February 2
1594: Death of Roman Catholic composer Giovanni di Palestrina, who was well known for high quality and originality in writing one hundred and five masses and two hundred and fifty motets (vocal musicals in the settings of biblical texts).
1650: Beheading of Jordan of Trebizond by Muslims in Constantinople, after he had mocked their prophet and refused to convert to Islam during the trial.
1829: York Minster, the Anglican Cathedral in York, burns all day. The Cathedral was set on fire by Jonathan Martin, a Methodist who had escaped from a lunatic asylum and hidden in the Cathedral.
1864: Death of Adelaide Anne Procter hymnwriter, who had been a favorite of Queen Victoria. Charles Dickens had cited many of her verses.
1900: Death of Annie Wittenmeyer, the first president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which strove to abolish liquor trade and to reduce consumption of alcohol; it also fostered abstinence. She was active in home missions and had founded orphanages, edited Christian periodicals, written hymns, and authored several books.
1902: Macedonian rebels release Ellen Stone, an American missionary to Turkey from the Congregational Church, whom they had held hostage for five months demanding a large ransom. Friends and the American public raised the sum to get her released.
1907: Leo Tolstoy, the Christian Russian novelist, exhorted in a letter written to American statesman William Jennings Bryan: “The most important thing is to know the will of God concerning one’s life, i.e., to know what he wishes us to do and fulfill it.”
1911: College teacher Eliza George of Texas gets a vision of the Last Judgment and Christ sitting on his throne; seeing this she mourned, “But no one ever told us You died for us.” Two years later she left her post at the college to establish a mission in Liberia.
1944: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian and Nazi martyr, wrote in a letter from prison: ‘There is a kind of weakness that Christianity does not hold with, but which people insist on claiming as Christian, and then sling mud at it.’
1955: C.S. Lewis, English apologist, wrote in a letter: “It is right…that we should be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to…demand that their salvation should conform to some ready-made pattern of our own.”
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org