Confederate National Flag since Mar 4 1865

The American Civil War threw up a number of spies of both genders; and Madame La Force was a spy helping the Confederates.

On June 28, 1861 the Confederate vessel St Nicholas sailed out of Baltimore, Maryland carrying on board a somewhat strange passenger. The passenger, a foreign lady named Madame La Force kept the passengers and crew entertained by outrageously flirting with them. Her antics diverted their attention from other men who were embarking, bringing aboard what looked like military trunks and toolboxes.

Immediately the ship set sail, Madame La Force retired to her cabin from which she did not emerge till the vessel docked at Point Lookout on the southern tip of Maryland. The Madame emerged on deck and resumed her disgraceful flirting while some more men came aboard. Once more when the ship resumed its journey, she retired below decks. She reappeared shortly after the vessel sailed but this time had thrown off what was a disguise. She now emerged as a full-fledged, fully armed Confederate Colonel, Col Richard Thomas. He immediately took charge of the men who had come aboard as passengers. From the military trunks and boxes they unloaded weapons with which they rounded up the passengers and crew and placed them below decks under guard. The captain of the vessel was ordered to sail to Coan River where they were to pick up a Lt Lewis and his men. One of the men in the new contingent was a Confederate commander, George N. Hollins.

The St Nicholas in the normal course was scheduled to stop alongside the union warship Pawnee to collect mail and deliver supplies. When it was learned that the Pawnee had been diverted to Washington, Hollins order the captain to set course for Fredericksburg, Virginia. Enroute, Hollins and his men captured three union ships loaded with ice, coal and coffee all in short supply with Confederacy troops. Part of Hollins men sailed the captive ships to Fredericksburg while the Pawnee and her cargo was towed by the St Nicholas.

10 days later at Fredericksburg, Colonel Richard Thomas was captured and incarcerated, kept in solitary for two years. In a prisoner exchange he was released after which he fled to France never to return. Col. Thomas was a ‘Zouave’, one of the foreign soldiers who fought in the American Civil War.

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Rahab of Jericho - From: Hans (Jan) Collaert (Antwerp, 1566-1628), Rahab (Hol. 13-32). Engraving after Marten de Vos, c. 1581. Plate 8 from a set of Celebrated Women of the Old Testament consisting of twenty engravings (plus frontispiece) by Hans or Adrien Collaert and Carel van Mallery published in Antwerp by Phillip Galle (1537-1612)

How great it was for such an unlikely character as was Rahab who illustrated God’s sovereign grace. Even in a corrupt city as Jericho, doomed to destruction, that a wicked person such as Rahab could experience grace by turning to God in faith. Such grace glorifies God and gives unnecessary attempts of several expositors to explain Rahab as a hostess or innkeeper to remove the stigma of that name from an ancestress of the Savior.

Rahab’s justifying faith is found in Joshua 2:8-14. This harlot is a fitting example of the power of the gospel of grace to save a sinner by faith and faith alone. “By faith the harlot, Rahab, perished not with them that believed not” (Heb. 11:31). Rahab was justified before God totally by faith (Joshua 2:9-14). She declared her saving faith, which was justified before men by works. First, “when she had received the spies with peace” (Heb. 11:31), “when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way” (James 2:25). Secondly, when Rahab said, “I know that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us” (v. 9).

Then thirdly, when Rahab talked about the divine redemptive power at the Red Sea and the miracles that happened at Sihon and Og, the Amorite kings (v. 10). Fourth, when Rahab confessed to the sole deity of Israel’s God both “in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (v. 11). Lastly, when she became a soul-winner and had concern for the salvation and safety for her family (Joshua 2:12-13). She continued in faith until full assurance of salvation became hers (v. 14).

This is such a remarkable event that occurred in the Bible. Rahab sent the messengers of the king in another direction, and let the spies down the outside wall by a cord or a rope from the window of her home (Joshua 2:15). When the Israelites conquered Jericho, they spared Rahab’s house that had a scarlet cord in the window, which was a sign that a friend of God’s people lived inside. So, Rahab including her father, her mother, her brothers, and her father’s household, was spared destruction. Apparently Rahab and her family were later on brought into Israel.

The Bible does not tell us how Rahab, who came from a culture where harlotry and idolatry were common, believed on the Lord as the one true God. But her insights that are written in Joshua 2:9-11 leave no doubt that she did so. Rahab’s declaration of faith led the writer of Hebrews to include Rahab as one of the heroes of faith (Heb. 11:31).

Furthermore, when the Israelites came near the city of Jericho, everyone in the city was afraid of what they had heard about the power of the God of Israel. But Rahab was the only one who made a decision to give herself to the Lord. This brave woman in this wicked city called Jericho, helped and became involved in espionage against her own country, and made a deal with these two Israelite spies before the presence of Almighty God, that I will help you to not be harmed in return for the safety for myself and my family.

So, here is the big question. Was her deception to her countrymen eclipsed by her faith in God? I tend to believe it was Rahab’s faith in God that motivated her to choose to act against her fellow countrymen. I believe she loved her country, but the Lord had done a work in her heart, that she loved the God of Israel more. Of course the other motivation on Rahab’s part, was she wanted her family to be spared from the destruction that she knew was up ahead. And she knew the only hope her family had, was by her having faith in God Almighty!

