into torches of discord, and to turn the sweetest honey into poison, but, with all their efforts, have not been able to destroy the beneficent power of those gifts of God. These Paschal controversies descended into the present period, and ended with the victory of the Koman and Alexan- drian practice of keeping Easter, not, like Christmas and the Jewish Passover, on a fixed day of the month, whatever day of the week it might be, but on a Sunday, as the day of the resurrection of our Lord. Easter thus became, with all the feasts depending on it, a movable feast ; and then the differ- ent reckonings of the calendar led to many inconveniences and confusions. The exact determination of Easter Sunday is made from the first full moon after the vernal efjuinox ; so that the ^ Ociava paschce, pascha clausum ; avriwaaxa. Octave is applied in general to the whole eight-days' observance of the great church festivals ; then especially to the eighth or last day of the feast. * Dominica in alb is. Also Quasimodogeniti, from the Introit for public worship, 1 Pet. ii. 2 ("Quasimodo geniti infantes," "As new-born babes," &c.). Among the Greeks it was called KaivT) KvpiaK-n. § 79. THE TIME OF THE EASTEK FESTIVAL. 405 day may fall on any Sunday between the 22d day of March and the 25th /)f April. The couiKil of Aries in 314 had already decreed, in its first canon, tha^the Christian Passover be celebrated " uno die et nno tempore per omnem orbem," and that the bishops of Rome should fix the time. But as this order was not universally obeyed, the fathers of Nicsea proposed to settle the matter, and this was the second main object of the first ecumenical council in 325. The result of the transactions on this point, the par- ticulars of which are not known to us, does not appear in the canons (probably out of consideration for the numerous Quar- todecimanians), but is doubtless preserved in the two circular letters of the council itself and the emperor Constantino.' The feast of the resm'reetion was thenceforth required to be cele- brated everywhere on a Sunday, and never on the day of the Jewish passover, but always after the fourteenth of. Nisan, on the Sunday after the first vernal full moon. The leading mo- tive for this regulation was opposition to Judaism, which had dishonored the passover by the crucifixion of the Lord. " We would," says the circular letter of Constantino in reference to the council of Nice, "we would have nothing in common with that most hostile people, the Jews ; for we have received from the Redeemer another way of honoring GoS [the order of the days of the weeTi\^ and harmoniously adopting this method, we would withdi'aw ourselves from the evil fellowship of the Jews. For what they pompously assert, is really utterly absurd : that we cannot keep this feast at all without their instruction. .