JULY 14
Keble Pleaded with the English Church to Renew its Life (1833)
“About sixteen years since I commenced writing a History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and had actually brought it down to about the year 1810 but...”
Bangs, Nathan. History of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. 1.
Retribution is inevitable (1885)
Know this—that as surely as God sometimes punishes wholesale, so surely is he always punishing in detail. By that...
Events
664
Death of Deusdedit, the sixth Archbishop of Canterbury.
Authority for the date: Encyclopedia Britannica.1558
Bishop Bonner has Robert Miles, Stephen Cotton, John Slade, Robert Dynes, William Pikes, and Stephen Wight burned at the stake. The case is especially notorious because the six had been guilty of no more than praying and reading the Bible while no longer considering themselves Catholics. Furthermore a note from Bonner “scribbled in haste” will later be found requesting permission (apparently from Cardinal Pole) to burn them at Brentford, Essex, where it can be done more quickly and quietly than at St. Paul’s Cathedral, because imprisoning the six at his house has become an inconvenience.
Authority for the date: Chambers Book of Days (1881) and Marian martyr lists.1575
Death of Richard Taverner, a Bible translator and reformer in England.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1614
Death of Camillus de Lellis at Rome. After a wild life as a soldier, he underwent a conversion experience, served the sick, and founded the Agonizants, an order to care for the sick and minister to the dying.
Authority for the date: Schaff, Philip. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.1660
Fire ravages Constantinople (Istanbul) for four days, destroying four churches of the Koum-Kapou section.
Authority for the date: Pargoire, “Meletios Syrigos, Sa Vie & Ses Oeuvres”1792
Samson Occom’s wife finds him dead, having collapsed as he walked back to his house after writing an article in his study. Occom had been a notable evangelist among American Indians, a hymnwriter, and the principal fundraiser for the college which became Dartmouth University.
Authority for the date: Edwin Hatfield. The Poets of the Church.1809
Death of Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, a champion of contemplative prayer and the co-compiler (with Macarius of Corinth) of the Philokalia (Love of the Good), an anthology of spiritual writings by monks from the desert fathers to Gregory Palamas.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1849
Theodore Fliedner escorts four deaconesses to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where three days later a deaconness home will be solemnly dedicated, the beginning of the Lutheran deaconess work in the U.S. from which will spring many deaconness hospitals.
Authority for the date: Jane M. Bancroft. Deaconesses in Europe.1850
Death of Johann August Wilhelm Neander. Born David Mendel, a Jew, he had taken the name Neander at his conversion and become an influential theologian and church historian.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1857
Forty-seven-year-old Ting Ang, a trader in Fuchau, China, is baptized on this day, the first Methodist convert in China.
Authority for the date: Williams, Craven E. “Origins: Methodists in China.” www.gborocollege.edu/prescorner/china.html1988
Death of William Ofori-Atta (“Paa Willie”) a fervent Christian evangelist and politician in Ghana, known for his simple and incorruptible life. He had been imprisoned five times for being out of step with ruling powers.
Authority for the date: The Changing Face of Christianity; Africa, the West, and the World2013
After eighty years in which only Russian Orthodox priests have been permitted to baptize Albanians, the Albanian-Udi church (the Church of Aran or Arran) conducts its own baptism.
Authority for the date: Anar Alizade, Christianity in Azerbaijan