21-05-2025
Does anyone believe the promise of Paradise?
With time to kill over the weekend I wandered around the graveyard of Youlgreave village's fine 12th-century All Saints church. I love reading gravestones. This, for example, moves one almost to tears. It's for an infant, Edward Radcliffe, who died in 1796 aged ten months:'Happy babe thy days are ended,All thy mourning days by angels' guards attended,To the light of Jesus gone.'
Did little Edward's unhappy parents actually believe that? We cannot know. So many of the chiselled inscriptions speak of being reunited with the deceased in Paradise one day. Did they actually believe that? With what degree of certainty? Did most ancient Greeks really, sincerely, believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods? There is so much that history will
