LEAP YEAR MOVEABLE FEASTS. 



might have been supposed that, as all civilised people have con- 

 curred in adopting the course of the seasons as the great unit of 

 time, they would have also fixed the limits of these units as they 

 succeed each other, by making them correspond with the natural 

 limits of the seasons. It is a very remarkable fact, nevertheless, 

 that, although various beginnings and endings of the year have 

 been adopted at different ages and in different nations, not one 

 that we know of was determined by the natural limits of the 

 seasons. 



12. Some religious observances, such, for example, as Christmas, 

 the Assumption, the Annunciation, always return upon the same 

 days of the same month. Others, such, for example, as Easter, 

 Trinity Sunday, Whitsunday, Corpus Christi, return on diffe- 

 rent days in each successive year, and are hence called MOVEABLE 

 FEASTS. 



To assign from year to year the dates of these moveable feasts 

 is one of the chief religious uses of the calendar. 



The principal of the moveable feasts, and that upon which the 

 dates of all the others depend, is Easter,* or the festival of the 

 Resurrection. 



13. The Resurrection took place at or near the full of the moon 

 which followed the equinox. This was also the time when the 

 Jews were accustomed to celebrate their festival of the Passover. 

 The celebration of that feast was regulated not only by the sun, 

 but also by the moon, and as the period of the lunar phases is 

 not commensurable with that of the seasons, the Passover was 

 necessarily a moveable feast, in reference to an equinoctial year. 

 The Christian festival was celebrated at the Paschal full moon, 

 because its origin was connected with the time of the Passover. 

 Many of the early Christians held Easter to be the Jewish Passover 

 continued as a Christian rite, and celebrated it on the day of the 

 Passover instead of the Sunday after. The Nicene Council put a 

 stop to this notion and practice ; and means were taken at the 

 reformation of the calendar to prevent the Christian festival 

 from falling actually upon the same day as that of the Jewish 

 Passover. 



14. It is a great error, though a very common one, to suppose that 



* The Saxons had a goddess to whom they sacrificed in the month of 

 April, called Eoster (known in Greek as Astarte, and in the Hebrew as 

 Ashtoreth}. To this goddess, according to Bede, they sacrificed in April, 

 which they called Eostcr-monath. Some have thought that the word East 

 in Saxon referred to rising, and that the point of the compass thus gets its 

 name from the rising of the sun, and the festival from the rising of the 

 Saviour. But the former is the most probable derivation. Christian rites 

 and usages sometimes acquired the names of their heathen predecessors. 



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