Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

ligion as entirely connected and consistent with one another.
Helen Macfarlane, the Chartist revolutionary, greatly admired
by Karl Marx, sees Christ as a manifestation of the democratic
principle:
I think one of the most astonishing ‘experiences’ in the history
of humanity, was the appearance of the democratic idea in the
person of a poor, despised, Jewish proletarian – the Galilean
carpenter’s son, who worked – probably at his father’s trade
– till he was thirty years of age, and then began to teach his
idea, wrapped in parables and figures, to other working men
– chiefly fishermen – who listened to him while they mended
their nets, or cast them into the lake of Gennesaret… Do you
understand now the meaning of the words: 'Democratic and
Social Republic’? They are the embodiment of that dying
prayer of our first Martyr: ‘That all may be one, even as we
are one.’
Psychiatrist Isabel Emslie Hutton comments on the theme of
religion in her autobiography:
…children in my day were brought up on the maximum
of Christian terror and the minimum of Christian love. It
is indeed not too much to say that many Scottish children
went through a mild conflict, which might almost be termed
religious melancholia, before their first decade of life, and that
some carried their guilt and fears with them into adult life.
The research process has been fascinating, and at times frustrating.
The internet is a double-edged tool, both indispensible
and dangerously unreliable. Take the case of Carrie Boustead,
the footballer: she doesn’t feature in this collection, although
she almost did! She appears in several online articles and websites
as the first Scottish black female goalkeeper, in the trail-
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