John Milton 1608- 1674

John Milton was arguably one of the greatest writers in the English language. He also was a noted historian, scholar, pamphleteer, and civil servant.

Milton ranks along with William Shakespeare among English poets; his writings and his influence are an important part of the history of English literature, culture, and thought. He is best known for Paradise Lost, which is generally regarded, as he intended, the greatest epic poem in the English language. Milton’s prose works, however, deserve their place in modern histories of political and religious thought.

According to one biographer, Milton “was loved by many, hated by some, but ignored by few.” How did John Milton come to have such influence? What made his last work—On Christian Doctrine—so controversial that it remained unpublished for 150 years? (John Milton: A Biography)

John Milton was born into a financially secure London family in 1608. “My father destined me in early childhood for the study of literature, for which I had so keen an appetite that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight,” Milton recalled. He excelled scholastically and received a master’s degree at Cambridge in 1632. Thereafter, he continued to read history and classical literature. By his own account, his early enthusiasm for the sensual poetry of Ovid and other Roman writers gave way to an appreciation of the idealism of Dante, Petrarch, and Edmund Spenser. He then moved on to Platonic philosophy and finally came to hold the biblical Book of Revelation in the highest esteem. Milton’s scholarly and literary gifts had from childhood marked him out in the minds of his family and teachers for the ministry, however  Milton wanted to be a poet. England in his day was in the throes of revolution. Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, appointed a court that had King Charles I executed in 1649. Using persuasive prose, Milton defended this action and became a spokesman for the Cromwell government. In fact, before attaining fame as a poet, John Milton was already well-known for his tracts on politics and morals..

Continue reading John Milton 1608- 1674

Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

Rating: ★★★★★

Guest Review written by Paul F. Hoye and Paul Lunde,  originally published by Saudi Aramco World Magazine in 1980

Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age”  ISBN:0932813429

Charles Hapgood, after exhaustive research and imaginative mathematical and cartographic experiments, came to some remarkable conclusions and eventually published them in a book called ‘Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings’. Briefly these are the conclusions:

  • That the Piri Reis map, dated to 1513, the Portolano charts and many other ancient maps include information supposedly unknown in the 16th century and, in some cases, information that was not confirmed until the middle of this century.
  • That the Piri Reis map and other maps were inexplicably accurate, particularly with regard to longitudes, which neither mariners nor cartographers could calculate until spherical trigonometry was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries.
  • That some civilization or culture still unknown to archeology — and pre-dating any civilization known so far — had mapped North America, China, Greenland, South America and Antarctica long before the rise of any known civilization — and at a time when Greenland and Antarctica were not covered with their millennia-old ice caps.
  • That to have done this, the ancient civilization had to have developed astronomy, navigational instruments — such as the chronometer — and mathematics, particularly plane geometry and trigonometry, long before Greece or any other known civilization.
  • That the advanced cartographic knowledge appearing on the Piri Reis map, the Oronteus Finaeus map and other maps came down in garbled and incomplete fragments that somehow survived the destruction of the unknown civilization itself and the repeated destruction of such ancient repositories of knowledge as the library at Alexandria..

Continue reading Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings

Galileo Galilei 1564– 1642

Born in Pisa in 1564, Galileo studied medicine at the university there. Showing little interest in that discipline, he abandoned it for the study of physics and mathematics. In 1585 he settled in Florence without obtaining any academic qualification. Yet, he gained the esteem of the greatest mathematicians of his day, credited with the discovery of certain principles of inertia, and winning the post of mathematics lecturer at the University of Pisa. After his father’s death, economic difficulties forced Galileo to move to Padua, where he was appointed to a more lucrative position, the chair of mathematics in that city’s university.

