Mid-Lent Sunday (fourth in Lent) and Palm Sun. day (next before Easter) are not recognised under those names in the English Prayer Book.

§ 88. The Saints' and Holyday Year.-Twelve apostles (including the two later ones, Matthias and Paul, but not John) have ten days allotted to them, four of the twelve being associated in pairs, viz. Philip and James, Simon and Jude. The two evangelists Mark and Luke have a day each. St. Mary has two, viz. for her Purification and Annunciation. There is a day for John the Baptist, for one companion of the apostles, Barnabas (designated "Apostle," as in Acts xvi. 14), for the saints collectively, and for the angelic body, completing a series of eighteen days. Timothy, Titus, and other companions of the apostles are not commemorated. Thus is formed a distinct course of festivals, with Collect, Epistle, and Gospel assigned to each; and in this set the service for a saint's day, as a rule, is to be looked for. But three days which more strictly belong to it, namely those of St. John the Apostle, St. Stephen, and the Holy Innocents, are placed, with their Collects, Epistles, and Gospels, among the Dominical days; the reason perhaps being that following so closely together after Christmas, and so prolonging the solemnity of that festival, it was desired to secure for them a special observance. Five holydays, viz. the Nativity, the Circumcision, Epiphany, Good Friday, Ascension Day, being commemorative of our Lord, are naturally placed among the Dominical days; and in the same series are placed the following, as intimately related to

Sundays: Ash Wednesday, from which the Sundays. in Lent are reckoned; the days in Holy Week before Easter; the two days after Easter; and the two after Whit Sunday.

One principle governing the selection of these days is that no person unrecorded in Scripture is commemorated, nor yet any unbiblical circumstance relating to one who is (cf. §§ 39, 42). Old Testament saints, many of whom appear in the Oriental Church Services, do not occur in those of the West; one reason perhaps being that no special days relating to them were handed down from Old Testament times, and another that the localities of those saints were less vividly associated with the Western mind than with the Eastern.

§ 89. History of the Church's Year.-We have very little direct information as to when the various Fasts and Festivals of the Church's Year began to be observed; but there is sufficient evidence to show that the process of their recognition was slow and gradual. For the most part we can but say when they are first mentioned by early writers. Early calendars and martyrologies give some help. The sacramentaries, since they mention holydays, might seem to do the same, but the dates of their constituent parts are too uncertain to make them of much use for this purpose. For some days the earliest evidence is afforded by extant anniversary sermons of ascertained period. Some days had at first only a local observance, and some festivals were kept on other days than those prevailing now. In the following succinct view we

shall present the festivals and fasts in the order and period of their first emergence in history.

1. Easter Day. This is the first festival recorded in ecclesiastical history. The earliest mention of it occurs about A.D. 160, through a dissension between St. Polycarp bishop of Smyrna and Anicetus bishop of Rome, as to the proper day for its observance (Euseb. v. 23). Easter Day is now defined as the Sunday after that full moon which occurs on or next after the vernal equinox, Mar. 21st. It can fall as early as March 22nd, and as late as April 25th. Easter Day regulates all the moveable feasts.

2. Good Friday is first mentioned (but under the name of Parasceve, i.e., Tаpaσkevý, or Preparation Day) by the African Father Tertullian, in his treatise On Fasting (chap. xiv.), some time between 201 and his death, c. 240.

The English "Good Friday" corresponds more nearly than might be thought with Tapaσкevý, which was the fixed Christian name for the sixth day of the week (D.C.A. 958).

3. Pentecost first occurs in the same passage of Tertullian, who, however, does not limit the word to a single day, as we do, but includes in it the whole period of fifty days after Easter. Thus the African Pentecost at that period was a long festival, analogous to the present forty days of Lent.

The same three days, παρασκευή, πάσχα, πεντηκοστή, are mentioned (and no others except the Lord's Day) by Origen, the great Greek Father of Alexandria, in his work Against Celsus (lib. viii. c. 22), written A.D. 249, They are, therefore, to be reckoned as the

only ones, besides Sundays, that marked the Church's Year down to the middle of the third century.

4. Epiphany. A somewhat obscure passage in St. Clement of Alexandria (ob. 203), is interpreted as stating that the Basilidian heretics in Egypt in his time were accustomed to observe a day (either January 6th or January 10th) in commemoration of Christ's baptism and nativity (St. Clem. Erpwμateîs or Miscellanies, lib. i. cap. 20). Although the actual word "Epiphany" does not occur, we see in this passage the germ of the festival. The word itself first appears in the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, c. 390, who states (lib. xxi. c. 2) that the Emperor Julian (A.D. 361–363), being at Vienne, in Gaul, went in January to a church where the Christians were keeping Epiphany. In the East this festival bore the name of Tà “Ayia Þŵтa, Sancta Lumina, Holy Lights, and Tà copáveia, Theophany, or Manifestation of God (Wh. 209).

5. St. Mark, April 25th. In 337 Marcus bishop of Rome dedicated a church to St. Mark at Rome, and this is the earliest indication of there having been a feast in memory of him. St. Mark was claimed by the Alexandrians as the founder of their Church, and this sufficed to keep his name more prominent.

6. Ascension Day. The Apostolical Constitutions, c. A.D. 350, mention this festival, which is called that of the ȧváλnis, or Assumption of our Lord (v. 19, viii. 33).

7. St. Thomas, December 21st. A splendid church. dedicated to him existed in the reign of the Emperor Valens (ob. 378), who visited it (Sozomen, vi. 18),

and such a dedication implies a festival. The earliest extant sermon for St. Thomas's Day is one delivered at Edessa in 402, and wrongly attributed to St. Chrysostom.

As we have now reached the period of extant sermons for saints' days, we here subjoin the names of the preachers to whom we are thus indebted; and since the dates of the sermons are in most cases undetermined, those of the ministerial lives of the preachers are given.

Gregory of Nazianzus, in Cappadocia, 361-390.

Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, in Cappadocia, 372-395. Chrysostom, deacon and presbyter of Antioch in Syria, 381-397, bishop of Constantinople, 398-404; ob. 407.

Augustine, presbyter and bishop of Hippo, 391 -430.

8. Christmas Day, December 25th. We have already seen that as early as about A.D. 200 the Basilidian Gnostics in Egypt commemorated our Lord's baptism and birth together, on or near about January 6th. We have also seen that in 361 there was a festival named the Epiphany, kept by the Church in January, commemorating, presumably, His birth and baptism under the general name of His Manifestation (ἐπιφανεία).

In, or very near to, A.D. 377 a commemoration of the Nativity on December 25th, as a distinct festival, was set on foot at Antioch, and this we learn from a sermon preached in that city by Chrysostom, while a presbyter there, in 386. He states that the festival had then been observed at Antioch nearly ten years (i.e., say