Of necessity a general outline sketch of the formation of the Kalendar
is all that can be attempted in the following pages. Local Kalendars,
more especially, for most of our readers, those of the service-books of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, present many interesting and attractive
features; but it has been impossible to deal with them in an adequate
manner. Some space has, however, been devoted to the consideration of
the Kalendar and Ecclesiastical Year of the Orthodox Church of the East,
including the peculiar arrangement of the grouping of Sundays; and brief
notices are given of the fasts and festivals of some of the separated
Churches of the East.
The questions concerning the determination of Easter will form the main
trial of the patience of the student.
The early controversies on the Paschal question are not free from
obscurity; and the interests attaching to the construction of the various
systems of cycles, intended to form a perpetual table for the unerring
determination of the date of Easter, are mainly the interests which
are awakened by the history of human ingenuity grappling more or less
successfully with a problem which called for astronomical knowledge and
mathematical skill. Religious interests are not touched even remotely.
Profound as are the thoughts and emotions which cluster around the
commemoration of the Lord’s Resurrection, they are quite independent of
any considerations connected with the age of the moon and the date of the
vernal equinox. The scheme for a time seriously entertained by Gregory
XIII of making the celebration of Easter to fall on a fixed Sunday,
the same in every year, has much to commend it. Had it been adopted we
should, at all events, have been spared many practical inconveniences,
and the ecclesiastical computists would have been saved a vast amount of
labour. But we must take things as they are.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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