R. A. Courtney, _The Hill and the Circle_, p. 15.
Between the years 1854 and 1930, inclusive, Little Easter occurs once—on the 2nd of May, 1886.
Quoted in the _Parochial History of Cornwall_, iii., 175.
The Celtic controversy respecting the incidence of the Christian Passover was concerned solely with astronomical calculations and has, of course, no bearing upon the matter here under discussion.
Buttel-Reepen, _Man and His Forerunners_, pp. 72-3.
The Armenians still keep the Nativity on the 6th of January.
The subject is fully dealt with by Neander; _Church History_ (Bohn’s ed.), vol. ii., pp. 419-48.
He would be led so to argue by reflecting that in the Church’s Kalendar Ascension and Pentecost are similarly related to the Paschal Feast and Annunciation to Christmas.
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It is almost, if not quite, impossible to acquire a right perspective of the position which the Celts occupy in British history without examining the incidence of that position and some of its relationships by the light of the results of modern archæological research.
In Cornwall, as elsewhere, the prehistoric races which inhabited the county before the Celts appeared have left abundant evidence of their presence. That evidence, however, will be hard to discover in the warp and bent of character and in the physical development which doubtless all Englishmen have in some measure inherited from them, and towards which these extremely remote ancestors have to some slight extent contributed. We shall probably never know enough about any of them so as to be in a position to say of any one living in the county as we might say, for example, of an Irishman “that splendid act of daring or that hairbrained escapade must be set down to his Irish breeding.” Yet, inasmuch as no one supposes that an incoming race commonly extirpates the race it supplants there is always the suspicion that the new race may have yielded to the moral influence or to the religious atmosphere of the old. History supplies us with instances of this triumph of spiritual over physical force, Christianity itself being the most striking instance of all.
For this reason it is necessary to go back to those ages which have been distinguished as palæolithic, neolithic, and bronze, in other words to those periods during which unpolished stone, polished stone, and bronze implements were in use,[11] in order to discover, if possible, whether as the tide of industrial progress flowed in, there are indubitable signs of an unbroken tradition of religious thought and practice which became articulate in the historic narrative of Julius Cæsar.