SEPTEMBER 27
DISPUTES ABOUT CHRIST TORE AT ETHIOPIA (1680)
“Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a so...”
Smith, Preserved. The Age of the Reformation. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920.
Spiritual muscles need exercise (1858)
Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusts in you: yes, in the shadow of your wings will I make...
Events
1177
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.
Authority for the date: Baring-Gould, Sabine. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. London: Rivingtons, 1877.1435
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.
Authority for the date: http://orthodoxwiki.org/Solovetsky_Monastery1557
Philippina Graveron, a young Huguenot widow, is martyred at Paris.
Authority for the date: “Life Pictures from Church History, No. 17. Philippina Graveron. “ The Guardian. 8 (January, 1865) 10-11604
The Seminario de San Bartolome is established by the Jesuits, their first college in Colombia. Classes will commence January 1st the following year with seventy students.
Authority for the date: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colegio_Mayor_de_San_Bartolom1660
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).
Authority for the date: Delany, John. Saints for All Seasons. New York: Doubleday, 1979.1674
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 will prove the poems 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.
Authority for the date: Standard encyclopedias.1680
Iyasu I convenes a church council in Ethiopia at which he deposes leaders of a sect he dislikes.
Authority for the date: Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile1715
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.
Authority for the date: http://www.bartleby.com/209/575.html1787
Thought to be a runaway slave, George White is arrested while searching for his mother. He will become a famous itinerant African-American preacher.
Authority for the date: Hodges, Graham Russell. Black Itinerants of the Gospel. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998.1827
[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.
Authority for the date: http://www.findagrave.com1839
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.
Authority for the date: History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450–1990, edited by Klaus Koschorke, Frueder Ludwig, a1947
The Church of South India is inaugurated at Madras by the merger of three denominations: Anglicans, Methodists, and the South India United Church (Presbyterian/Congregationalist).
Authority for the date: “Church of South India.” http://www.csisynod.com/history.php1995
Death of Missionary Sam Sasser. In 1960 Sasser had begun serving as a missionary in the Marshall Islands and Samoa.
Authority for the date: “A Tribute to Dr. Sam Sasser.” http://across.co.nz/SamSasser.html