Appeal

Oh Lord, Thou knowest that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in Essex. I beseech Thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes; and as I have also a mortgage at Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee also to have an eye of compassion on that county, and for the rest of the counties, Thou may deal with them as Thou art pleased. Oh Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills and make all my debtors good men, give a prosperous voyage and safe return to the Mermaid sloop, because I have not insured it, and because Thou has said, ‘The days of the wicked are but short’, I trust in Thee that Thou wilt not forget Thy promise, as I have an estate in reversion, which will be mine on the death of the profligate young man, Sir J. L. …g.

Keep my friends from sinking, preserve me from thieves and housebreakers, and make all my servants so honest and faithful that they may always attend to my interest and never cheat me out of my property night or day.

— John Ward, onetime M.P. for Weymouth, quoted in M.C. D’Arcy, The Mind and the Heart of Love, 1947

(This must be satire, but I haven’t been able to learn anything more about it.)

04/01/2025 UPDATE: Apparently the “prayer” was discovered among Ward’s papers after his death in 1755 — possibly he was condemning self-dealing in Parliament at the time. (Thanks to readers Brieuc de Grangechamps and Jon Anderson.)

| Religion · Society

Misc

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender legs, it is my woe that I cannot run. Death.

| Death · Language · Literature · Quotations · Religion · Trivia

In a Word

vatic
adj. relating to a prophet

futurition
n. future existence

natalitial
adj. of or relating to a person’s birth

aporetic
adj. inclined to raise objections

In 2000, three sisters from Inverness bought a £1 million insurance policy to cover the cost of bringing up the infant Jesus Christ if one of them had a virgin birth.

Simon Burgess, managing director of britishinsurance.com, told the BBC, “The people were concerned about having sufficient funds if they immaculately conceived. It was for caring and bringing up the Christ. We sometimes get weird requests and this is the weirdest we have had.”

The company withdrew the policy in 2006 after objections by the Catholic Church. “The burden of proof that it was Christ had rested with the women and any premium on the insurance was donated to charity, said Mr Burgess.”

| Language · Oddities · Religion

One World at a Time

Thomas Jefferson to the Rev. Isaac Story, Dec. 5, 1801, on the afterlife:

When I was young I was fond of the speculations which seemed to promise some insight into that hidden country, but observing at length that they left me in the same ignorance in which they had found me, I have for very many years ceased to read or to think concerning them, and have reposed my head on that pillow of ignorance which a benevolent Creator has made so soft for us, knowing how much we should be forced to use it.

“I have thought it better, by nourishing the good passions & controlling the bad, to merit an inheritance in a state of being of which I can know so little, and to trust for the future to him who has been so good for the past.”

| Death · Religion

Advance Billing

When the philosopher Antisthenes was being initiated into the mysteries of Orpheus, and the priest told him that those who vowed themselves to that religion were to receive after death eternal and perfect blessings, he said to him: ‘Why, then, do you not die yourself?’

— Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, 1576

| Death · Literature · Religion

The Size of It

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_Earthrise_AS08-14-2383_Apollo_8_1968-12-24.jpg

From W.H. Auden’s 1970 commonplace book A Certain World:

David Hartley offered a vest-pocket edition of his moral and religious philosophy in the formula W = F2/L, where W is the love of the world, F is the fear of God, and L is the love of God. It is necessary to add only this. Hartley said that as one grows older L increases and indeed becomes infinite. It follows then that W, the love of the world, decreases and approaches zero.

| Religion

The Sermon Game

In Ambrosia and Small Beer (1964), Edward Marsh describes a way of passing time during a long sermon:

[Y]ou look out for words beginning with each letter of the alphabet in succession, and if you get as far as Z (for which you may count a Z in the middle of a word) you cast a Bible on the ground and leave the building. It is palpitating. On this occasion we were held up by B, which seemed as if it would never come; and as the sermon was short neither of us got beyond M.

In Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), John Espey writes,

Like most ministers’ children, I imagine, I early perfected several techniques for surviving sermons — counting games, making knight’s moves through the congregation using bald heads, or brown-haired, or ladies’ hats for jumps; betting my right hand against my left on which side of the center aisle the next cough would come from; or what the division would be in the Lord’s Prayer between ‘debts’ and ‘trespasses.’ I had, after all, heard everything, and more than once, by the time I turned ten.

P.G. Wodehouse’s 1922 story “The Great Sermon Handicap” describes a variation on a horse race: “Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins.” In 1930 a group of Cambridge undergraduates carried this out in real life — the winner, for the record, was the Rev. H.C. Read, “riding” the parish church of St Andrew-the-Great.

| Religion · Society

Misc

  • Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal.
  • WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin.
  • By convention, current flows from positive to negative in a circuit; electrons, which are negatively charged, move in the opposite direction.
  • The immaculate conception describes the birth of Mary, not Jesus.
  • “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.” — Samuel Butler

10/22/2024 UPDATE: Interesting addendum from reader Mark Thompson: The capital cities Asunción, Canberra, and Kuwait City are nearly equidistant on great-circle routes:

Kuwait City to Canberra: 12,768 km
Canberra to Asunción: 12,712 km
Asunción to Kuwait City: 12,766 km

“Their mutual distances apart (along the earth’s surface) happen to be very close to one Earth-diameter [12,742 km]: so, sadly, they don’t all lie on a single great circle (since pi is not 3).” (Thanks, Mark.)

| Language · Quotations · Religion · Science & Math · Trivia

Evidence

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3_%D0%A1%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BE%D1%84.jpg

It must, I think, be allowed, that if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the universe, were assured, that it were the production of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine, merely from these attributes of the cause, of which he is informed, that the effect could be so full of vice and misery and disorder, as it appears in this life. Supposing now, that this person were brought into the world, still assured that it was the workmanship of such a sublime and benevolent Being; he might, perhaps, be surprised at the disappointment; but would never retract his former belief, if founded on any very solid argument; since such a limited intelligence must be sensible of his own blindness and ignorance, and must allow, that there may be many solutions of those phenomena, which will for ever escape his comprehension. But supposing, which is the real case with regard to man, that this creature is not antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevolent, and powerful, but is left to gather such a belief from the appearances of things; this entirely alters the case, nor will he ever find any reason for such a conclusion. He may be fully convinced of the narrow limits of his understanding; but this will not help him in forming an inference concerning the goodness of superior powers, since he must form that inference from what he knows, not from what he is ignorant of. The more you exaggerate his weakness and ignorance, the more diffident you render him, and give him the greater suspicion that such subjects are beyond the reach of his faculties. You are obliged, therefore, to reason with him merely from the known phenomena, and to drop every arbitrary supposition or conjecture.

— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779

| Religion

Subtext

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrostic#cite_ref-WilliamBrowne_33-0

William Browne’s 17th-century poem “Behold, O God!” forms a sort of symbolic acrostic. The text can be read conventionally, scanning each line from left to right, but the letters shown here in bold also spell out three verses from the New Testament:

  • Luke 23:42: “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.”
  • Matthew 27:46: “O God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
  • Luke 23:39: “If thou art the Christ, save thyself and us.”

The three embedded quotes represent the three figures crucified on Golgotha, and the “INRI” at the top of the middle cross stands for IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM — Latin for “Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews” (John 19:19).

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