Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
A fiery fanatic wins support for the suppression of Christianity in its very cradle.
The Apostle St Paul had been given the name Saul by his parents, after the first King of Israel, but he changed it to Paul in honour of his Roman patron Sergius Paulus, a Proconsul of Cyprus, whom Saul brought to Christianity. Saul’s own conversion, in about AD 33 to 36, had been altogether more dramatic.
A mild-mannered clerk in the British Embassy’s passport office in Berlin, just before the outbreak of war in 1939, was not all he seemed to be.
By 1938, Germany had stopped forcing Jews to leave the country and was interning them in camps, yet thousands still escaped into British-run Palestine. An angry Arab backlash prompted the Foreign Office in London to dam the flood, but one man had both the will and the means to introduce more than a few leaks.
A mouse’s delight at seeing his old enemy caught in a trap proves short-lived.
Yaugandharayana, minister of Udayana, King of Vatsa (roughly Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh), has made a casual assertion that even animals go to each other for protection. Yogeshvara challenges him to provide an example, so the wise minister tells him about a mouse that once lived at the bottom of a banyan tree.
With Christianity faltering in the British Isles, Pope Gregory took the first definite steps towards restoring its vigour.
Romans brought the gospel to Britannia in the late first century, but the influx of pagan Angles and Saxons after the Romans abandoned the province in 410 all but snuffed the Church out. One man was determined to rekindle it, and the Kingdom of Kent was to be the touch-paper.
In 1274, the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople signed a historic reunion, but there were some formidable dissenters.
In 1261, the Roman Emperor Michael Palaeologos won his battered empire back from the Crusaders, but Charles, Count of Anjou, was eager to reconquer the East and bring its ‘schismatic’ Christians under the Pope. Michael instructed the Greek Church to give in and save his crown, but twenty-six monks of Mount Athos were more concerned with their consciences.
In an enduring fable from the Kathasaritsagara, an Indian merchant explains how he acquired his nickname.
Gunadhya, sixth-century narrator of this tale from the Kathasaritsagara, was in Pratisthana (Paithan) watching little knots of men in the city conducting their business. They included bookies promising treasure to gamblers, but among the merchants was a man who had a better way to become rich.