Bede's Ecclesiastical History of EnglandBede, the Venerable, Saint
History
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England
Bede, the Venerable, Saint
England -- Church history -- 449-1066
“The catholic reason of this observance being thus explained, the
unreasonable error, on the other hand, of those who, without any
necessity, presume either to anticipate, or to go beyond the term
appointed in the Law, is manifest. For they that think Easter Sunday is to
be observed from the fourteenth day of the first month till the twentieth
moon, anticipate the time prescribed in the law, without any necessary
reason; for when they begin to celebrate the vigil of the holy night from
the evening of the thirteenth day, it is plain that they make that day the
beginning of their Easter, whereof they find no mention in the commandment
of the Law; and when they avoid celebrating our Lord’s Easter on the
one-and-twentieth day of the month, it is surely manifest that they wholly
exclude that day from their solemnity, which the Law many times commends
to be observed as a greater festival than the rest; and thus, perverting
the proper order, they sometimes keep Easter Day entirely in the second
week, and never place it on the seventh day of the third week. And again,
they who think that Easter is to be kept from the sixteenth day of the
said month till the two-and-twentieth(965) no less erroneously, though on
the other side, deviate from the right way of truth, and as it were
avoiding shipwreck on Scylla, they fall into the whirlpool of Charybdis to
be drowned. For when they teach that Easter is to be begun at the rising
of the sixteenth moon of the first month, that is, from the evening of the
fifteenth day, it is certain that they altogether exclude from their
solemnity the fourteenth day of the same month, which the Law first and
chiefly commends; so that they scarce touch the evening of the fifteenth
day, on which the people of God were redeemed from Egyptian bondage, and
on which our Lord, by His Blood, rescued the world from the darkness of
sin, and on which being also buried, He gave us the hope of a blessed rest
after death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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