AUGUST 16
JOHN CAMPANIUS RACKED UP FIRSTS IN AMERICA (1642)
“Address of the British Conference to the Bishops and Members of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of Ameri...”
Elliot, Charles. The Life of the Rev. Robert R. Roberts; Quote from Bangs, Nathan. A History of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Vol. IV. New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1839.
Use your influence for good (1886)
Impossible as in reality it is to avoid exercising personal influence, there is yet a restricted sense in which it may b...
Events
1532
Death of John the Constant (Elector of Saxony). He had been a leader of the princes who protested the measures taken by the Catholic-dominated Diet of Speyer in 1529 (thus becoming one of the first to be named a “Protestant”). He signed the Augsburg Confesssion and helped organize the Schmalkaldic League which protected the Protestant Reformation.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1642
John Campanius sails from Stockholm with his family to minister in Delaware. There he will learn the Lenni Lenape tongue and translate religious works into it, keep weather records, and consecrate the first Lutheran church built in the new world.
Authority for the date: “Campanius, John.” Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribners, 1958.1661
Death of Thomas Fuller, a popular preacher of seventeenth-century England. He had written two books which made him famous: A Church History of Britain and Worthies of England. A Royalist during the civil war, he was in such danger that he later remarked “All that time I could not live to study who did only study to live.”
Authority for the date: Britannica.1773
A month-old papal brief by Pope Clement XIV is carried into effect, suppressing the Jesuit order in several nations. Forty-one years later Pope Pius VIII will formally restore the order.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1795
Ordination of Absalom Jones, formerly a slave, as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. He will become America’s first African-American Episcopal priest.
Authority for the date: archive.episcopalchurch.org1851
Repose (death) of Matrona Naumovna Popova who had founded the first hospice in the town of Zadonsk, a disciple of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk.
Authority for the date: orthodoxwiki.org.1875
Evangelist, pastor, and educator Charles G. Finney dies at Oberlin.
Authority for the date: Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals.1936
Death of hymnwriter Constance Headlam Coote at Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, remembered for the hymn “In the Quiet Consecration.”
Authority for the date: Cyberhymnal.1967
Death in New York City of John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit theologian and educator. He is best-known for his defence of the United States’ Constitution and his arguments against any effort by the Roman Catholic Church to bring about change within nations by means other than moral persuasion.
Authority for the date: Britannica.