Historical Writings

Torture and beheading of Victor of Milan, a soldier in the Roman army, because he had revealed his Christian faith by destroying pagan altars.

The people of York go out to meet Archbishop William, who has just returned from Rome. As the throng follows him across the River Ouse on an old wooden bridge it collapses. Many people are pitched into the water, including women and small children. William makes the sign of the cross and prays. Not one life is lost.

English mystic Julian of Norwich, 31, by her own account, received a series of sixteen revelations, while in a state of ecstasy lasting five hours. Her book, "The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love," was written 20 years later as the fruit of her meditations on this experience. Little else is known of her life.

Pope Clement VII addresses a brief to the Observantine Franciscans, empowering them to receive all Lutherans desiring to return to the Catholic Church without the severe penalties decreed by Pope Leo X and others.

Tyndale's Parable of Wicked Mammon is printed. A fugitive on the European continent, he smuggled pamphlets into England through merchant friends.

Counter-reformer Peter Canisius is admitted into the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Mainz on his twenty-second birthday. By living a blameless life, founding colleges, preparing a clear well-organized catechism, and writing and speaking without bitterness and ridicule, he will restore the dignity of the Catholic Church in Northern Europe where the Protestant Reformation is ascendant.

Death of John Hough, bishop of Worcester, known for great generosity and also for being the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, whom James II ejected in his effort to restore Roman Catholic influence in England.

Moravian missionary David Zeisberger establishes a mission at Oxford, Canada.

Thomas Middleton, the first Bishop of Calcutta is consecrated privately because the India company fears publicity.

The American Bible Society was organized in the Dutch Reformed Church on Garden Street in NY City. The non-profit society was instituted to promote wider circulation of the Scriptures by publishing Bibles without notes or comments.

At a three-day convention in Augusta, GA, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed by 300 representatives from Baptist churches in Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina.

Bishop Adjai Crowther of Nigeria draws up the Niger Delta pastorate scheme in which the Delta District is to be made a native pastorate and financed through native agency. It will be inaugurated the next January.

Edward Thomas Demby is ordained a priest while in Texas and will serve churches in Tennessee, Missouri, and Florida. He will also become the second African-American bishop (a suffragen, or assistant bishop) of the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Death in Windsor, Ontario, of Henry McNeal Turner, a controversial bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He had served as the first African-American chaplain in the United States Colored Troops.

Death of H. G. C. Moule, British New Testament scholar. Firmly evangelical, he had been associated with the Keswick movement.

Vladyka Gurias, archbishop of Suzdal, is arrested - one of many arrests he has endured at the hands of the Soviets. He will be sentenced to three years in concentration camps for "participation in a branch of the counter-revolutionary church-monarchist organization, ‘ The True Orthodox Church'."

English apologist C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter: 'The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.'

American missionary and martyr Jim Elliot wrote in his journal: 'Either take me to be with Thee, Savior, or put out the life of this old man as I draw near Thee in the flesh. Consume me, Fiery Lover, as Thou dost choose.'

The executive committee of the World Communion of Reformed Churches meets for a week in Ghana, homeland of its global leader, theologian and pastor Setri Nyomi.