1558 - Dutch Anabaptist reformer Menno Simons wrote in a letter: 'Wherever there is a pulverized and penitent heart, there grace also is, and wherever there is a voluntary confession not gained by pressure, there love covereth a multitude of sins.'
1629 - In England, proto-Baptist minister and founder of Rhode Island, 26-year-old Roger Williams married Mary Barnard, daughter of a Puritan clergyman. Two years later, he and his wife sailed from Bristol to Massachusetts.
1739 - English revivalist George Whitefield wrote in a letter: 'My brother, entreat the Lord that I may grow in grace, and pick up the fragments of my time, that not a moment of it may be lost.'
1957 - British apologist C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter: 'May it please the Lord that...faith unimpaired may strengthen us, contrition soften us and peace make us joyful.'
1990 - More than 400 American Roman Catholic theologians charged that the Vatican had been throttling church reforms and imposing "an excessive Roman centralization." They contended that the Vatican had undercut a greater role for women, slowed the ecumenical drive for Christian unity and undermined the collegial functioning of national conferences of bishops.
© 1987-2009, William D. Blake. Used by permission of the author, from
Almanac of the Christian Church
