History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Three highly decorated officers in the Roman Army fall victim to a campaign to discredit them.
From 331, the Praetorian Prefect of the East was Ablabius, making him the most important man in the eastern Roman Empire after the Emperor himself. Originally a pagan from Crete, he became a Christian and was a close confidant of Emperor Constantine. Later, under Constantius, he lost his place and his life for supporting the Orthodox party in the Arian crisis.
Trouble comes to the town of Myra when Imperial soldiers are despatched to put down a revolt.
In February 313 the new Roman Emperor, Constantine, and Licinius his junior in the Balkans, decreed religious liberty across the Empire. With astonishing speed, formerly persecuted Christian bishops gained public respect, and if this tale is anything to judge by, deservedly so.
Welsh journalist Henry Stanley is despatched by head office in New York to find a missing British explorer.
In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
The Northumbrian monk was touched by two thieving birds who repented of their misdeeds.
Cuthbert had a particular attachment to the many wonderful birds of the Farne Islands, which remained a key feature of devotion to the saint at his shrine in Durham. He was not, however, a bird-pleaser any more than he was a people-pleaser, and if his birds needed a little moral correction he would steel himself to provide it.
Bede is reminded of another great Christian saint when St Cuthbert shoos some troublesome crows from his barley crop.
A good example of the way Bede uses miracles comes from the story of Cuthbert’s barley. Some later chroniclers took a story about Anthony of Egypt and some wild asses and transposed it, donkeys and all, onto more recent saints. Bede, however, was content to draw parallels with a quite different miracle attributed to St Cuthbert.