The most important day of worship in the week was Sunday, which from apostolic times had been consecrated to the memory of our Lord's resurrection. The chief festival of the year was Easter, later rivaled by Christmas Day, the celebration of which was introduced into the Eastern Church from the West during the fourth century. The great feast of Easter was preceded by the forty days of Lent, kept in memory of our Lord's forty-day fast in the wilderness, and during this period every Christian fasted according to his powers, some to a greater and some to a lesser degree. The Ascension and the day of Pentecost were celebrated respectively forty and fifty days after Easter. But during the first three centuries of Christianity, the Church was not agreed as to the exact day on which Easter should be celebrated. As our Lord had been crucified on the fourteenth of the Jewish month Nisan, on a Friday, and had risen again on the sixteenth, on a Sunday, some of the Christian Churches insisted on celebrating the Resurrection on the sixteenth day of Nisan, regardless of whether or not it was a Sunday; whereas others waited for the first Sunday following the sixteenth day of Nisan, unless that date itself happened to fall upon a Sunday. In order to settle this difference, the apostolic Father Poly carp undertook the long journey to Rome in 155; but the Pope, Anicetus, refused to yield, although he received Polycarp as a brother and allowed him to celebrate the Holy Liturgy with him. The question of Easter, with other questions relative to the order of the Church, was settled by the first Ecumenical Synod at Nicaea, which ruled that all the Churches should celebrate Easter on the same day; namely, the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Part II.

Mediaeval Times.

(A.D. 700-1453).

The Spread of Christianity Among the Slavs.

Serbs, Croats, Dalmatians, and the Slavs in Greece.

   Though hampered by various internal and external obstacles, with which the following pages will deal, Christianity continued throughout the Middle Ages to conquer new territories. Most important of these for the Eastern Church were the Slavonic peoples. The first to receive the Gospel, as early as the seventh century, were the Serbs, Croats and Dalmatians, established in the Balkan Peninsula, of whom the Serbs, by the grace of God, have remained Orthodox, while the Croats and Dalmatians, uniting with the Hungarian kingdom, have passed into the jurisdiction of Rome, and embraced the tenets of the Western Church. Later, in the ninth century, Christianity spread to all the Slavonic tribes, who, driven back from the north by the Avars, had poured into Macedonia, Thessaly, the mainland of Greece and the Peloponnesus from the sixth century onwards, imperiling not only the national, but also the Christian character of the countries that they overran; for they were polytheists, and polytheism had long since died out in Greece, except in the region of Taygetos, where until the ninth century the Maniates still continued to worship idols in their mountain homes. But the Byzantine Emperors Michael III (842-867) and Basil the Macedonian (867-886) sent their generals to subdue the Slav invaders, who were, moreover, ravaged and weakened by continual epidemics, and gradually assimilated them both in nationality and religion to their Greek environment. Under the pressure of the Byzantine steam-roller, even the Maniates of Taygetos, the descendants of ancient Spartans, at last surrendered to Christianity; and idolatry ceased henceforth to exist in Hellenic soil.

The Moravians.

   Among other Slavonic tribes were the Moravians, who settled on German soil and came under German domination. But in 855 their king, Rostislav, freed them from the German yoke, and then appealed to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III, to send him Christian preachers; whereupon Michael, with the co-operation of the Great Patriarch Photius, sent out into Moravia the two famous missionaries and heralds of civilization to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, Greeks from Salonica who had practiced the monastic life in the Monastery of Polychronius at Constantinople. Not only did these two men preach God's Word among the Moravians; they also translated the Bible and the Byzantine Liturgy into the Slav tongue for the benefit of the newly-founded Moravian Church, which they placed under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose envoys they were. Unfortunately, in 867, Rostislav changed his mind, for political reasons, and turned to the Church of Rome, which in those days began to aspire to be the supreme ecclesiastical center of Christendom. The two fellow-missionaries were then summoned before the Pope, and Cyril stayed in Rome until his death, while Methodius was sent to continue his work as Archbishop of Moravia. As long as Methodius lived, he fought for the preservation of the Slavonic Bible and the Byzantine Liturgy in church use. After his death, however, the Roman See abolished them and replaced them by Latin, scornfully rejecting the Slavonic language as “barbarous and profane.”

The Bulgarians.

   During the ninth century, too, the Bulgarians received Christianity from the same Byzantine source. The Bulgarians, a Tartar tribe, who had once lived on the shores of the Caspian Sea, migrated thence in the fifth century and, traveling up the Danube, established themselves permanently in the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula. They were at first a heathen people of savage customs, and even practiced human sacrifice; but from 800 onwards they began to progress along the ways of enlightenment, and under the influence of the native Slavs, adopted the Slavonic language and race consciousness. Their proximity to the Byzantine Empire was not at all pleasant to the Byzantines, whom they constantly harried; it had, however, an undoubtedly beneficial influence on the Bulgarians themselves by accustoming them to the atmosphere of Christianity. The first herald of Christianity to the Bulgarians was the sister of their king Boris, who had been initiated into Christian beliefs while she was a prisoner in Constantinople. After 861, however, Boris himself was the hardest and most systematic worker for the Christianisation of his people, having been persuaded on the one hand by a fearful plague from which he had been saved through prayer to Jesus Christ, and on the other by the terrible impression made on his mind by a picture of the Last Judgment, which had been shown to him by the missionary Methodius.