Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 1929 THE FEAST OF EASTER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIII, 30 March 1929, Page 6

Nelson Evening Mail SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 1929 THE FEAST OF EASTER

THE festival of Easter, like others of the Christian festivals, embodies not only a great and distinctive Christian feature or fact, but has absorbed and, ;is it were, assimilated certain pagan and Jewish rites which it has annihilated or superseded. This is shown by its very name. The word Easter is derived from Eastre or Ostara, which was the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of Spring, to whom the fouith month of the year, that

is to say, April, was dedicated. But the month of April, the Venerable Bede tells us, was the Pascal Month, that is the month of the Jewish Passover, and "the old (Jewish) festival is observed with the gladness of a new solemnity."

Indeed, Easter is known among the Latin races as the Paschal Feast — French, pasques ; Italian, pasqua; Spanish, pascua—so that we see that the chief Christian festival, which commemorates the Resurrection, has taken the places of the ancient pagan rites of sunworship in the North of Europe, and of the Hebraic rites of the Passover, which had been at first observed by the Christian churches in the South of Europe and Asia Minor. An early ecclesiastical historian says, "The Apostles had no thought of appointing festival days, but of promoting a life of blamelessness and piety," and he goes on to explain that the introduction of the Easter festival was attributable to the habit of perpetuating old usages and customs. Thus the Passover of the Jews, "ennobled by the thought of Christ as the true Pascal Lamb, the first fruits of the dead,"—another ecclesiastical writer tells us —"continued to be celebrated, and became the Christian Easter." As to the date when the Feast of Easter should be held, there was diversity of opinion and practice almost from the beginning of the Church, because Jewish Christians were of one way of thinking 3 rid Gentile Christians of another. Finally the controversy may be said to have been settled by the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) called by Emperor Constantine for that very "purpose, among others. The assembled prelates, we are told, "all agreed that Easter should be kept on one and the same day throughout the world, and that none should hereafter follow the blindness of the Jews." But the Council did not determine when and how the date of Easter should be lixed. "That duty," our authority tells us, "was practically left to be calculated at Alexandria, (then) the home of astronomical science, and the bishop of that see was to announce it annually to the churches under his jurisdiction and to the bishop of Rome, by whom it was to be communicated to the Western churches. ... It was established as a rule that Easter must be kept on a Sunday, but there was no general agreement as to the cycle by which the festival was to be calculated. We learn from St Ambrose (Epis. 23) that in the year 387 A.D. the churches of Gaul kept Easter on 21st March, while the churches of Italy postponed it to 18th April, and those of Egypt a week later still, to 25th April; and it appears from an epistle of Leo the Great that in the year 455 A.D. there was eight days' difference between the Roman and the Alexandrine Easter."

It was of the essence of the festival that it should be a movable feast, which was the cause of so much divergency of opinion as to fixing it every year. These divergencies continued even after the fourth Council of Orleans (541 A.D.) ordained that Easter should be kept at the same time by all churches, "according to the tables of Victorius." Even this declaration did not bring about uniformity of observance, for we learn that in England it was not till the Council of Whitby (664 A.D.) that the English Church agreed to abandon the Celtic usage, and to adopt the Roman Lille. There is quite a literature on this question of the fixing of Easter, some of it so difficult, to follow that it is incomprehensible except to such scholars as Professor de. Morgan, who, in 1845, wrote an elaborate account of the whole matter, in the "Companion toi the British Almanac," of the year mentioned. Briefly it may be said that "Easter day is the* first Sunday after the 14th day (not the full moon) of the calendar moon which happens on or next after 21st March."

Here follows a comment by another authority, which much confuses matters for the layman. He says: "It must be remembered, however, that it is not the actual moon in the heavens, nor even the moon of the astronomers, that regulates the time of Easter, but an altogether imaginary moon, whose periods are so contrived that the new (calendar) moon always follows the real new moon (sometimes by two, or even three days), etc., etc." We have not by any means exhausted the subject, but we have said enough to show why it was that the ecclesiastics of early times found it difficult to agree as to the fixing of Easter, and quite easy for them to form different opinions on so complicated a subject. But when, after so long a time spent in controversy, they have agreed almost unanimously as to when and how the date of Easter is to be fixed, it would be almost unfeeling to try to upset their calculations by arbitrarily fixing Easter by adopting a settled date each year. And yet that is what some people have proposed lately, for the benefit of holidaymakers and tradespeople. That would mean that Easter would fall on each day of the week in seven successive years; and it is of the essence of Easter that it shall fall on a Sunday, "the first day of the week," when Mary Magdalene came to the Holy Sepulchre and found it empty. The poetry of Easter is lost if it be held on any other day but Sunday—the Lord's Day, and called so in memory of the Resurrection. Politicians might attempt to upset the present usage, but the Church's attitude would most likely differ. The only result would be to revive an ancient controversy, which would probably strengthen immeasurably the Church's case for fixing faster as it does.