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 their view of it. With such a presumption of good sense in their favour, it becomes easier to believe in any claim which may be made on their behalf to tact or sagacity in settling any other matter. And I strongly suspect such a claim may be made for them on the Easter question.

I collect from many little indications, both before and after the Council, that the division of the Christian world into Judaical and Gentile, though not giving rise to a sectarian distinction expressed by names, was of far greater force and meaning than historians prominently admit. I took note of many indications of this, but not notes, as it was not to my purpose. If it were so, we must admire the discretion of the Council. The Easter question was the fighting ground of the struggle: the Eastern or Judaical Christians, with some varieties of usage and meaning, would have the Passover itself to be the great feast, but taken in a Christian sense; the Western or Gentile Christians, would have the commemoration of the Resurrection, connected with the Passover only by chronology. To shift the Passover in time, under its name, Pascha, without allusion to any of the force of the change, was gently cutting away the ground from under the feet of the Conservatives. And it was done in a very quiet way: no allusion to the precise character of the change; no hint that the question was about two different festivals: 'all the brethren in the East, who formerly celebrated this festival at the same time as the Jews, will in future conform to the Romans and to us.' The Judaizers meant to be keeping the Passover as a Christian feast: they are gently assumed to be keeping, not the Passover, but a Christian feast and a doctrinal decision is quietly, but efficiently, announced under the form of a chronological ordinance. Had the Council issued theses of doctrine, and excommunicated all dissentients, the rupture of the East and West would have taken place earlier by centuries than it did. The only place in which I ever saw any part of my paradox advanced, was in an article in the Examiner newspaper, towards the end of 1866, after the above was written.

A story about Christopher Clavius, the workman of the new Calendar. I chanced to pick up 'Albertus Pighius Campensis de æquinoctiorum solsticiorumque inventione.…Ejusdem de ratione Paschalis celebrationis, De que Restitutione ecclesiastici Kalendarii,' Paris, 1520, folio. On the title-page were decayed words followed by ' hristophor C  ii, 1556 1556 (or 8),' the last blank not entirely erased by time, but showing the lower halves of an l and of an a, and rather too much room for a v. It looked very like E Libris Christophori Clavii 1556. By the