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Quote of the day

“We have received, fed, and comforted at this hospital, during the past week, between four and five thousand wounded men, and still they come. All the...”

Brockett, Linus Pierpont and Mary C. Vaughan. Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience. Zeigler, McCurdy & Co., 1867.

Devotional

Life-Changing Righteousness Is Possible (1897)

That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us —Romans 8:4 (KJV). Beloved friends, do you know the mis...

Events

597

Ethelbert, an Anglo-Saxon king, is baptized, having converted to Christianity weeks earlier.

Authority for the date: William Smith and Henry Wace. A Dictionary of Christian Biographies, Literature, Sects and Doctrines.... London: Jo

1453

George “Gennadius” Scholarios becomes the first ecumenical patriarch of the Orthodox Church to serve under a Muslim conqueror when Mohammed II invests him with the crosier and mantle.

Authority for the date: Fortescue, Adrian. "Gennadius II." Catholic Encyclopedia. Appleton, 1909.

1660

Mary Dyer, Quaker, is hanged in Boston for preaching Quaker doctrine.

Authority for the date: Deen, Edith. Great Women of the Christian Faith. New York: Harper, 1959.

1661

James Guthrie, a Covenanter, is hanged in Edinburgh. On the scaffold he says, “I do believe that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the chief,” and urged his listeners to seek Christ’s free grace.

Authority for the date: McFeeters, J. C. Sketches of the Covenanters.

1735

Joseph Hawley, spiritually depressed, commits suicide in Northampton, Massachusetts, causing the collapse of a revival led by Jonathan Edwards. 

Authority for the date: Christian History 77 (2003).

1826

Death of John F. Oberlin, a missionary to the Vosges Mountains on the French/German border. In addition to teaching Bible principles, he had showed his people how to make their way out of crushing poverty.

Authority for the date: http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/OYTT-images/JFO.html

1846

Death of Gregory XVI, a compromise selection for pope, who had governed papal estates with autocratic rigor, rejecting attempts at representative government and resisting the introduction of modern innovations such as gas lighting and railroads. Among his actions he had also issued an encyclical against slavery.

Authority for the date: Britannica

1886

The executive board of the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention (African American) learns that W.W. Colley, their respected African-American missionary to Liberia, has shot and killed an African boy. Appalled, they order him to turn over the mission to another man. However, he is already on his way home because of illness. It turns out that the killing was accidental. He had fired a gun to frighten off a mentally ill man who had entered the property and had struck the boy without knowing it until later. An African court had already cleared him.

Authority for the date: Jacobs, Sylvia M. Black Americans & the Missionary Movement in Africa. Greenwood Press, 1982.

1924

A timid Ji Wang is baptized secretly in Taiwan. Eventually a Presbyterian missionary will convince her to get religious training in order to evangelize the tribe among whom she lives. She agrees. By her death in 1946, five thousand head hunters will have been baptized because of her ministry.

Authority for the date: Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity.

1971

Death in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, of Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent neo-orthodox and realist theologian. Deeply concerned with the conditions of working people, he had rejected the Social Gospel, liberal utopianism, and naive biblical literalism. He was an anti-communist who helped found Americans for Democratic Action. Niebuhr taught at Union Theological Seminary for thirty years and wrote many influential books. Christians who know nothing else about him may still have recited some form of his popular Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Authority for the date: Britannica

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Containing today’s events, devotional, quote and stories