During his 18 years in Padua, three children were born to Galileo by his mistress, a young Venetian woman. In 1610 he returned to Florence, where he obtained a better economic situation enabling him to dedicate more time to research—but at the expense of the freedom he had enjoyed in the territory of the powerful Venetian Republic.  (The Library of Original Sources, Vol. VI, 1915)

A step leading to the confrontation between Galileo and the church occurred back in the 13th century, and involved Catholic authority Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Aquinas had a profound respect for Aristotle, whom he referred to as The Philosopher. Aquinas struggled for five years to fuse Aristotle’s philosophy with church teaching. By the time of Galileo, says Wade Rowland in his book Galileo’s Mistake: A New Look at the Epic Confrontation Between Galileo and the Church, “the hybridized Aristotle in the theology of Aquinas had become bedrock dogma of the Church of Rome.” In those days there was no scientific community as such. Education was largely in the hands of the church. The authority on religion and science was often one and the same.

The next step became the confrontation between the church and Galileo. Even before his involvement with astronomy, Galileo had written a treatise on motion. It challenged many assumptions made by the revered Aristotle. However, it was Galileo’s steadfast promotion of the heliocentric concept and his assertion that it harmonizes with Scripture that led to his trial by the Inquisition in 1633.

In his defence, Galileo affirmed his strong faith in the Bible as the inspired Word of God. He also argued that the Scriptures were written for ordinary people and that Biblical references to the apparent movement of the sun were not to be interpreted literally. His arguments were futile. Because Galileo rejected an interpretation of Scripture based on Greek philosophy, he stood condemned! Not until 1992 did the Catholic Church officially admit to error in its judgment of Galileo.

Continue reading Galileo Galilei 1564– 1642

Thomas Babington Macaulay 1800-1859

The History of England

What a marvellous name! The family of Macaulay belonged originally to the Scottish highlands. His mother was a brilliant woman of Quaker descent; his father was a business man who was very successful in trade, and appointed at one time governor of the Sierra Leone Colony in Africa, and he spent the whole of his fortune in helping to free the slaves. In consequence, when Macaulay left college he faced the immediate problem of supporting himself and his family.
We should take note of Macaulay’s personal qualities. He read everything from Plato to the cheapest novel, and after reading a book, could recall practically the whole of it after a lapse of twenty years. To this photographic memory we are indebted for the wealth of quotation, allusion and anecdote which brightens every page of his writings. Probably a few of his errors too!

Continue reading Thomas Babington Macaulay 1800-1859

And They Blessed Rebecca, by Pat Molloy

Rating: ★★★★★

And They Blessed Rebecca: An Account of the Welsh Toll Gate Riots, 1839-1844 (1983) by Pat Molloy

Sometimes with popular heroes, historical or recent, the Robin Hoods or the Che’ Guevaras, hard facts can detract from the legend. An in-depth look at the popular uprisings in Wales a century and a half ago, known as the Rebecca Riots, does not detract from the excitement and genuine feelings of a people who took hope from expressing their disgust at extortion and injustice.
The Rebecca Riots have become a powerful and emotive part of Welsh folklore, conveying through the years the spirit of a long and continuing resistance to English domination and exploitation, for attacks on the toll gates in the dead of night, by men with blackened faces, and disguised as women, were only part of the story. Discontentment in rural Wales ran far deeper than mere annoyance with having to pay the excessive and arbitrary road tolls at legal, and worse, illegally erected gates, and that discontent took many forms.

Continue reading And They Blessed Rebecca, by Pat Molloy

Lincoln the Unknown by Dale Carnegie

Rating: ★★★★★

Lincoln the Unknown, by Dale Carnegie

What do you really know about Abraham Lincoln? Before reading this book, first published way back in 1932, my knowledge could have been summed up like this: He was the president of the American Civil War. He was the president who made a famous speech after Gettysburg and emancipated the slaves. He was hated enough by some, that he was assassinated. Today he is revered as a protector of American democracy, and has a famous memorial in Washington D.C. Carnegie wrote this book after realizing he too, only knew the bare facts. There is so much more..

Continue reading Lincoln the Unknown by Dale Carnegie

Vasily Arkhipov

It was October 1962. The submarine was cruising deep beneath the Atlantic on its way to Cuba. Suddenly, the crew felt the sickening sledgehammer blows to the hull as an enemy warship dropped depth charges. A scene from ‘Crimson Tide’, or maybe ‘Das Boot’? No. This was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviet vessel being bombarded was almost at its destination.

