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Quote of the day

“My Worthy Friend, Mr. Walton, I am heartily glad, that you have undertaken to write the life of that excellent person .Dr. Sanderson, late Bishop of L...”

Walton, Izaak. Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson, ed. Thomas Zouch. York: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1796.

Devotional

Learn from Fiery Serpents (1866)

In pursuing the course which had been marked out for them, the Hebrew host traversed southward the arid, hot, and sandy...

Events

1508

At the insistence of Pope Julius II, Michelangelo begins work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He writes this note to himself, “On this day, May 10, 1508, I Michelangelo, sculptor, have received on account from our Holy Lord Pope Julius II five hundred papal ducats toward the painting of the ceiling of the papal Sistine Chapel, on which I am beginning work today.”

Authority for the date: Clement, Charles. “Painting on the Sistine Chapel,” in The Great Events by Famous Historians.

1787

Death of Synesius of Siberia, a famous monk of the Orthodox Church.

Authority for the date: Walsh, Michael J. A New Dictionary of Saints.

1908

At her urging, Ana M. Jarvis’s church in Philadelphia holds one of the first Mothers’ Day services. Ana supplies the church with white carnations, which had been her mom’s favorite flower.

Authority for the date: Rice, Susan Tracy and Robert Haven. Mothers’ Day. Dodd, Mead and Co., 1954.

1910

Death in Bristol, England, of hymnwriter Anna Laetitia Waring. Born Quaker, she had become an Anglican and was a social reformer active in prison visitation. Her best-known hymn was “In Heavenly Love Abiding.”

Authority for the date: Cyberhymnal.

1917

Death in Hitchin, England, of Bible scholar Henry Barclay Swete, an Anglican who had stood firmly for the Bible when modern scholarship attacked it. He was a founder of the Journal of Theological Studies and wrote The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint. He was described as a “pillar of Christian learning and a pattern of Christian life.”

Authority for the date:

1918

Edgar Stillman Kelley’s choral work The Pilgrim’s Progress is produced at the Cincinnati May Festival. His music was in the late Romantic tradition.

Authority for the date: Lahee, Henry Charles. Music in America.

1918

Bishop C.H. Phillips speaks against a movement to unite the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church with the African Methodist Episcopal and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, a plan which he says does not answer crucial questions of belief and organization. As it turns out, the movement will founder on its inability to agree on a name.

Authority for the date: Phillips, C.H. History of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America.

1941

German bombers hit the Salvation Army’s International Headquarters in London, destroying many documents of historic interest.

Authority for the date: Christian History 26 (1990).

2001

Death from a heart attack of Subhang Sodemba, who had founded an evangelistic and orphanage work in the Himalayas.

Authority for the date: Linder, God’s Special Agents

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Containing today’s events, devotional, quote and stories