The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Five young women cared enough about a man’s wedding-day to make the smallest of sacrifices, and received the best of rewards.
The Parable of the Ten Virgins was told as a caution to those who think that conscientious preparation for the Hereafter is unnecessary. Five young women hired as lamp-bearers for a Jewish wedding assumed they could beg, borrow or buy oil when the time came.
One of the Emperor Galerius’s most trusted generals openly defied him.
At the end of the 3rd century, Christians of the pagan Roman Empire were comparatively free: they built churches, founded schools, and established networks of charity and goodwill that the authorities both envied and feared. One Emperor sent in the army to nip the flower in the bud, but George, one of his most senior military commanders, would have no part in it.
Alexander the Great dropped a hint to his sycophantic entourage.
In 336 BC, the young Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedon, was just beginning his astonishing rise to be King of all Greece and Asia. Like all great men, he was surrounded by tittering hangers-on; one wonders if they quite got the hint he gave them here.