Middlesbrough & Stockton Gazette and General Advertiser. — 1874-04-02 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

THE EASTER SOLID AY S. • coinmon consent Good Friday, once a emu festival of the Church, and still a day owed and reverenced as a sort of special 'bath by devout persons. has become a irral holiday, which means something very removed from the original holy-day. glish people have a laudable love for hulland contend as sturdily for maintaining ir privileges in this respect as a large laud !ler, would for keeping the Land Laws on jr present footing. The free, breezy, open unions and greens of many a town and lige, will on, Friday, echo with the jubilant inl of children's laughter and the rude' rriment of boisterous workmen, and also, flaps, the profanity in which a large portion the lower classes of the British public de.hts to indulge. All work will be stopped d properly so, because though the sanctity the day may not be so fully realised as it gl.ttu be, a holiday is physically a boon to classes, whether they live by the toil of eir hands or their brains. Everybody ows the origin of Good Friday, and what is intended to commemorate, and Aso the main; of Easter Sunday, or if they do not would be a good argument in favour of the pbolders of denominational education as 'posed to secular teaching, but all are probly not aware that monks and bishops have arrelled many a time, and oft about the pror time for bolding these commemorative stivals. It may perhaps be new even to roe of our Yorkshire readers that twelve tunes since a fierce and hot controversy  n this point was waged within the walls of he monastery of the Abbess Hilda at Whitby ,ttween the reverend old monks who clung to the traditions of the eld Wish Christian Cburch, and the champions the then new fangled ideas of the Chnrch Rome. 'I he British and Irish Churches ilopted as the baris of their reckoning the Cycle of 81 years, Which for all other purposes Lad then become obsolete, and observed the ;inning of the Festival from the 14th to the 2')th day of the first vernal moon, :wording as the Sunday happened to fall, while the ll.nlanists adopted the 19 years cycle of the moon, and the 2ti years cycle of the sun as the  fiAni4lation of their reckoning, and observed the begiening of the Festival from the 15th to  the 21st day of the first vernal moon inclusive, their reas4n fr this being that they would not begin the Paschal Festival at the same time as the Jews. A long disputation was kept up, according t 4 al chronicles, before Oswry, Iknig of _Northumbria, who was president of the reverend council, and who was, moreover, all unscrupulous man, having made his I,ey to the throne, or chair of state, over the murdered body of his predecessor. Church and State were, it appears, connected even in days, and the prelates and monks jabbered their Latin to this rude untutored half Stage, 54 no doubt dubbed him with the glon,ous title of "Defender of the Faith." The litlh monks gave St. John as their authority 'or the cause they pursued, and the Romanist fil.o%kis quoted tit. feter; and after both sides 44.1 .quuted several volumes of cases and opinions and black-letter statutes, and the 44%1 on both sides had made their closing l'Peeches to the Defender of the Faith, who all