It is certain that the assigning of the birth of the Lord to Dec. 25 appears first in the West; and it is not till the last quarter of the fourth century that we find it becoming established in some parts of the East. St Chrysostom in a homily delivered in A.D. 386 distinctly relates that it was about ten years earlier the festival of Dec. 25 came to be observed at Antioch, and that the festival had been observed in the West from early times (ἄνωθεν)[41]. At Constantinople the festival was kept on Dec. 25, apparently for the first time, in A.D. 379 or 380; and about the same time it appears in Cappadocia, as we learn from the funeral oration on Basil the Great pronounced by his brother, Gregory of Nyssa. At Alexandria this date was adopted before A.D. 432. At Jerusalem, however, the Nativity was observed on Jan. 6 not only in the time of the _Pilgrimage_ of ‘Silvia,’ but, if we may credit the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, even as late as at the middle of the sixth century. This writer relates that the people of Jerusalem, arguing from Luke iii. 23 (where, as he interprets the passage, Jesus is said to be _beginning_ to be thirty years of age at His baptism) celebrated the Nativity together with the Baptism on Jan. 6[42]. But when did the observance of Dec. 25 make its appearance in the West? It must have been a well-marked festival at Rome when it appeared in the Bucherian Kalendar in A.D. 336 (see p. 15). And about one hundred years earlier (as we learn from his commentaries on Daniel) Hippolytus was led to infer, partly from a belief (however it originated) that the Incarnation took place at the Passover, and partly by a process of calculation with the help of his cycle, that the actual Incarnation took place on March 25 in the year of the world 5500 (or B.C. 3), and consequently the Nativity on Dec. 25[43]. The Bishop of Salisbury (J. Wordsworth) offers an ingenious conjecture which may possibly point to the early Eastern practice of commemorating the Nativity on Jan. 6 having originated in a similar way. Sozomen, the historian, writing in the fifth century, states that the Montanists always celebrated the pascha on the eighth day before the Ides of April (_i.e._ April 6), if it fell on a Sunday, otherwise on the following Sunday (_H.E._ vii. 18). The Bishop thinks that the belief that April 6 was the proper day of the pascha ‘may probably have been an opinion quite unconnected with their [the Montanists’] sect.’ But he rightly admits that ‘actual facts are not yet forthcoming[44].’