Unknown to the Americans in the warship above, it carried a single torpedo tipped with a nuclear warhead. A torpedo if launched, was capable of igniting World War Three.

Unable to contact his superiors, and shaken by the explosions, Captain Valentin Savitski ordered the missile prepared for launch. But although the crew had official clearance to launch the warhead if provoked, the orders were very specific ( and familiar to those who watched ‘Crimson Tide’), approval of the three most senior officers on board was needed.

Continue reading Vasily Arkhipov

William Tyndale c.1494- 1536

WILLIAM TYNDALE, born about 1494, near Gloucester, England, at a turbulent time, that of Henry VIII. He excelled in the study of Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In July 1515  he received a Master of Arts degree at Oxford University.

By 1521 he was an ordained Roman Catholic priest. At that time Catholicism in Germany was in turmoil because of Martin Luther’s activity, but England remained a Catholic country until Henry VIII finally broke with Rome in 1534, and in this respect, was a religious backwater.

About 1521 he came to the home of Sir John Walsh as a tutor for his children. Mealtimes around Walsh’s table often found the young Tyndale debating with the local clergy. Among them was John Stokesley, who had known Tyndale at Oxford. He later replaced Cuthbert Tunstall as bishop of London.

Tyndale matter-of-factly challenged their opinions by using the Bible. In time, the Walsh family became convinced of what Tyndale was saying, and the clergymen were invited less often and were received with less enthusiasm. Naturally, this embittered the clerics further against Tyndale and his beliefs. Tyndale grew convinced that the Bible alone should determine the practices and doctrines of the church and that every believer should be able to read the Bible in his own language..

Continue reading William Tyndale c.1494- 1536

The Socinians in Poland

The Socinians

Faustus Socinus (or Fausto Sozzini), an Italian influenced by Servetus’ writings, was moved by his brutal execution at the hands of Calvin, to examine the Trinity doctrine. He concluded that it had no basis in the Bible. Faustus decided to leave his comfortable life as a courtier and share the truths he had learned from the Bible. (Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism)

Hounded by the Catholic Inquisition, Socinus travelled to Poland, where, by 1574, he found a small group of Anabaptists who called themselves “The brethren.. who have rejected the Trinity.” To Socinus, this religion was clearly the closest to the truth of the Bible. So he settled in Kraków and began to write in defense of their cause.

These Socinians, as they later came to be called, wanted most of all to restore the pure Christianity taught in the Bible. They felt that the Protestant Reformation had merely skimmed off some of the corruption of the Catholic Church while leaving its unbiblical teachings intact.

Continue reading The Socinians in Poland

John Hales 1584- 1656

John Hales was a principled English protestant divine born at Bath in 1584. After an education at Oxford, he was elected fellow of Eton College, the capacity for which he is best known. By 1636, his liberal theological views had brought him into conflict with the masterful,autocratic William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, who however, was so charmed by his learning and conversation, that he appointed him as a canon of Windsor.

Hales was a man of learning, well read in many branches of literature, a man of sound common sense, well balanced and moderate in his views, disliked extremism, with a reputation as a peacemaker among his contemporaries. He taught a passion for unity, the value of study, a questioning of religious dogma, but also the necessity of faith.  He greatly admired the teachings of Faustus Socinus (see Post: The Socinians in Poland ), and Clarendon said of Hales, ‘he would often say that he would renounce the Church of England tomorrow if it obliged him to believe that any other Christians should be damned, and that nobody would conclude a man to be damned who did not wish him so.’

Hales was one of the earliest admirers of Shakespeare, Dryden saying of him, ‘there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but that he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare’. Like many scholars, Hales wrote little, and reluctantly. His miscellaneous writings were collected and published in 1659, under the title ‘Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable Mr. John Hales’

In 1649, Hales was turned out of his Eton fellowship, having refused to take the oath of ‘engagement’ to the Cromwellian regime. This oath took the form: “I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords.” He refused on the basis of neutrality. He spent the rest of his life in great want, which was relieved to some extent by the sale of his valuable collection of books. He died on 19 May 1656.

Continue reading John Hales 1584- 1656