March 1
1562: Huguenots, the French Protestants, are attacked at Vassy while worshiping in a barn; over sixty lost their lives and more than one hundred got injured, setting off a series of religious wars between French Protestants and the Roman Catholics which lasted for almost forty years.
1603: Demise of Venerable Martyrius at the Zelenets monastery he founded. He is said to have had many visions of Holy Mary.
1633: George Herbert , English poet and clergyman, breathed his last with the following words on his lips, “I shall be free from sin and all the temptations and anxieties that attend it…I shall dwell… where these eyes shall see my Master and Savior.”
1692: Beginning of the Salem Witch Trials in the Massachusetts colony with the conviction of Tituba, a West Indian slave, for witchcraft.
1799: Johannes Theodorus Vanderkamp, missionary to South Africa, arrives in Capetown, who could redeem many slaves with his own money and break down European settlers’ resistance to mission work. Later, as a widower, he married an indigenous African woman and got four children from her, leading to outrage among Europeans.
1810: Georgetown College was established in Washington, D.C., making it the first Roman Catholic institution of higher learning established in the United States.
1843: Fidelia Fisk sails from Boston Harbor for Smyrna to begin mission work. She wrote to her sisters, “It may be that my usefulness will greatly depend upon your prayers for me. Sisters, pray for me.”
1910: The first issue of “The Evening Light and Church of God Evangel” edited by A. J. Tomlinson was published in Cleveland, Tennessee.
1919: Several Christian leaders join the opponents of Japanese occupation in order to get Korea declared an independent land, following which they were arrested and thousands of Korea’s Christians became preys of brutal retaliation.
1966: Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth exhorted in a letter, “If Jesus is and does what we read in 1 John 2:2, then He prays for all men: for those who already pray and for those who do not yet pray.”