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JANUARY      

 28, 1547 --England. Henry VIII dies and along with him the bitterness of nearly unrelenting persecution against those who have stood opposed to his “Six Articles.” These Articles have reaffirmed six basic Catholic doctrines: 1.) Transubstantiation, 2.) Withholding the cup from the laity, 3.) Celibacy of the clergy, 4.) The Inviolability of monastic vows, 5.) The Saying of private masses, and 6.) The importance of Oral Confession. Denial of the first article has brought the penalty of Death, while the denial of one of the others has constituted imprisonment and forfeiture of property; but for an additional denial, the penalty is Death.

28, 1561 --France. The royal “Ordinance of Orleans” suspends persecution of the Huguenots.

28, 1907 --England. John A. Paten, at the age of eighty-three years, dies. He has been a pioneer missionary among the New Hebrides islands, and has described himself as “a Presbyterian Evangelical Calvinist of the Old Covenant Reformed Church of Scotland.”

29, 1737 --England. Thomas Paine is born in Norfolk. As his father is a Quaker, he will be reared in the faith of George Foxe and William Penn.
     On January 8, 1776, he will publish his classic work, Common Sense in which he asserts “The Design and End of Government is freedom and security. In the early ages of the world, mankind were equals in the order of creation; the heathen introduced government by kings, which the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproved. To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a lessening of ourselves, so the second might put posterity under the government of a rogue or a fool. Nature disapproves it; otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule. England, since the conquest, hath known some few good monarchs, but groaned beneath a much large number of bad ones.
     “The most plausible plea which hath ever been offered in favor of hereditary succession is that it preserves a nation from civil wars; whereas the whole history of England disowns the fact. Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the conquest, in which time there have been no less than eight civil wars and nineteen rebellions. In short, monarchy and succession have laid not this kingdom only, but the world, in blood and ashes.
     “ ...Volumes have been written on the struggle between England and America, but the period of debate is closed. Arms must decide the contest; the appeal was the choice of the king, and the continent hath accepted the challenge.
     “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent, of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in it, even to the end of time.
     “But Great Britain has protected us, say some. She did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account. America would have flourished as much, and probably more, had no European power had anything to do with governing her. France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be, our enemies as Americans, but as the subjects of Great Britain.
     “Britain is the parent country, say some; then the more shame upon her conduct. But Europe, and not England is the parent country of America; this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe; we claim brotherhood with every European Christian, and triumph in the generosity of the sentiment. Not one third of the inhabitants, even of this province, are of English descent. The phrase of parent or mother country, applied to England only, is false, selfish, narrow, and ungenerous; but, admitting that we were all of English descent, Britain, being now an open enemy, extinguishes every other name.

 

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