The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
John’s enduring influence is evident today in the rich sights and sounds of Christian liturgy.
St John Damascene (676-749) was Syrian monk and a contemporary of our own St Bede, both of them highly respected scholars with a deep love for Church music. John left us an exposition of Christian theology of enduring importance throughout east and west; he compiled a wealth of hymns, collects and prayers; and he saved Christian iconography everywhere from the hands of extremists.
John Wesley urged the medical profession (and his fellow clergy) to remember that drugs are not the answer to every sickness.
On Saturday May 12th, 1759, John Wesley was in Whitehaven, on the coast of Cumbria. That evening, he left himself a reminder in his daily Journal never to try to get there via the coast road: the inland trip by Kendal and Keswick was longer but quicker. He then fell to musing on a lady he had spoken to recently, who suffered from a persistent stomach ailment.
When farmhand and lay preacher George Loveless was convicted of conspiracy, both charge and sentence made the country gasp.
In October 1833, after his wages had been slashed almost by half, George Loveless of Tolpuddle in Dorset, a farm labourer and father of five, formed a Friendly Society to support struggling families and to remind employers of their moral obligations. The following March, George and five others found themselves up before the Bench in Dorchester under the obscure Unlawful Oaths Act (1797).
In 1844, Daniel O’Connell was hauled before a Dublin court to answer charges of seditious conspiracy, and he didn’t stand a chance.
In February 1844, Robert Peel’s Tory Party succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell MP, the outspoken but peaceful Irish rights activist, convicted by a Dublin jury on eleven charges of ‘seditious conspiracy’. That May, O’Connell was sentenced to a year in gaol; but four months later the sentence was quashed by the House of Lords, in a landmark decision for jury trials throughout the United Kingdom.
William Cowper told Lady Hesketh about a walk beside the river at Olney, and the affecting behaviour of his spaniel Beau.
In June 1788, William Cowper wrote to his friend Lady Hesketh about a remarkable act of devotion from his spaniel Beau. It all happened when Cowper, who now lived a rather retired life owing to his shattered nerves, was taking a break from his books with a walk by the River Great Ouse near Olney in Buckinghamshire. The following month he cast the tale into verse.
Sir Philip Francis told the House of Commons that it must not let ministers manufacture crises as an excuse for grabbing more power.
In 1794, Great Britain was braced for an invasion by neighbouring France, and King George III, as hereditary Elector of Hanover, decided that the situation warranted stationing Hanoverian troops in Britain. Sir Philip Francis, among others, demanded to know why the Commons had not been consulted, and was told that in desperate times His Majesty’s Government can take desperate measures.