THE DETERMINATION OE EASTER DAY. 



L75 



The Latin Fathers (yet not the Greek) often give the year 29, yet 

 always associate it with the date March 25, which was certainly not 

 the true date. It seems to have been a common practice to put 

 Church festivals on the 24th or 25th of the month — the eighth day 

 before the Kalends — and three of our quarter days are so kept still. 

 Now when once they had got the Crucifixion on March 25, they 

 almost necessarily gave the year 29. For it was easy to see by the 

 Julian calendar that in the year 29 March 25 was a Friday. The 

 assumption of the wrong day led to the adoption of the wrong year. 

 It is a pity that the error still persists in some distinguished 

 quarters. 



Page 170, end. — I should be sorry to see a fixed Easter. Our 

 clocks and almanacs are but crutches for the use of an enfeebled 

 age. The true clock and the true almanac are on the face of the 

 sky. It is better to follow the sun and moon than the figures of a 

 dial or the printed pages of a book. 



In some of the Greek Churches it is the custom after nightfall on 

 Good Friday to carry the Host in procession through the church- 

 yard. The full moon shines on that procession even as the full 

 moon shone on another procession, small and sad : when Nicodemus 

 and Joseph of Arimathea, the faithful women and the Mother of 

 our Lord bore His sacred Body from Calvary to the grave. For 

 two nights the full moon watched over the sleeping Christ. It 

 would be lamentable in this age of dulness to break the connexion 

 between our astronomy and our Christianity, between our science 

 and our faith, " to make a cockney holiday " ! 



Mr. Walter Maunder said that Mr. Fotheringhamhad reminded 

 them of that which they should always remember, viz., " the true 

 clock and the true almanac are on the face of the sky." Mr. Pearce 

 had connected Easter with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. There 

 were Babylonian monuments which preserved the memory of a very 

 simple method in use 6,000 years ago for identifying the new moon 

 of springtime by a simple reference to the face of the sky. In the 

 British Museum there were scores of little stone pillars, commonly 

 known as " boundary stones," and on the top of these were three 

 astronomical symbols — a new moon lying on its back, together with 

 two stars. 6,000 years ago, when the new moon was seen setting 

 together with the twin stars, Castor and Pollux, then the observers 

 knew that the month of the spring equinox had begun. If the 



