Sunday, but the next: it also prescribes rules for determining Easter. "2. In defiance of the precept, though in accordance with the rules, the Easter Sunday of 1845 is on the very day of the full moon next following March 21. 3. One part of the reason of this is that the British Legislature misunderstood the definition of Easter, used in the rules which they adopted, thinking that FEASTS. of S. Martin, Enurchus, Holy-Cross FOR THE MOVEABLE AND IMMOVEABLE FEASTS; TOGETHER WITH THE DAYS OF FASTING AND ABSTINENCE, THROUGH THE WHOLE YEAR. RULES TO KNOW WHEN THE MOVEABLE FEASTS EASTER-DAY (on which the rest depend) is always the First Sunday after the Full Moon which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first Day of March; and if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-Day is the Sunday after. Advent-Sunday is always the nearest Sunday to the Feast of St. Andrew, whether before or after. always do so; and it should never be matter of surprise if Easter fall on the Sunday of the full moon, whether real or calendar. "6. It is not correct to say that Easter is made to fall wrongly in 1845: it falls where the legislators, who correctly copied the rule of the Roman Church, intended it should fall, though they did not correctly give the explanation of the rule they intended to use." The following remarks are from Professor De Morgan's paper referred to above. "There is not much information as to the manner in which the Christians of the first three centuries kept Easter, except that the proper mode was much disputed; that there was one division as to whether it should be kept on the day of the old Passover or on the first day of the following week, another as to what mode of constructing the lunar calendar should be adopted. Leaving out the Montanists, who are said to have kept OF THE VIGILS, FASTS, AND DAYS OF ABSTINENCE. Vigils are the Evens before Feasts. Festivals "were commonly ushered in by the attendance of preceding pernoctations or vigils, which, as harbingers, went before to make preparations for the solemnities of the following days. These vigils were much of the same nature as the common nocturnal, or daily morning prayer, which was early before it was light: and they only differed from the usual antelucan service in this, that whereas the usual morning service never began till after midnight towards cockcrowing in the morning, these vigils were a longer service, that kept the congregation at church the greatest part of the night. These the Greeks called Tavvvxides, and the Latins pernoctationes et pervigilia, watchings all the night."BINGHAM. The observance of the Easter vigil is mentioned by Tertullian, A.D. 192. Every vigil is a fast. or six weeks, deducting the Sundays; and in the 8th century, in the pontificate of Gregory II., Ash-Wednesday and the other three days were added to Lent, and the Quadragesimal fast was observed during forty days."-PROCTER The word Lent is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Lencten, spring. Fasting is a total abstaining from food for a certain time; abstinence a partial abstaining from food, either by a diminution of quantity or by an abstaining from certain kinds of food. The observance of days of fasting and abstinence is very ancient. I. The fast of Lent is of primitive observance. "The original duration of the fast appears to have been forty hours, in commemoration of the time that elapsed from the noon of Friday, when our Saviour began to yield to the power of death, until his resurrection. But in the time of Irenæus and Tertullian other days were added to these, varying in different Churches; until in the 5th century the usual fast was kept for thirty-six days, II. These particular days of the fasts of the four seasons were fixed by_the Council of Placentia, A.D. 1095. Pope Leo I. A.D. 440, has a homily on the jejunia quatuor temporum. He ascribes their origin to Apostolic tradition. For the derivation of Ember, see p. 81. III. The observance of the Rogationdays has been traced to Mamercus, Bishop of Vienne in Gaul, A.D. 460, who insti tuted litanies or rogations on those days on account of some calamities in his dio cese. IV. The Friday fast was instituted in memory of our Lord's Passion. Its observance is as ancient as the time of Clemens Alexandrinus and Tertullian. The Table of Vigils, Fasts, and Days of Abstinence was first added in 1662. Fasts on Vigils were marked in the Ca lendar of 1561. The observance of the Anniversary of the Sovereign's Accession rests on Royal Proclamation. The special service for this day was not sent with the Prayerbook to Parliament in 1662, and is not noticed in the Act of Uniformity. Hence some have maintained that its use is contrary to law, the power of the Crown to dispense with an Act of Parliament being now entirely taken away. See p. 355. NOTE, That if any of these Feast-Days fall upon a Monday, then the Vigil or Fast-Day shall be kept upon the Saturday, and not upon the Sunday next before it. III. The Three Rogation-Days, being the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, before Holy-Thursday, or the Ascension of our LORD. IV. All the Fridays in the