away all the old presbytery of Jerusalem.  It obviously indicates that none of its members had joined the party whose principles had obtained the ascendency.  And yet, though the adherents of Marcus might have been charged with innovation, they acted under the sanction of apostolical authority.  They very properly refused to continue any longer in bondage to the beggarly elements of a ritual which had long since been superseded.  Though the seceders might have urged that they were of apostolical descent, and that they were supported by ancient custom, it must be admitted, after all, that they were but a company of deluded and narrow-minded bigots.  The evangelical pastors of the primitive Church repudiated their zeal for ritualism, and gave the right hand of fellowship to Marcus and his newly-organized community.  The history of the mother Church of Christendom in the early part of the second century is thus fraught with lessons of the gravest wisdom.  We may see from it that the true successors of the apostles were not those who occupied their seats, or who were able to trace from them a ministerial lineage, but those who inherited their spirit, who taught their doctrines, and who imitated their example.

Though, in this instance, the disciples at Jerusalem nobly emancipated themselves from the yoke of circumcision, it appears, from a controversy which created much confusion about sixty years afterwards, that the whole Church was disposed, to some extent, to conform to another Judaic ordinance.  The embers of this dispute had been for some time smouldering, before they attracted much notice; but, about the termination of the second century, they broke out into a flame which spread from Rome to Jerusalem.  The name of Easter [625:1] was yet unknown, and the Paschal feast appears, at least in some places, to have been then only recently established; but at an early period there was a sprinkling of Jewish Christians in almost every Church throughout the Empire, and they had at length induced their fellow-disciples to mark the seasons of the Passover and Pentecost [626:1] by certain special observances.  The Passover was regarded as the more solemn feast, and, strange as it may now appear, was kept at the time by the Christians in much the same way in which it had been celebrated by the Jews before the fall of Jerusalem.  A lamb was shut up on a certain day; it was afterwards roasted; and then eaten by the brotherhood. [626:2] The time when this ceremony was to be observed, and some other circumstantials, now formed topics of earnest and protracted discussion.  One party, known as the Quarto-decimans, or Fourteenth Day Men, held that the Paschal feast was to be kept exactly at the time when the Jews had been accustomed to eat the Passover, that is, on the fourteenth day of the first month of the Jewish year; [626:3] and they celebrated the festival of the resurrection on the seventeenth day of the month, that is, on the third day after