Conjectures of this kind, though at present unsupported, are well worth remembering, if for no other reason, because students of early Christian literature are thus put on the alert to note any testimonies which make for, or else go to invalidate, the suggestion offered. I may add that the Montanist notion, as recorded by Sozomen, that the creation of the sun in the heavens took place on April 6, is of a kind that would well fall in, among fanciful speculators, with the notion that the Incarnation also took place on the same day[45]. Why this time of the year, late in December or early in January, was assigned for the Nativity is a question which it is not possible to answer with confidence. It is conceivable that the insecure and blundering argument alleged, among others, by Chrysostom may have had weight. He supposes that Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, was the High Priest, and that he had entered the Holy of Holies on the day of Atonement when the angel appeared to him. The day of Atonement was in September. Six months later (Luke i. 26) the Annunciation was made to St Mary; and after nine months the Saviour was born. By others it has been suggested that the festival of Christmas on Dec. 25 did not originate in any such calculations; but was suggested by the pagan festival _Natalis Solis Invicti_ marked at that day. The solstice was passed. The sun was entering on its new increases. ‘The Light of the world,’ ‘the Sun of righteousness’ was to take the place of the sun-god in the heavens[46]. The Theophany, or Epiphany (Jan. 6), is, like its name, as characteristically Eastern in its origin as the feast of the Nativity (Dec. 25) is Western; but when it passed into the West it was in thought, either at the outset or certainly soon, separated from the Nativity; and eventually, while the baptism of Christ was not ignored, the main stress of liturgical allusion was on the visit of the Magi, so that the festival is not uncommonly designated simply as the feast of the Three Kings. In the East the dominant thought is the manifestation of Christ’s divinity at his baptism: and in the Basilian Menology the day is simply named ‘The Baptism of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ And it is to this connexion, baptism among the Greeks being known as ‘illumination,’ that has been attributed another name for the day, ‘the lights’ (τὰ φῶτα)[47]. It is not improbable that the feast of the Epiphany made its way to the West, through the churches of Southern Gaul, whose affinities with the East are recognised facts of history. At all events it is in connexion with Gaul that we find the first reference to the Epiphany in the West. The pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus, in his account of the Emperor Julian in A.D. 361 visiting a Christian church at Vienne, says that it happened on the day in the month of January which Christians call ‘Epiphania’ (_Hist._ xxi. 2).