Year, except CHRISTMAS-DAY. A CERTAIN SOLEMN DAY, FOR WHICH A PARTICULAR SERVICE IS APPOINTED. The Twentieth Day of June, being the Day on which Her Majesty began Easter on a fixed day, the dispute seems to resolve itself entirely into the schism of the Eastern and Western Christians: and Eusebius says that the parties were nearly equally balanced. No doubt there were some sub-divisions of opinion; but the great mass of the Eastern Christians celebrated Easter on the 14th day of the moon, and of the Western on the Sunday following: the two sides pleading two different apostolic traditions. There is also some probability that the Easterns used the lunar cycle of 84 years, which the Jews are known to have used, and are supposed to have learned during the captivity: while there is every reason to suppose that the Westerns calculated their new moons by the aid of the cycle of nineteen years, introduced by Meton. That the Western Churches used the Sunday after the 14th day of the moon is certain, from the letters of Popes Pius and Victor on the subject in the second century. The schism has an historical existence from the middle of that century, and probably there never had been any agreement on the subject. Uniformity of practice was introduced by the Nicene Council, in a manner which will require some description." The Council of Nice (A. D. 325) issued the following announcement in their epistle to the Church of Alexandria, preserved by Socrates and Theodoret:We also send you the good news concerning the unanimous consent of all in reference to the celebration of the most solemn feast of Easter, for this difference also has been made up by the assistance of your prayers: so that all the brethren in the East, who formerly celebrated this festival at the same time as the Jews, will in future conform to the Romans and to us, and to all who have of old observed our manner of celebrating Easter.' Here, it will be observed, no rule is fixed, nor pretended to be fixed: all that is told is that the Eastern Christians shall or will in future conform to the practice of the Western ones. There is not a word about the moon, nor about any rule for determining Easter." Writers, both Catholic and Protestant, have endeavoured to infer that the Council laid down the strict use of the cycle of nineteen years, and all that constituted the rule afterwards established." Clavius asserts that the cycle of nineteen years was arranged for the purpose by Eusebius of Cæsarea (the historian and one of the bishops of the Council) and some Alexandrian astronomers. Mr De Morgan shews that the reasons alleged in support of this assertion are insufficient, and con The the astronomers of Alexandria together, and desired them to form the Metonic cycle into the sort of Calendar which was in use for a thousand years before the time of Pope Gregory, it is difficult to imagine that the simple cycle arising out of this rule, should have borne the name of a priest of the sixth century. first question which an ancient astronomer would ask, in arranging a chronological reckoning, would be, What is its cycle? After what period does it begin to recommence? Supposing the Metonic reckoning to be accurate, nothing is more easy than to see that, with leap year every four years, a period of 19X28, or 532 years, will bring round the Easters in an order which will be repeated in the next 532 years, and so on. But this cycle bears the name of the Scythian Dionysius, surnamed Exiguus, an abbot of Rome about A.D. 530. "Granting that the Council fully established a unanimous observance of the Sunday after the 14th of the moon, we shall see that not only did they not succeed in framing a lunar cycle, but that the Church itself never had an undisturbed rule till the sixth century. First comes Theophilus of Alexandria, A.D. 380, with a cycle of 437 years; after him Cyril of Alexandria, A.D. 412, with one of 95 years, which attained great celebrity. Next Victorinus of Aquitaine, the real author of the Dionysian cycle of 532 years, was actually employed by Pope Hilarius to correct the Calendar in the year 463. The authority for this account of Victorinus is his contemporary Gennadius, who mentions as his predecessors in the art of cycle-making, Hippolytus (Antenicene), Eusebius, Theophilus, and Prosper. Dionysius Exiguus seems to have done no more than accommodate the cycle of Victorinus (or Victorius, as he is often called) to his new mode of reckoning; he being the person who first abandoned the era of Diocletian, and reckoned from the supposed year of the birth of Christ." a "The Dionysian cycle entailed gradually increasing error, both as to the time of the year at which the feast should be kept, and its coincidence with the moon. This error began to be fully recognised about the beginning of the sixteenth century, and after various attempts had been made to excite attention to the subject, it was taken up in earnest by Pope Gregory XIII. in the year 1577." On March 1st, 1582, a papal Bull was published, abolishing the old Calendar, giving a description of the new one, and referring for the grounds on which the new Calendar was adopted to a work |