June 5
303: Felix, Bishop of Tibiuca in North Africa, is ordered by the magistrate to hand over Christian books in compliance with an imperial decree, but staunchly refuses. He was then martyred under the great persecution of Emperor Diocletian.
1409: The Council of Pisa declares the rival popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII as “notorious schismatics, promoters of schism, and notorious heretics, errant from the faith, and guilty of the notorious and enormous crimes of perjury and violated oaths.”
1568: Beheading of Egmont and Hoorn, two Counts, by Spanish overlords in Brussels, causing a furious resistance which freed the Netherlands from Spain and established Calvinism as the principal form of Christianity.
1724: Demise of Rev. Henry Sacheverell, a Church of England priest whose political oratory provoked the Whig government to impeach him. As Anglicans rose in his defense and riots followed, the Whig government was swept away from power.
1801: A Turkish tribunal condemns Mark of Smyrna to capital punishment. Having betrayed his Christian faith once, he regretted his behaviour, renounced Islam and returned to the gospel at the cause of his life.
1831: The first observance of the Lord’s Supper in Madagascar at the Ambatonakanga church.
1860: Foundation of the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Augsburg Synod in Wisconsin, North America.It merged with three other Lutheran churches to form the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) in 1962.
1865: Pastor Sabine Baring-Gould pens the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” as a marching song for some children as they walked between two villages during a Whit-Monday festival (i.e., the day after Pentecost) in Yorkshire, England.
1900: Beheading of lay preacher Chen Dayong at Yanqing by Chinese revolutionists, known as Boxers, who also hacked his wife and daughter to death.
1944: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran theologian and martyr, exhorted in a letter from prison:, “Certainly one must try everything, but only to become more certain what God’s way is.”
1960: Pope John XXIII publishes the motu proprio “Superno Dei Nutu,” which created the necessary committees and organizational structure for the upcoming Vatican II Ecumenical Council.
1961: C.S. Lewis, English apologist, reflected in a letter, “Any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting of our own sins and forgiving those of others is…usually bad for us.”
1967: Beginning of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, during which Israel took over the control of the Sinai Desert, the city of Jerusalem and the west bank of the Jordan River. A cease-fire on the mediation of the U.N. ended the conflict on June 10th.
1995: Steve Saint and some of his family members go to the forests in Ecuador with the aim of training the Waodani Indians to manage their lives in the modern world.
Edited by: T. Chempilayil MCBS
Courtesy: www.studylight.org