Concerning the date of the introduction of this feast, we have detailed information in a sermon of John of Eubœa, who lived in the middle of the eighth century. He was first a monk and then Bishop of the island, and was contemporary with St John Damascene, whom he occasionally visited. John declares that there are ten points in the life of the Holy Virgin which must be commemorated, and these he enumerates in the tenth section of his sermon. The most of them are at the same time feasts of our Lord, the only ones entirely relating to our Lady being her Nativity, Annunciation, and Assumption. With regard to the feast of our Lady’s Conception, John hesitates. First of all, in the passage referred to above, he enumerates it among the feasts, but at the end of his sermon he states that it is not acknowledged by all,[525] but he speaks highly in its favour, and considers in conclusion that it ought to be celebrated. From this it is plain that in his time the feast was not yet generally accepted, and that he exerted himself to spread it. If Passaglia, who quotes this sermon as evidence for the feast, had noticed this passage, he would have learnt that in the eighth century the festival had not yet become generally popular in purely ecclesiastical circles, such as among the specially devout and the religious, and he would have avoided the mistake of throwing back the inception of the feast to the fifth century in reliance on an interpolated and much later _Typicum S. Sabæ_.[526] John mentions the 9th December as the day of the feast. The contents of this sermon of his are in other respects of no importance. George of Nicomedia, who lived about a century later, is the second Greek preacher of whom we possess a sermon for this festival.[527] It bears the title, “Concerning the Conception of St Anne,” and was delivered upon a festal occasion (πανήγυρις), and the day is already distinctly called a feast (ἑορτή). George considered it no longer necessary to merely commend the acceptance of the feast, but regarded its adoption as a matter of course. He reveals, however, the comparatively late date of its institution, by saying that the day was not to be kept “as one only recently added to the Calendar, but as one adopted on the best grounds, since it naturally belonged to the course of the year and is prescribed by the nature of things. In doing so we become partakers of the joy it promises.”