Historical Writings

Spanish Jesuits led by Fray Batista Segura arrived in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia, for the purpose of converting the American Indians to Christianity. (Unfortunately, six months later, the entire group was massacred by the very Indians they had come to evangelize.)

Meletius Pegas becomes the Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria. He will endeavor to reunite the Greek and Coptic churches.

Baptism of John Eliot, American "apostle to the Indians." His evangelistic zeal led in 1649 to establishing the (missionary) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England.

Eight Quakers from England arrived in Boston and were immediately imprisoned by the local Puritan authorities. (The church-and-state amalgam of Puritanism looked upon non-ritual Quakerism with suspicion, regarding it as theologically apostate and politically subversive).

Rev. John Cuthbertson, America's first Scottish Covenanter pastor, arrives in America. His name appears frequently as a genealogical authority because he will keep a log of births and marriages. In it, he records over five thousand family names as well as notes of six hundred marriages and almost two thousand baptisms he performs in the course of seventy thousand miles of ministerial travels.

Death of Thomas McCrie, Scottish minister and church historian. He and three other divines had left the General Association Synod and formed the Constitutional Association Presbytery. He also wrote biographies of John Knox and Andrew Melville.

Birth of Grant C. Tullar, American Methodist evangelist and music publisher. He is remembered today for composing the tune to the hymn, "Face to Face with Christ My Savior."

Scottish missionary Mary Slessor boards the SS Ethiopia to sail to Calabar (Nigeria). She shares the ship with a cargo of liquor.

Death of Jesse Irvin Overholtzer, founder and first director of Child Evangelism Fellowship.

Anuarite Nengapeta takes her vows as a nun in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, becoming Sister Marie-Clémentine. During the Simba Rebellion, two different rebels attempt to force her to marry them, finally stabbing and shooting her when she refuses to break her vows.

The South American country of Bolivia adopted a new constitution that separated the powers of church and state.