Historical Writings

A great earthquake in England destroys some churches in Kent and damages Canterbury Cathedral.

Henry Phillips betrays William Tyndale to Roman Catholic authorities in Antwerp. Phillips, an agent of Henry VIII, already has a long track record of villainy. Tyndale will be strangled and burned.

The General Assembly of Geneva, Switzerland officially embraced Protestantism by accepting the evangelical faith of the Swiss reformers.

Methodist hymnwriter Charles Wesley, 31, on the first anniversary of his religious conversion, penned the hymn, "O For a Thousand Tongues."

English revivalist George Whitefield wrote in a letter regarding Jesus' character; 'He was God and man in one person, that God and man might be happy together again.'

Belgian missionary priest Father Damien, 24, was ordained on the Island of Hawaii. Born Joseph de Veuster, the Picpus Father began a work among the lepers on the island of Molokai in 1873. Contracting the disease in 1884, Father Damien succumbed to it five years later.

Death on the Isle of Mull of hymnwriter Mary Macdougal Macdonald. The daughter of a Baptist cleric, she wrote in Gaelic. Her best known hymn is "Child in the Manger."

Ira Sankey first sings "The Ninety and Nine" (the "Lost Sheep" song). His audience is deeply moved.

Fourteen-year old Matrona Petrovna Frolova enters the Krasnoslobodsky Trinity women's monastery in Penza province. Four years later she will become a nun at Kazan. In 1907 she will receive a Red Cross medal for her work during the Russo-Japanese war. She becomes abbess of a Kazan monastery, where she will make every possible defense against its dismantling by the Soviets. She will be arrested many times in succeeding years, deprived of her right to vote, and shot in her old age.

George Louis Williams is ordained as a Congregational minister at Oberlin College, Ohio. He will become a missionary to China where he and his wife will work among opium addicts. Williams will be murdered in the Boxer Rebellion but his wife will heroically continue the mission work.

Baptism of Jeremiah Mahalu Kisula. He will become the first bishop in Tanzania for the Africa Inland Mission, recognized as a prayer-warrior, church planter, and author.

German Lutheran theologian and Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison: 'God alone protects; otherwise there is nothing.'

Laszlo Toth, wielding a hammer, and shouting "I am Jesus Christ - risen from the dead," attacks Michaelangelo's sculpture the Pieta, chipping the nose and left eye of the Madonna, and breaking off her left arm.