partaking of the Paschal lamb, whether that happened to be the first day of the week or otherwise.  The other party strenuously maintained that the eating of the Paschal lamb ought to be postponed until the night preceding the first Lord’s day next following the fourteenth day of the first month.  They considered that this next Lord’s day should be recognized as the festival of our Saviour’s resurrection, and that the whole of the preceding week until the close should be kept as a fast not to be interrupted by the eating of the Passover.

The most determined Quarto-decimans were to be found in Asia Minor, and at their head was Polycrates, the chief pastor of Ephesus.  At the head of the other party was Victor, bishop of Rome.  The Church over which he presided did not originally observe any such appointment, [627:1] but some of its members of Jewish extraction were probably, on that account, dissatisfied; and about the time of the establishment of the Catholic system, the matter seems to have been settled by a compromise.  It appears to have been then arranged that the festival should be kept; but to avoid the imputation of symbolizing with the Jews, it was agreed that the Friday of the Paschal week and the Lord’s day following, or the day on which our Saviour suffered and the day on which He rose from the dead, should be the great days of observance.  This arrangement was pretty generally accepted by those connected with what now began to be called the Catholic Church:  but some parties pertinaciously refused to conform.  Victor, as the head of the Catholic confederation, no doubt deemed it his duty to exact obedience from all its members; and, deeply mortified because the Asiatic Churches persisted in their own usages, shut them out from his communion.  But it was soon evident that the Church was not prepared for such an exercise of authority, for the Asiatics refused to yield; and as some of Victor’s best friends protested against the imprudence of his procedure, the ecclesiastical thunderbolt proved an impotent demonstration.

The Paschal controversy was far from creditable to any of the parties concerned.  The eating of a lamb on a particular day was a fragment of an antiquated ceremonial, and as the ordinance itself had been superseded, the time of its observance was not a legitimate question for debate.  Each party is said to have endeavoured to fortify its own position by quoting the names of Paul or Peter or Philip or John; but had any one of these apostles risen from the dead and appeared in the ecclesiastical arena, he would, no doubt, have rebuked all the disputants for their trivial and unholy wrangling.  We have here a notable proof of the absurdity of appealing to tradition.  Within a hundred years after the death of the last survivor of the Twelve its testimony was most discordant, for the tradition of the Western Churches, as propounded by Victor, expressly contradicted the tradition of the Eastern Churches, as attested by Polycrates.