The Sun.
London, England, 1844-07-15 00:00:00

NEXT EASTER.

The following curious article regarding " Easter-day,
1855," is by Professor de Morgan :
"In an article which I have prepared for the next
number of the' Companion to the Almanac,' I have dis-
cussed the reasons why Easter day will next year fall,
in apparent defiance of the Act of Parliament, upon
the very day day of the full moon. But as an acci•
dental application which I have received (and I know
that the superintendent of the Nautical Almanac has
received another from a different quarter) makes me
think that the computer of almanacs will he puzzled,
and that the useless discussion of 1818 (when the dis-
crepency last occurred) will be revived, unless some one
will forthwith state the reason of the difficulty. I re-
quest that you will publish some of the conclusions
of the paper to which I refer, which will in due
time appear in the work cited. And I hope that
the daily papers will give additional currency to
the same conclusions ; and I should recommend that
the same thing should be done in the almanics. The
rule adopted in this country for finding Easter is that
of the Roman Catholic Church, as established at what
is called the Reformation of the Calendar by Pope
Gregory the Thirteenth, in the year 1582- The au-
thority for this rule is contained in the papal brief of
March Ist, 1582, in which reference is make, for all ex-
planations, to the then forthcoming work of the Jesuit
Clavius, to whom both the adjustment and explanation
of the Calendar had been intrusted. The British Par,
liament, in adopting the rule of Clavius, made two mis-
ta'ses in the explanation of that rule. Their explana-
tion is, that Easter Sunday is the Sunday after the full
moon which comes on or next after the 21st of March,
and that if the full moon fall on a Sunday, Easter Sun-
day is the next Sunday.
The two mistakes are as follow :

"1. Instead of full moon,' they should have said,
'fourteenth day of the moon, the day of new moon
being reckoned as the first.' That Easter, as well as
the Passover, was always regulated, not by the full
moon, but by the fourteenth day of the moon, is of the
utmost historical notoriety. And Clavius says that
none but a few who fancy themselves sharpsighted ever
imagined that the fourteenth of the moon and the full
moon were the same in the Church of God.'

"2. Instead of the moon' of the heavens, they onght
to have said the moon of the calendar,' which is a very
different thing. The moon of the calendar is not even a
mean, or uniformly moving moon to which astronomers
refer the real moon ; but differs from it intentionally and
avowedly, by two classes of arbitrary alterations, the
first class intended for simplicity of calculation, the
second for avoiding the possibility of the Christian Easter
falling on the actual day of the Jewish Passover.
" In the year 1845, the fourteenth day of the calendar
moon falls on Saturday, the 22d of March, whence Easter
is rightly made to be Sunday the 23d, according to the
law both of the Roman and English Churches, though
the English statute does not well explain its own method.
With regard to this country, it should be noticed that
this statute enacts that Easter shall be kept by the' ca-
lendar,
tables, and rules' annexed to the Act; and these
e should ib ert y, as many did in 1818,
be altered ; and agree with Clavius.
to th
cer-
tainly it would be worth while to avoid misconception
and
Oinfkcotuhraset athney onesta statute
is t a t
by repealing the faulty definition, a v.
substituting a
better one, in the Prayer-books of the Established
Church. But if any one should wish to advocate the
repeal of the rules, and the construction of new ones
agreeable to the existing definition, and astronomi-
cally true, he will perhaps pause when he finds that
his own system would sometimes cause it •to happen that
St. Paul's Cathedral must keep Easter a week after
Westminster Abbey, and would very frequently make a
week's difference between the festivals of the colonies
and the mother country.—l remain, Sir, yours faithfully,
" A. DE MORGAN.
" University College, London, July 11, 1844." .