Historical Writings

Death at Winkel (near Mainz) of Christian educator, encyclopedist, and archbishop Rabanus Maurus.

Pope Eugene IV published the encyclical "Cantante domino." It asserted that the biblical canon of the Roman Catholic Church contains both the 66 protocanonical books (i.e., the complete Protestant Bible) and 12 deuterocanonical (aka "apocryphal") books 78 writings in all.

English reformer John Rogers is burned at the stake at Smithfield, the first of many martyrs in the reign of Mary Tudor.

Muslims in Aleppo execute Joseph of Aleppo, claiming he had promised to become a Muslim but reneged. He seals his fate by testifying against Islamic beliefs at his hearing.

Elizabeth Fry, reared a Quaker, has a conversion experience in Norwich, England, under the preaching of William Savery, an American Friend. She will become a notable prison reformer.

The Cumberland Presbyterian Church was organized in Tennessee as an outgrowth of the Great Revival of 1800. Standing between Calvinism and Arminianism, the denomination holds a "medium theology" which affirms unlimited atonement, universal grace, conditional election, eternal security of the believer and salvation of all children dying in infancy.

Birth of George Bennard, American Methodist evangelist. He penned over 300 Gospel songs during his lifetime, but is primarily remembered today for one: "The Old Rugged Cross."

English poet and devotional writer Frances Ridley Havergal, 37, penned the words to the popular hymn of commitment, "Take My Life and Let It Be [Consecrated, Lord, to Thee]."

In South Africa, the parents of teenager Manche Masemola kill her and bury her by a granite rock. Masemola had refused to abandon Christianity, worshiping in the Anglican Church at every opportunity. Decades later, she will be honored with a statue at Westminster Abbey.

American missionary and martyr Jim Elliot resolved in his journal: 'I may no longer depend on pleasant impulses to bring me before the Lord. I must rather respond to principles I know to be right, whether I feel them to be enjoyable or not.'

Merger in Santiago, Chile, of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church and the First Methodist Pentecostal Church of Chile, enlarging the International Pentecostal Holiness Church to over two million members.