(_k_) In conclusion, I may be allowed so far to anticipate what will be found fully established in the next chapter, as to point out here that since in countless places the text of our oldest Evangelia as well as the readings of the primitive Fathers exhibit unmistakable traces of the corrupting influence of the Lectionary practice, _that_ very fact becomes irrefragable evidence of the antiquity of the Lectionary which is the occasion of it. Not only must it be more ancient than Cod. B or Cod. א, (which are referred to the beginning of the ivth century), but it must be older than Origen in the iiird century, or the Vetus Itala and the Syriac in the iind. And thus it is demonstrated, (1st) That fixed Lessons were read in the Churches of the East in the immediately post-Apostolic age; and (2ndly) That, wherever we are able to test it, the Lectionary of that remote period corresponded with the Lectionary which has come down to us in documents of the vith and viith century, and was in fact constructed in precisely the same way. I am content in fact to dismiss the preceding instances with this general remark:—that a System which is found to have been fully recognised throughout the East and throughout the West in the beginning of the fourth century, _must of necessity have been established very long before_. It is as when we read of three British Bishops attending the Council at Arles, A.D. 314. The Church (we say) which could send out those three Bishops must have been _fully organized_ at a greatly antecedent period. 4. Let us attend, however, to the great Festivals of the Church. These are declared by Chrysostom (in a Homily delivered at Antioch 20 Dec. A.D. 386) to be the five following:—(1) Nativity: (2) the Theophania: (3) Pascha: (4) Ascension: (5) Pentecost.(365) Epiphanius, his contemporary, (Bishop of Constantia in the island of Cyprus,) makes the same enumeration,(366) in a Homily on the Ascension.(367) In the Apostolical Constitutions, the same five Festivals are enumerated.(368) Let me state a few Liturgical facts in connexion with each of these.