distinction between the movable and immovable feasts. So early as the 2nd century of our era, great disputes had arisen among the Christians respecting the proper time of celebrating Easter, which governs all the other movable feasts. The Jews celebrated their passover on the 14th day of the first month, that is to say, the lunar month of which the fourteenth day either falls on, or next follows, the day of the vernal equinox. Most Christian sects agreed that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday. Others followed the example of the Jews, and adhered to the 14th of the moon; but these, as usually happened to the minority, were accounted heretics, and received the appellation of Quartodecimans. In order to terminate dissensions, which produced both scandal and schism in the church, the council of Nicaea, which was held in the year 325, ordained that the celebration of Easter should thenceforth always take place on the Sunday which immediately follows the full moon that happens upon, or next after, the day of the vernal equinox. Should the 14th of the moon, which is regarded as the day of full moon, happen on a Sunday, the celebration Of Easter was deferred to the Sunday following, in order to avoid concurrence with the Jews and the above-mentioned heretics. The observance of this rule renders it necessary to reconcile three periods which have no common measure, namely, the week, the lunar month, and the solar year; and as this can only be done approximately, and within certain limits, the determination of Easter is an affair of considerable nicety and complication. It is to be regretted that the reverend fathers who formed the council of Nicaea did not abandon the moon altogether, and appoint the first or second Sunday of April for the celebration of the Easter festival. The ecclesiastical calendar would in that case have possessed all the simplicity and uniformity of the civil calendar, which only requires the adjustment of the civil to the solar year; but they were probably not sufficiently versed in astronomy to be aware of the practical difficulties which their regulation had to encounter.
Dominical Letter.—The first problem which the construction of the calendar presents is to connect the week with the year, or to find the day of the week corresponding to a given day of any year of the era. As the number of days in the week and the number in the year are prime to one another, two successive years cannot begin with the same day; for if a common year begins, for example, with Sunday, the following year will begin with Monday, and if a leap year begins with Sunday, the year following will begin with Tuesday. For the sake of greater generality, the days of the week are denoted by the first seven letters of the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, which are placed in the calendar beside the days of the year, so that A stands opposite the first day of January, B opposite the second, and so on to G, which stands opposite the seventh; after which A returns to the eighth, and so on through the 365 days of the year. Now if one of the days of the week, Sunday for example, is represented by E, Monday will be represented by F, Tuesday by G, Wednesday by A, and so on; and every Sunday through the year will have the same character E, every Monday F, and so with regard to the rest. The letter which denotes Sunday is called the Dominical Letter, or the Sunday Letter; and when the dominical letter of the year is known, the letters which respectively correspond to the other days of the week become known at the same time.
Solar Cycle.—In the Julian calendar the dominical letters are readily found by means of a short cycle, in which they recut in the same order without interruption. The number of years in the intercalary period being four, and the days of the week being seven, their product is 4 × 7 = 28; twenty-eight years is therefore a period which includes all the possible combinations of the days of the week with the commencement of the year. This period is called the Solar Cycle, or the Cycle of the Sun, and restores the first day of the year to the same day of the week. At the end of the cycle the dominical letters return again in the same order on the same days of the month; hence a table of dominical letters, constructed for twenty-eight years, will serve to show the dominical letter of any given year from the commencement of the era to the Reformation. The cycle, though probably not invented before the time of the council of Nicaea, is regarded as having commenced nine years before the era, so that the year one was the tenth of the solar cycle. To find the year of the cycle, we have therefore the following rule:—Add nine to the date, divide the sum by twenty-eight; the quotient is the number of cycles elapsed, and the remainder is the year of the cycle. Should there be no remainder, the proposed year is the twenty-eighth or last of the cycle. This rule is conveniently expressed by the formula (x + 928)r, in which x denotes the date, and the symbol r denotes that the remainder, which arises from the division of x + 9 by 28, is the number required. Thus, for 1840, we have 1840 + 928 = 66128; therefore (1840 + 928)r = 1, and the year 1840 is the first of the solar cycle. In order to make use of the solar cycle in finding the dominical letter, it is necessary to know that the first year of the Christian era began with Saturday. The dominical letter of that year, which was the tenth of the cycle, was consequently B. The following year, or the 11th of the cycle, the letter was A; then G. The fourth year was bissextile, and the dominical letters were F, E; the following year D, and so on. In this manner it is easy to find the dominical letter belonging to each of the twenty-eight years of the cycle. But at the end of a century the order is interrupted in the Gregorian calendar by the secular suppression of the leap year; hence the cycle can only be employed during a century. In the reformed calendar the intercalary period is four hundred years, which number being multiplied by seven, gives two thousand eight hundred years as the interval in which the coincidence is restored between the days of the year and the days of the week. This long period, however, may be reduced to four hundred years; for since the dominical letter goes back five places every four years, its variation in four hundred years, in the Julian calendar, was five hundred places, which is equivalent to only three places (for five hundred divided by seven leaves three); but the Gregorian calendar suppresses exactly three intercalations in four hundred years, so that after four hundred years the dominical letters must again return in the same order. Hence the following table of dominical letters for four hundred years will serve to show the dominical letter of any year in the Gregorian calendar for ever. It contains four columns of letters, each column serving for a century. In order to find the column from which the letter in any given case is to be taken, strike off the last two figures of the date, divide the preceding figures by four, and the remainder will indicate the column. The symbol X, employed in the formula at the top of the column, denotes the number of centuries, that is, the figures remaining after the last two have been struck off. For example, required the dominical letter of the year 1839? In this case X = 18, therefore (X4)r = 2; and in the second column of letters, opposite 39, in the table we find F, which is the letter of the proposed year.
It deserves to be remarked, that as the dominical letter of the first year of the era was B, the first column of the following table will give the dominical letter of every year from the commencement of the era to the Reformation. For this purpose divide the date by 28, and the letter opposite the remainder, in the first column of figures, is the dominical letter of the year. For example, supposing the date to be 1148. On dividing by 28, the remainder is 0, or 28; and opposite 28, in the first column of letters, we find D, C, the dominical letters of the year 1148.
Lunar Cycle and Golden Number.—In connecting the lunar month with the solar year, the framers of the ecclesiastical calendar adopted the period of Meton, or lunar cycle, which they supposed to be exact. A different arrangement has, however, been followed with respect to the distribution of the months. The lunations are supposed to consist of twenty-nine and thirty days alternately, or the lunar year of 354 days; and in order to make up nineteen solar years, six embolismic or intercalary months, of thirty days each, are introduced in the course of the cycle, and one of twenty-nine days is added at the
