FIXED DATE FOR EASTER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 May 1940, Page 2

FIXED DATE FOR EASTER

REFORM STILL UNFULFILLED.

Easter Day, 1940, was the earliest for 27 years, and during the remainder of the century there will be no earlier date, writes a London journalist. For years there has been anxiety to secure a fixed Easier. An Act passed in Britain so long ago as 1928 fixed Easter Day, “conditionally upon international acceptance,” as the first Sunday after the Second Saturday in April. The date of the Act's enforcement was io be decreed by an Order-in-Council, which would be approved in draft by Parliament, and would have regard to the officially expressed opinion cf any Church or other Christian body. There, however, the matter has rested. Authorities in Whitehall state that the fixed Faster, which would have to be the subject of international agreement, was likely to remain "on the shelf” for a long while. To stabilise Easter would do away with a number of inconveniences. At the beginning of the century national and international chambers of commerce began to pass

annual resolutions in favour of a fixed date for Easter. In 1923. the Roman. Eastern Orthodox. and Anglican Churches were represented at a League of Nations conference on. the subject, and opinion then seemed unanimous that there should be a fixed date. The reform still falls short of fulfilment 17 years later.