MAY 21
Charles Wesley Was Filled with the Holy Spirit (1738)
“Simply to Thy Cross I cling is but half of the Gospel. No one is really clinging to the Cross who is not at the same time faithfully following Christ...”
Boreham, Frank W. A Handful of Stars. New York, Cincinnati: Abingdon Press, 1922.
We Remember Ascension Day (1858)
Jesus said to his bereaved disciples, “If you loved me, you would rejoice, because I go to my Father” (John 14:28).O my...
Events
1382
A great earthquake in England destroys some churches in Kent and damages Canterbury Cathedral.
Authority for the date: Chambers’ Book of Days, from Stow’s Chronicles1535
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.
Authority for the date: Daniell, David. William Tyndale. Yale University Press, 2001.1536
William Farel preaches so effectively in Geneva that its people swear an oath with lifted hands “to live in the holy evangelical law and the word of God as it has been announced to us desiring to abandon all masses, images, idols and all which may pertain thereto to live in union and obedience to justice.” They also vow to set up a school for poor children and to educate their children.
Authority for the date: http://www.bookrags.com/research/farel-guillaume-eorl-05/1872
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.”
Authority for the date: Cyberhymnal.1874
Ira Sankey first sings “The Ninety and Nine” (the “Lost Sheep” song). His audience is deeply moved.
Authority for the date: Sankey, Ira David, 1840-1908. My Life and the Story of the Gospel Hymns and of Sacred Songs and Solos. New York: Ha1884
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.
Authority for the date: Moss, Vladimir. Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia.1891
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.
Authority for the date: http://genforum.genealogy.com/moon/messages/4477.html1921
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.
Authority for the date: Dictionary of African Christian Biography.1972
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.
Authority for the date: http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2565,00.html