1724 HT: Dan Graves If Beethoven is the poster child for unexpected results from a faulty ancestry, Henry Venn could stand for predictable results from a good line. His great-great grandfather William Venn became a Protestant clergyman during the Reformation. William’s son Richard was dispossessed of his church position by Parliament because he favored the…
1546 HT: Dan Graves On this day, March 1, 1546, soldiers from St. Andrews Castle ushered George Wishart to his place of death. Some beggars at the roadside pleaded with him for alms as he passed, but he replied that with his hands tied, he could give them nothing. He might have added that…
1546 George Wishart, a Scottish reformer, is arrested by Roman Catholic authorities, and will be burned to death as a heretic the next day by order of Cardinal David Beaton. 1638 HT: Dan Graves Scotland took seriously the religious reforms introduced in the sixteenth century by John Knox, which included church rule by elders. When…
398 HT: Dan Graves John Chrysostom resisted, pleaded. The Imperial messengers were deaf to his pleas. They had their secret orders. He was coming with them whether he wished it or not. Outside Antioch they transferred him into a royal chariot and rode for Constantinople. There, in the capital of the Roman Empire he…
303 HT: Dan Graves DIOCLETIAN became Roman emperor in 284. Under him, the empire experienced its cruelest and most systematic persecution of Christians. To share the load of governance, he made Maximian his co-emperor and Galerius and Constantius junior emperors. To bind Galerius to himself, Diocletian gave him his daughter Valeria as a wife, allegedly…
155 HT: Dan Graves POLYCARP HOLDS A SPECIAL PLACE in church history. He was an intermediary between the age of the apostles and the church of the second century, as well as being one of the earliest martyrs about whom we have an eyewitness account. His writings quote from most of the books of the…
1680 HT: Dan Graves When Thomas Goodwin was born in 1600, he was a premature baby. Consequently, his health was a rather shaky. But since his godly parents hoped to see him in the pulpit, rather than farming or soldiering, bodily weakness was not a serious impediment to his future. The couple provided their son…
1945 HT: Dan Graves In China, Eric Liddell asked his students if they believed Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. When they said they did, he would say “let’s add it on to the end of the Apostles Creed and when you finish saying the Apostles Creed say, ‘I believe in the Sermon on the Mount’.” This…
1636 HT: Dan Graves Not many pastors rise at 3 A.M. to be sure they have sufficient time for God and their people. Samuel Rutherford was one who did. Thus it came as a great blow to him when he was compelled to leave the folk he loved. Rutherford had published an Apology of Divine Grace against…
1678 HT: Dan Graves Next to the Bible, John Bunyan’s allegory of a pilgrim toiling toward the Celestial City is the best-selling Christian book ever written. Like the King James Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress gave the English language many phrases. “Vanity Fair,” for example, became the title of William Makepeace Thackeray’s best-known novel and of a British magazine.…