Among the Jews it was from the creation of the world, as recorded in their sacred books--but no one can determine when that was with sufficient accuracy to make it represent anything but an agreement of the present day. Different interpreters do not come within a thousand years of one another for its supposed date; although some of them have determined it very accurately to their own satisfaction--one going so far as to say that creation finished at nine o'clock one Sunday morning! In other cases the date has been reckoned from national events--as in the Olympiads, the foundation of Rome, &c. The word we now use, AERA, points to a particular date from which to reckon, since it is composed of the initials of the words AB EXORDIO REGNI AUGUSTI "from the commencement of the reign of Augustus." At the present day the point of departure, both forwards and backwards, is the year of the birth of Jesus Christ--a date which is itself controverted, and the use of which did not exist among the first Christians. They exhibited great indifference, for many centuries, as to the year in which Jesus Christ entered the world. It was a monk who lived in obscurity at Rome, about the year 580, who was a native of so unknown a country that he has been called a Scythian, and whose name was Denys, surnamed _Exiguus_, or the Little, who first attempted to discover by chronological calculations the year of the birth of Jesus Christ. The era of Denys the Little was not adopted by his contemporaries. Two centuries afterwards, the Venerable Bede exhorted Christians to make use of it--and it only came into general use about the year 800. Among those who adopted the Christian era, some made the year commence with March, which was the first month of the year of Romulus; others in January, which commences the year of Numa; others commenced on Christmas Day; and others on Lady Day, March 25. Another form of nominal year was that which commenced with Easter Day, in which case, the festival being a movable one, some years were shorter than others, and in some years there might be two 2nd, 3rd, &c., of April, if Easter fell in one year on the 2nd, and next year a few days later. The 1st of January was made to begin the year in Germany in 1500. An edict of Charles IX. prescribes the same in France in 1563. But it was not till 1752 that the change was made in England by Lord Chesterfield's Act. The year 1751, as the year that had preceded it, began on March 25th, and it should have lasted till the next Lady Day; but according to the Act, the months of January, February, and part of March were to be reckoned as part of the year 1752. By this means the unthinking seemed to have grown old suddenly by three months, and popular clamour was raised against the promoter of the Bill, and cries raised of "Give us our three months." Such have been the various changes that our calendar has undergone to bring it to its present state. CHAPTER XV. THE END OF THE WORLD.