A box of Precious Promises.

My wife is a great hoarder, from a line of great hoarders, and an unfailing source of intriguing objects. Today, I bring you a box of Precious Promises courtesy of Dr Samuel Clarke.

Samuel Clarke D.D. (1684-1759) was an English Nonconformist parson and theological writer, best remembered for his 1720 book, a Collection of the Promises of Scripture, arranged systematically. The book is simply a list of Bible verses, which are promises from God's word arranged by various topics, and was intended to be dipped into when inspiration or guidance was required.

This box, dating I think from the late 1800s, presents the Promises in a different way. They are printed on little scrolls of paper which are rolled up and stored in the box. The devout owner is instructed to take one at random and then to replace it, presumably having read and digested the message. I guess it is the 19th Century equivalent of a Kindle.

Today's promise is specially for those of you who buy lottery tickets. A word of caution however. Before I was put out to grass with the other dinosaurs, a colleague and I much enjoyed teaching an annual course entitled "Brute force Pascal programming for ecologists". One of the exercises that we used was to write a program to simulate the UK national lottery. The program suggested that if you were to buy a single ticket every week then you will eventually win the big prize. Sadly, if I remember correctly, the average time to winning was in the order of 400,000 years!

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