EASTER vSUNDAY AND THE DOMINICAL LETTER. 



BY JACOB B. BROWN. 



The matter to be taken in hand is in all strictness astro- 

 nomy, though it may not seem so. We are, namely, to com- 

 pare the records, true and conventional, respectively, of the 

 sun and moon. 



The good prelates of the Council of Nice in the year of our 

 Lord 325 saw fit to make the festival of Easter a movable one ; 

 that is, to make it dependent upon the moon as well as upon 

 the sun, instead of giving it a straightforward solar date, like 

 that of Christmas or Ascension Day. They may have had in 

 mind that from the sixth hour on the day of the Crucifixion 

 " there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour," a 

 darkness not occasioned by eclipse, because the moon was at 

 the full. And they desired, moreover, not to run the risk of 

 coincidence with the Jewish festival of the Passover. 



They thei-efore enacted that the first Sunday after the first 

 full moon which falls on or next after the 21st of March should 

 be Easter Sunday. 



The determination of Easter thus involves the difficult 

 problem of reconciling three periods which have no common 

 measure — the week, the lunar month and the solar year. 



In order to show how this is accomplished some prelimi- 

 nary statement is necessar^^ 



The Vernal Equinox in the Ecclesiastical Calendar is fixed 

 invariably for the 21st of March, though this date does not 

 always or even usually agree with the fact. 



The full moon for the purposes of the rules and calcula- 

 tions to follow is the fourteenth day of a lunar month reckoned 

 according to an ancient ecclesiastical computation, and not 

 the astronomical full moon, from which it may differ as much 

 as two days. 



The Paschal moon is that of which the fourteenth day falls 

 on or next follows the Vernal Equinox. The Paschal full 



