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AUGUST

    
9, 378 --Turkey. The Roman Emperor Valens dies in the Battle at Adrianople while fighting the Visigoths. He is the son of Gratian. While Valens ruled in the eastern Roman Empire, his brother Valentinian I has ruled the Western Empire. Both he and his brother made manly professions of Christianity in the time of Julian the Apostate, but Valens is an Arian denying the Deity of Christ, and has actively persecuted orthodox Christianity sentencing its professors to banishment and confiscation of goods. One account maintains he deliberately burned a ship with thirty pastors aboard.
     He has taught Arianism to the Vandals.

9, 1534 --Italy, Jacopo de Vio, known as Thomas Cajetan dies. During the second session of the Fifth Lateran Council, he brought about the doctrine of Papal infallibility. When Henry VIII appealed for divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he wrote the decision rejecting his request.

9, 1788 --Massachusetts. Adoniram and Abigail Judson are blessed with a son whom they name in honor of his father. Mr. Judson is pastor of the Congregation-al Church in Malden. This infant will one day carry the Gospel to the people of Burma.

9, 1851 --Hong Kong. Karl Friedrich August Guetzlaff dies. He was one of the founders at Hong Kong of an association to train converted Chinese to become missionaries to their own people. He leaves behind a Japanese translation of the Gospel of John.

9, 1883 --England. Robert Moffat dies at the age of eighty-eight years, fifty-three years of which he has served as missionary. The place is Leigh, Kent, in England. He has translated the Bible into Tswana and has influenced his son-in-law, David Livingstone, to go northward where no missionary has gone. He met Mr. Livingstone during his only furlough home and described to him how he had often seen the smoke from a thousand villages where the Gospel had never been preached.

10, 258 --Italy. Last year, Emperor Valerian, goaded by Macrianus to revive persecution, prohibited church congregations to meet together while he exiled their pastors. This year he has ordered "bishops, presbyters and deacons" to be immediately put to death, and the rich and noble to be arrested, degraded, and if necessary killed.
     Lawrence is one of the seven deacons here. The Roman Prefect has heard the church has great treasures and has demanded Lawrence to surrender them. He has therefore gathered a crowd of old, crippled, poor and sick and has explained, "These are our treasures." Today he is martyred.

10, 955 --Germany. Otto I annihilates the Hagyars in the Battle of Lechfeld, and will now be able to establish civil and religious order among his subjects.

10, 1557 --France. Admiral Gaspard de Coligny holds the city of St. Quentin for seventeen days enabling the French to reorganize. He thus saves Paris; but on the surrender of St. Quentin today, he is carried as prisoner into the Netherlands until he is ransomed at great expense. During his confinement in the prisons of Philip II, he will be converted having time to read Calvinistic writings sent him by his brother Andelot.

10, 1785 --England. William Carey is sent out by his church to preach the Gospel "wherever God in His Providence might call him." He will be profoundly moved to become the first missionary of modern times after reading Captain Cook's Voyages.

10, 1874 --Iowa. Herbert Hoover is born today, but will be left an orphan at nine years of age. He will become the thirty-first President of the United States. As a young man he will become an engineer and will serve in China during the Boxer Rebellion. A Quaker, he will provide refuge to native Chinese Christians to help defend the foreign garrison against attacks by Chinese government soldiers, attacking the city of Tientsin.
 

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