Historical Writings

Pope Alexander III writes a letter to the legendary Prester John, supposedly Christian king over much of central Asia. He entrusts this to Philip, his physician, to deliver. Philip does not survive the attempt to convey it.

Repose (death) of Savvaty. He was the inspiration behind the famous Solovetsky monastery, having settled as a hermit on one of the almost uninhabitable islands of the White Sea in northern Russia.

Through the encyclical "Regimini militantis ecclesiae," Pope Paul III officially approved the Society of Jesus, a body of priests organized by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 for missionary work. Today, the Jesuits constitute the largest Catholic teaching order in the United States.

Philippina Graveron, a young Huguenot widow, is martyred at Paris.

The Seminario de San Bartolome is established by the Jesuits, their first college in Columbia. Classes will commence January 1st the following year with seventy students.

Death of St. Vincent de Paul. After giving his life to serving the poor, he had founded the first Confraternity of Charity, the Congregation of the Mission, and the Daughters of Charity (the first non-monastic women's order completely given to care of the sick and poor).

Death of Thomas Traherne. His poetry, considered worthless at his death, will be rediscovered by William T. Brooke who will point them out to Alexander Grosart much later at an outdoor book stall. Bertram Dobell later proved they were the work of Trahern. Trahern's poems will come to be recognized as among the best of the seventeenth century minor poets, brimming with childlike delight in God's works.

Death at Charterhome, London, of Dr. Thomas Burnet, an English theologian, and author of Sacred Theory of the Earth, popular in its day. He had tried to explain Noah's flood by describing the antedeluvian world as a hollow, oval-shaped object filled with water.

Birth of Robert Robinson, English clergyman and author of the hymn, "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." He was converted at age 20 under the preaching of revivalist George Whitefield.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S. was founded on this date, following the American Revolutionary War, when U.S. Anglicans met in Philadelphia to create a denomination independent from and autonomous of the Church of England.

Thought to be a runaway slave, George White is arrested while searching for his mother. He will become a famous itinerant African-American preacher.

[despite his tombstone, which says September 26] Death of Freeborn Garrettson, for many years a leading Methodist itinerant pastor, later the presiding elder in the state of New York.

G. Tradescant Lay, an English physician, asserts at the first annual meeting of the Medical Missionary Society in Canton, China, that he will endeavor while he has life, to create a nearly universal system to freely give the benefits of “rational medicine” (as opposed to pre-scientific medicine) to the world’s poor.

The Church of South India was officially formed by the merger of three denominations: the Anglicans, the Methodists and the South India United Church (a Presbyterian and Congregational union). Historically, it was the first union ever between episcopal and non-episcopal bodies.

The dramatic anthology series "Crossroads" aired for the last time over ABC television. Depicting the work of various clergymen, the series had premiered in October 1955.

Death of Missionary Sam Sasser. In 1960 Sasser had begun serving as a missionary in the Marshall Islands and Samoa.