The proper day for keeping this festival, the anniversary of our Lord’s resurrection, was at one time the cause of bitter controversies in the Christian world. It was first a subject of keen dispute between the Eastern and Western Churches, and again between the Church of Rome and the Irish and British Churches. The feast is moveable, and depends on the time of the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Owing to rectifications of the calendar introduced at Rome, but unknown to the British Churches, two different days had come to be observed, and by the seventh century the discussion as to which day was the correct one had become so warm and the difference so scandalous that the civil powers interfered and the question was settled in favour of the Church of Rome by Oswy, King of Northumbria, at Whitby in 664. The Celtic clergy were accused of being Quartodecimans (a very good word in a controversy), that is, of keeping the festival, according to the Jewish mode of calculation, on the fourteenth day of the month Nizan, whether that day fell on a Sunday or not. The accusation is now universally acknowledged to be ill-founded, but it is likely they followed the Alexandrian rule on the point, by which the Easter festival could not begin till the eighth of March, a rule which had been at one time observed by the Church of Rome itself. Neither the cycle followed during the controversy by the Celtic Church, nor that followed by the Romish Church, is that now prevailing, so that if one day was of more value than another for the festival, both parties were in the wrong. The rule now observed in the Highlands is “seven short weeks from Shrovetide to Easter,” Shrovetide being “the first Tuesday of the New Moon in Spring,” or, Easter is “the first Sunday of the second wane of the moon in spring” (_chiad Di-dòmhnaich de ’n dara earra-dhubh san Earrach_).