MAY 31
Astonishing Alexander Cruden Was Half Mad but Spiritually Based (1700)
“TEXT Deuteronomy 1 13 Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you. also v. 15, So I took t...”
Fiske, John. The Beginnings of New England: Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty. St. Louis, 1889.
We Remember Pentecost (Whitsuntide) (1875)
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind...
Events
1567
Guido de Brès, author of the Belgic Confession, is hanged for his faith in Valenciennes.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1578
Italian archaeologist Antonio Bosio recognizes the importance of the accidental discovery of a subterranean burial place as an entrance to the catacombs of Rome and investigates. He will go on to find and explore many more underground burial places.
Authority for the date: Williams, Neville. Chronology of the Expanding World. David McKay Company Inc., 1969.1638
Thomas Hooker preaches the opening sermon at First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, declaring that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.” He will have a hand in producing an early American “constitution,” the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut in 1639.
Authority for the date: http://homepages.rpi.edu/~holmes/Hobbies/Genealogy2/ps28/ps28_470.htm1680
Death in Bremen of Joachim Neander, German hymnwriter and Pietist.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1752
Death in London of Sidney Griffifth from tuberculosis. She had been a strong supporter of the Calvinist Methodists, going so far as to leave her husband so that she could live with Methodists at Trevecca.
Authority for the date: Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals.1803
Presbyterians appoint Rev. Gideon Blackburn as their first missionary to the American Indians. A flambouyant preacher, he had once held a crowd of fifteen hundred listeners spellbound for two hours in a rainstorm while he preached. As a missionary and pastor, he will found churches and schools from Illinois to Alabama over a period of forty years, working along the western frontier of the United States. However, his reputation will suffer when it is learned he smuggled whiskey and speculated in land.
Authority for the date: Slosser, Gaius Jackson, ed. They Seek a Country. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955.1843
Methodist elder Orange Scott presides over a convention assembled at Utica, New York, to establish a new church, known as the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, because the Methodist Episcopal Church was willing to compromise on such issues as slaveholding but these Methodists were not.
Authority for the date: http://media.wesleyan.org/Orange%20Scott-en.pdf1847
Thomas Chalmers, a highly-regarded leader in the Scottish Free Church, is found dead in bed this morning in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Authority for the date: Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals.1907
Barbara A. Johnston receives the baptism of the Holy Ghost in a small Canadian church. The following year she will sail as Canada’s first Pentecostal missionary to India, where she will make translations, care for orphans, train women, manage mission work, marry, and die of acute kidney disease at thirty-two, after just three years of service.
Authority for the date: Caleb Courtney, “Barbara Johnston of Sarnia, Ontario.”2007
Dedication in North Carolina of the Billy Graham Library is attended by two former presidents of the United States: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Bush delivers the keynote address.
Authority for the date: www.billygraham.org.