Historical Writings

Leo I, the Great, is consecrated bishop of Rome (i.e.: pope). He will strengthen the authority of the church, suppress the Manichean heresy, and write important doctrinal letters.

Death in exile of theologian Conrad Vorstius, at Toningen, Holstein, Germany. He had been accepted for a time by the Dutch Remonstrants (Arminians) but apparently denied the Trinity and the pre-existence of Christ and was eventually exiled by the Calvinist Synod of Dort.

An American Indian tomahawks René Goupil for having made the sign of the cross over some Iroquois children. Goupil falls, gasping the name of Jesus. Earlier he had been beaten to the ground and assailed several times with knotted sticks and fists, had his hair, beard and nails torn off and his forefingers bitten through. [Note: some sources assign this event to September 23rd.]

The day before his death at age 56, English revivalist George Whitefield prayed: 'Lord Jesus, I am weary in thy work, but not of it.'

Death at Aventage, India, of Rajanaiken. Converted from Catholic to Protestant views while serving in the army, he had enjoyed such success winning souls that he left the military to became an evangelist and pastor. His former church then had persecuted him and stirred up mobs to kill him, but each time he managed to escape, dying at last of natural causes.

The first Roman Catholic Church in Boston was formally dedicated. (Catholics had not been permitted any religious freedom within this predominantly Puritan colony prior to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.)

The Leeds Mercury publishes Richard Oastler's letter deploring "Yorkshire Slavery" - oppressive labor conditions of women and children. "Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town....are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system ‘colonial' slavery."

Baptism of Pandita Ramabai, who becomes the most influential woman of India in the nineteenth-century.

While Reverend Seth Joshua prays, Evan Roberts is filled with the Holy Spirit. He will go on to lead a significant revival in Wales.

Edward Thomas Demby is consecrated as the first African American suffragan (assistant) bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Communists sentence Natalya Ivanovna Sundukova to death because she refuses to work for the Soviet state, declaring it is antichristian. She is convicted of "anti-Soviet propaganda among the prisoners and counter-revolutionary sabotage" and will be shot the following January.

Death of notable Welsh evangelist and revivalist Evan Roberts near Cardiff.

Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth wrote in a letter: 'God has very different people who like one another to different degrees.'

Death of Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary Betty Ann Olsen, while being held captive by the Viet Cong. She was sick with dysentery, malnutrition and tormented by fungus, infections, leeches, and ulcerated sores.

The New American Bible was published by the St. Anthony Guild Press. It represented the first English version Roman Catholic Bible to be translated from the original Biblical Greek and Hebrew languages. (The Rheims-Douai Version of 1610 had been based on Jerome's Latin Vulgate.)

In Washington, DC, the National Cathedral (officially, the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul) was completed after 83 years of construction. Begun in 1907, the Gothic edifice had been used in its incomplete form since 1912.