of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries, that Christ was actually born on the twenty-fifth of December ; and Chrysostom appeals, in behalf of this view, to the date of the registration under Quirinus (Cyrenius), preserved in the Eoman archives. But no certainty respecting the birth-day of Christ can be reached from existing data.° Around the feast of Christmas other festivals gradually gathered, which compose, with it, the Christmas Cycle. The celebration of the twenty -fifth of December was preceded by the Christmas Yigils, or Christmas ISTight, which was spent with the greater solemnity, because Christ was certainly born in the night,^ After Gregory the Great the four Sundays before Christ- mas began to be devoted to the preparation for the coming of our Lord in the flesh and for his second coming to the final judgment. Hence they were called Advent Sundays. With the beginning of Advent the church year in the West began. The Greek church reckons six Advent Sundays, and begins them with the fourteenth of jSTovember. This Advent season was designed to represent and reproduce in the consciousness of the church at once the darkness and the yearning and hope of the long ages before Christ. Subsequently all noisy amuse- ' Dies or natales invicti Soils. This 13 the feast of the Persian sun-god Mithras, which was formally introduced in Rome under Domitian and Trajan. ^ In the early church, the 6th of January, the day of the Epiphany festival, was regarded by some as the birth-day of Christ. Among Bibhcal chronologists, Jerome, Baronius, Lamy, Usher, Petavius, Bengel, and Seyffarth, decide for the 25th of De- cember, while Scaliger, Hug, Wieseler, and EUicott (Hist. Lectures on the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ, p. 10, note 3, Am. ed.), place the bb-th of Christ in the month of February. The passage in Luke, ii. 8, is frequently cited against the common view, because, according to the Talmudic writers, the flocks in Palestine were brought in at the beginning of November, and not driven to pasture again till toward March. Yet this rule, certainly, admitted many exceptions, according to the locahty and the season. Comp. the extended discussion in Wieseler : Chronologische Synopse, p. 132 ff., and Seyffarth, Chronologia Sacra. ' Luke ii. 8. 398 THIRD PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590. ' ments and also weddings were forbidden during this season. The pericopes are selected with reference to the awakening of repentance and of desire after the Kedeemer. From the fourth century Christmas was followed by the memorial days of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr (Dec. 26), of the apostle and evangelist John (Dec. 27), and of the Innocents of Bethlehem (Dec. 28), in immediate succession ; representing a threefold martyrdom : martyrdom in will and in fact (Stej)hen), in will without the fact (John), and in fact without the will, an unconscious martyrdom of infantile inno- cence. But Christian martyrdom in general was regarded by the early church as a heavenly birth and a fruit