In conclusion, Rahab is one of many great woman who are mentioned in the Bible who exhibited great faith in the power of God!

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Ab? ?Al? al-?asan ibn al-?asan ibn al-Haytham as shown on the obverse of the 1982 Iraqi 10 dinar note

We live in a scientific age. Millions of young people study science, thousands of universities teach it, and hundreds of publications chronicle it. We even have a cable channel devoted exclusively to its wonders. We are immersed in technology rooted in its discoveries. But what is science, and who was its first practitioner?

Science is the study of the physical world, but it is not just a topic, a subject, a field of interest. It is a discipline—a system of inquiry that adheres to a specific methodology—the scientific method. In its basic form, the scientific method consists of seven steps:

1) observation;

2) statement of a problem or question;

3) formulation of a hypothesis, or a possible answer to the problem or question;

4) testing of the hypothesis with an experiment;

5) analysis of the experiment’s results;

6) interpretation of the data and formulation of a conclusion;

7) publication of the findings.

One can study phenomena without adhering to the scientific method, of course. The result, however, is not science. It is pseudoscience or junk science.

Throughout history, many people in many parts of the world have studied nature without using the scientific method. Some of the earliest people to do so were the ancient Greeks. Scholars such as Aristotle made many observations about natural phenomena, but they did not test their ideas with experiments. Instead they relied on logic to support their findings. As a result, they often arrived at erroneous conclusions. Centuries later the errors of the Greeks were exposed by scholars using the scientific method.

Perhaps the most famous debunking of Greek beliefs occurred in 1589 when Galileo Galilei challenged Aristotle’s notions about falling bodies. Aristotle had asserted that heavy bodies fall at a faster rate than light bodies do. His contention was logical but unproven. Galileo decided to test Aristotle’s hypothesis, legend says, by dropping cannon balls of different weights from a balcony of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He released the balls simultaneously and found that neither ball raced ahead of the other. Rather, they sped earthward together and hit the ground at the same time. Galileo also conducted experiments in which he rolled balls of different weights down inclines in an attempt to discover the truth about falling bodies. For these and other experiments, Galileo is considered by many to be the first scientist.

Galileo was not the first person to conduct experiments or to follow the scientific method, however. European scholars had been conducting experiments for three hundred years, ever since a British-born Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon advocated experimentation in the thirteenth century. One of Bacon’s books, Perspectiva (Optics) challenges ancient Greek ideas about vision and includes several experiments with light that include all seven steps of the scientific method.

Bacon’s Perspectiva is not an original work, however. It is a summary of a much longer work entitled De aspectibus (The Optics). Perspectiva follows the organization of De aspectibus and repeats its experiments step by step, sometimes even word for word. But De aspectibus is not an original work, either. It is the translation of a book written in Arabic entitled Kit?b al-Man?zir (Book of Optics). Written around 1021, Kit?b al-Man?zir predates Roger Bacon’s summary of it by 250 years. The author of this groundbreaking book was a Muslim scholar named Ab? ‘Al? al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham.

Born in Basra (located in what is now Iraq) in 965, Ibn al-Haytham—known in the West as Alhazen or Alhacen—wrote more than 200 books and treatises on a wide range of subjects. He was the first person to apply algebra to geometry, founding the branch mathematics known as analytic geometry.

Ibn al-Haytham’s use of experimentation was an outgrowth of his skeptical nature and his Muslim faith. He believed that human beings are flawed and only God is perfect. To discover the truth about nature, he reasoned, one had to allow the universe to speak for itself. “The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them,” Ibn al-Haytham wrote in Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, “but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.”

To test his hypothesis that “lights and colors do not blend in the air,” for example, Ibn al-Haytham devised the world’s first camera obscura, observed what happened when light rays intersected at its aperture, and recorded the results. This is just one of dozens of “true demonstrations,” or experiments, contained in Kit?b al-Man?zir.

By insisting on the use of verifiable experiments to test hypotheses, Ibn al-Haytham established a new system of inquiry—the scientific method—and earned a place in history as the first scientist.

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1. Who is Clement Hurd? Clement G. Hurd was an American illustrator of children’s books....

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Clement G. Hurd was an American illustrator of children’s books. He was born on January 12, 1908 and became best known for his collaborations with author Margaret Wise Brown, including Goodnight Moon in 1947, which has since sold more than two million copies. He also illustrated The Runaway Bunny (1942) and a number of books written by his wife Edith (a friend of Brown’s) as well as a children’s book written by Gertrude Stein, The World Is Round (1938).

The son of a New York mortgage banker, Hurd was educated at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire.  He then studied architecture at Yale University as well as painting with Fernand Léger in Paris. On seeing two of his paintings, Margaret Wise Brown asked him if he would consider illustrating children’s books.

His son Thacher Hurd is also a children’s book author and illustrator, and referred in an interview to the “wonderful aura of creativity” surrounding his father and the Vermont farm that was their home.

A doctored/altered photo of Hurd was included in the 60th anniversary republication of Goodnight Moon with a cigarette removed from his hand, causing controversy over publication standards. A New York Times article wrote “In the great green room, there is a telephone, and a red balloon, but no ashtray. “Goodnight Moon,” the children’s classic by Margaret Wise Brown, has gone smoke free.”

Hurd died February 5, 1988.

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