1256 Pope Alexander IV founds the religious order of the Augustine Hermits.
1493 Pope Alexander VI issues the bull Inter caetera II, officially dividing the possession of the New World discoveries by Spain and Portugal along a longitudinal line running 250 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands.
1521 Martin Luther, who was on his way home from the Diet of Worms, is taken into protective custodyby order of the German ruler Frederick the Wise and held at Wartburg, where he translated the Bible into German.
1535 John Houghton, Robert Lawrence, and Augustine Webster (all three Carthusian monks), Richard Reynolds (a learned Bridgettine monk) and John Haile (vicar of Thistleworth) are hanged, drawn, and quartered in London for refusing to submit to Henry VIII as head of the church.
1677 Demise of Isaac Barrow, an eminent English divine, educator, mathematician, and classics scholar, whose sermons were reprinted for two hundred years, and who had a great influence on Isaac Newton.
1689 Repose of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth in Bavaria, a hymn-writer and Christian student of the Kabbalah (the Jewish mystical tradition which explicates the nature of God and of the universe through esoteric knowledge and practices), which he had begun translating into Latin. His most famous hymns are “Jesus, Sun of Righteousness” and “Dayspring of Eternity.”
1730 Anna Nitschmann, a protestant missionary and the then leader of the Moravians, enters into a covenant before God. This day is observed as an annual Choir Festival by the Moravian Sisters, in which they remember Nitschmann’s original covenant, renew it for themselves, and initiate new members into the Choir.
1746 Establishment of the Moravian Women’s Seminary at Bethlehem by the Moravians in Pennsylvania, the first of its kind established by the “Unitas Fratrum” in colonial America.
1784 Birth of Carl G. Glaser, a German music teacher, who is remembered today for his hymn tune AZMON, to which the hymn “O For a Thousand Tongues” is sung today.
1814 Repose of Thomas Coke, a Methodist superintendent, while leading a group of missionaries to India.
1856 Mount Vernon Church in Boston, accepts Dwight L. Moody reluctantly into church membership, having already rejected him once because of his complete ignorance of Christian truth. Moody later became an evangelist of international fame.
1876 Passing away of Friedrich Konrad Dietrich Wyneken, a Lutheran frontier evangelist and pastor, in San Francisco, who had worked primarily around Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was instrumental in attracting many Lutheran pastors from Germany to America and in giving the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church an evangelical character.
1888 Rufus Wilder Miller of the Reformed Church organizes a Bible study and prayer group called ‘the Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip’ at Reading, Pennsylvania, which soon became influential across denominational lines, becoming a pioneer in such inter-denominational activity.
1898 A huge crowd gathers to celebrate the silver jubilee of the Episcopal Ordination of Michael Augustine Corrigan, the Archbishop of New York, who was influential among laymen, priests, and prominent Catholics through his virtuous life.
1923 Death of W. Robertson Nicoll at Hampstead; he was the editor of the British journal The Expositor and the author cum editor of the fifty-volume Expositor’s Bible, a project in collaboration with twenty-eight other scholars.
1938 Mei Yiqi, a Christian educator, becomes the president of a makeshift university at Kunming under severe wartime conditions; it was organized in exile out of three refugee universities’ faculties.
1945 Bandits torture and murder Vasily Martysz, a Polish Orthodox priest, who after having served as a priest in Alaska and Pennsylvania, had returned to Poland, where he organized a chaplaincy for the Polish army following World War I and worked hard to make the Polish Orthodox Church independent and self-ruling.
1970 The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the constitutionality of a New York statute exempting church-owned property from taxation, while pronouncing the final judgment in the “Walz v. Tax Commission of New York” arbitration.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org