THE GREAT COMMEMORATION.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1008, 24 December 1910, Page 13

THE GREAT COMMEMORATION.

Though wo keep the Feast of the Nativity of Christ on December 25, thg Christian Church has never pretended that it is more than a commemorative anniversary. No tradition has ever existed as to the day, month, or even'year when Christ was born in Bethlehem. Very early, however, the statement in the Gospel according to St. Luke that John the son of Zacharias began to preach in the wilderness in tho fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius, and that Jesus was about thirty years old when He was baptised by John, caused an approximate dato to be fixed 011 for the year. Even as late as the middle, of the third century Clement of Alexandria tells us of various calculations which led men to suppose that. April 18 or 19, or a certain day at tho end of May, might be tho day of the Nativity. Tho first evidence for tho' observance of December 25 as Christmas Day . is a Roman calendar of .TIG A.D., which has: "VIII kalian, natns Christus in Betleem" ("Christ was born in Bethlehem on December 25"). I-'or some few years this feast was only observed in the Latin Church though it lvas not long before the custom began to crecp in 111 the Eastern Church. St. John . Chysostom writes in 386 that it had been kept for about ten years at Antioch, but at this time neither Jerusalem nor Alexandria, two important centres of religious life,' had accepted the feast. Jerusalem did so about fifty years later.