Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/636

614 614 The name by which Easter is known among the Romance nations French pdques ; Italian, pasyna ; Spanish, pascua is derived through the Latin pascha, and the Greek Trao-^a, from the Chaldee or Aramaean form, NHpS pascha 1, of the Hebrew name of the Passover festival, Hpjp, pesach, from P3 ? &quot; he passed over,&quot; in memory of the great deliverance when the destroying angel &quot; passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when he smote the Egyptiaus,&quot; Exod. xii. 27. An erroneous deriva tion of pascha is given by some of the early fathers of the church, e.g., Irenaeus, Tertullian, &c., to whom Hebrew was an unknown tongue, from the Greek Tracr^etv, &quot; to suffer, &quot; as being the period of our Lord s sufferings. St Augustine (inJoann. Tract. 55) notices this false etymology, and shows how similarity of sound had led to the error, and gives the true derivation. There is no trace of the celebration of Easter as a Christian festival in the New Testament or in the writings of the apostolic fathers. The sanctity of special times or places was an idea quits alien from the early Christian mind, too profoundly absorbed in the events themselves to think of their external accidents. &quot; The whole of time is a festival unto Christians because of the excellency of the good things which have been given,&quot; writes Chrysostom, commenting on the passage 1 Cor. v. 7, which has been erroneously supposed to refer to an apostolic observance of Easter. Origen also in the same spirit (Contr. Celsum, viii. 22) urges that the Christian who dwells on the truths of Christ as our Pass over and the gift of the Holy Ghost, is every day keeping an Easter and Pentecostal feast. The ecclesiastical his torian Socrates (Hist. Eccl., v. 22) states with perfect truth that neither Christ nor his apostles enjoined the keeping of this or any other festival. &quot; The apostles,&quot; he writes, &quot;had no thought of appointing festival days, but of pro moting a life of blamelessness and piety ; &quot; and he attributes the introduction of the festival of Easter into the church to the perpetuation of an old usage, &quot;just as many other cus toms have been established.&quot; This is doubtless the true statement of the case. The first Christians, being derived from, or intimately connected with, the Jewish Church, naturally continued to observe the Jewish festivals, though in a new spirit, as commemorations of events of which these Jiad been the shadows. The Passover, ennobled by the thought of Christ the true Paschal Lamb, the first-fruits from the dead, continued to be celebrated, and became the Christian Easter. Thus the human instinct which every where craves for the commemoration of marked epochs in the personal, social, ecclesiastical, or national life, found its legitimate gratification in the public celebration of the events which are the foundation of the Christian faith. But though the observance of the Paschal festival at a very early period became the rule in the Christian church, a difference as to the time of its observance speedily sprang up between Christians of Jewish and Gentile descent, which led to a long-continued and bitter controversy, and an un happy severance of Christian union. No rule as to the date of the Easter festivals having been laid down by authority, Christians were left to follow their own in stincts. These were naturally different in the Jewish and Gentile churches. The point at issue really was the date of the termination of the Paschal fast. With the Jewish Christians, whose leading thought would be the death of Christ as the true Paschal Lamb, this fast would end at the same time as that of the Jews, on the 14th clay of the moon, at evening, and the Easter festival would immedi ately follow, entirely irrespective of the day of the week. With the Gentile Christians, on the other hand, unfettered by Jewish traditions, the first clay of the week would be identified with the Resurrection festival, and the preceding Friday would be kept as the -commemoration of the Cruci fixion, irrespective of t/ie day of the month, the fast continu ing with increasing strictness till the midnight of Saturday. With the one, therefore, the observance of the day of the month, with the other the observance of the day of the week, was the ruling principle. The chief point was the &quot; keeping &quot; or &quot; not keeping&quot; the 14th day of the moon corresponding to that of the month Nisan. Those who, adopting the Jewish rule, did so keep the 14th day were called TeTpaSeKanTai, Ter/oaSmu, Quartodecimani, and were stigmatized as heretics. In the absence of any authorita tive decision as to the day to be observed and the proper mode of calculating it, other discrepancies arose, which led to controversies and dissensions which, in the words of Epiphanius (Panar., Heer. Ixx.), distracted the church, and became a source of mockery and ridicule to the unbelievers. &quot; Some, &quot; he writes, &quot; began the festival before the week, some after the week, some at the beginning, some at the middle, some at the end, thus creating a wonderful and laborious confusion.&quot; This diversity of usage was gradually brought to an end by the verdict of the Church of Rome. The Roman Chris tians adopted the ordinary Gentile usage, which, within certain limits, placed the observance of the Crucifixion on a Friday, and that of the Resurrection on the following Sunday. A decretal of Pope Pius I., c. 147 the genuine ness of which, however, is by no means established pro nounces that &quot; the Pasch should be celebrated on the Lord s Day by all.&quot; His successor Anicetus was equally firm upon the point. Polycarp, the venerable and sainted bishop of Smyrna, who, according to Irenseus (apud Euseb., //. E., v. 24), visited Rome in 159 with this object, failed to induce Anicetus to. conform to the Quartodeciman usage, which Polycarp had inherited from his master, the Apostle John. Anicetus declined to permit the Jewish custom in the churches under his jurisdiction, but made no scruple of communicating with those who adopted it, and allowed Poly carp to celebrate the Eucharist at Rome. Between thirty and forty years after this visit (197) the same question was controverted in a very different spirit between Victor, bishop of Rome, and Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, the aged metropolitan of proconsular Asia. This province was the only portion of Christendom that still maintained the Quartodeciman iisage, which had been dropt even by the churches of Palestine and Alexandria. Victor s despotic demand that the Asiatic churches should adopt the Roman system having been met by Polycrates with a courteous but firm refusal, Victor proceeded to ex communicate him and all who held with him. So sweep ing a measure shocked the Christian world. Irenaeus remonstrated with the bishop of Rome, and ultimately the Asiatic churches were allowed to retain their usage unmolested. (Euseb., //. E., v. 23-25.) We still find the Quartodecimau usage springing up from time to time in various places, but it never took permanent root, and at the time of the Council of Nicsea (325) the Syrians and the I Antiochenes were the solitary champions of the Jewish rule. The settlement of this controversy was one among the causes which led the emperor Constantine to summon that council. The consent of the assembled prelates was unanimous. 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 (Socr., II. U., i. 9). Nothing, however, was said as to the deter mination of the day. This was practically left to be calculated at Alexandria, 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.