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APRIL

 11, 146 --Africa. The Roman Emperor Septimus Severus is born. When Partinax is murdered by his troops in 193, the troops will proclaim Septimus emperor. There will be Christians in his own household and during his reign, the Church at Rome enjoys peace, but persecutions of the church by the general populations in various provinces will be severe. In his reign, Irenaeus will be killed and Clement will be forced to flee.

11, 1713 --Netherlands. The Peace of Utrecht is signed and so ends the War of Spanish Succession, otherwise known as Queen Anne's War. Protestant succession is secured for England, and France is separated from Spain.

11, 1833 --England. In London, Rowland Hill dies. He was one of the founders of the Religious Tract Society and promoted the London Missionary Society as well as the British and Foreign Bible Society. He was an early advocate of vaccination.

11, 1836 --England. In Bristol, George Mueller opens his first orphanage on Wilson Street. By April 1844, a fourth orphanage will be opened, and in 1846, he will build his first building on Ashley Down. By 1869, he will open his fifth orphanage.

11, 1888 --England. Charles Haddon Spurgeon withdraws from the London Baptist Association which he has helped form in 1865. He has charged that in many churches and chapels, "The Atonement is scouted, the Inspiration of Scripture is derided, the Holy Spirit is degraded into an Influence, the Punishment of sin is turned into fiction, and the Resurrection into a Myth . . .. At the back of doctrinal falsehood comes a natural decline of spiritual life evidenced by a taste for questionable amusements and a weariness of devotional meetings."

12, 1631 --Massachusetts. Last year John Winthrop wrote his wife, whom pregnancy had detained in England, "We here enjoy God and Jesus Christ, and is not this enough? I thank God I like so well to be here, as I do not repent my coming. I would not have altered my course, though I had foreseen all these afflictions. I never had more content of mind."
     Later, he will declare, "Civil liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it. It is a liberty to that only which is good, just and honest. This liberty you are to stand for with the hazard not only of your goods, but if need be, of your lives. Whatsoever crosseth this is not authority, but a distemper thereof."
     Today, Governor John Winthrop and his council first write to Salem against Roger Williams. Mr. Williams will in turn go to Plymouth where his first child will be born in August 1633. It was said of Mr. Williams, that "From his childhood, the Father of Lights and Mercies touched his soul with a love to Himself, to His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus, and His Holy Scriptures." But Mr. Williams will soon run into difficulty at Plymouth because he will hold no communion with the Church of England on account of its intolerance, "for," he says, "the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience is most evidently and lamentably contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus." When the magistrates insist on the presence of every man at public worship, Mr. Williams will reprobate the law believing the worst statute in the English Code was that which merely enforced attendance upon a parish church. To drag to public worship the irreligious and the unwilling seemed only like requiring hypocrisy. "An unbelieving soul is dead in sin," and "no one should be bound to worship, or to maintain a worship against his own consent."
     "What!" his opponents will exclaim, "is not the laborer worthy of his hire?"
     “Yes," he will reply, "from them that hire him."
     He will protest that magistrates are but the agents of the people, or its trustees on whom no spiritual power in matters of worship can ever be conferred, since conscience belongs to the individual and is not the property of the body politic. And, he will assert, that "the civil magistrates may not intermeddle even to stop a church from apostasy and heresy;" that "his power extends only to the bodies and good and outward estate of men."
     In 1634, he will publish a paper in which he will assert a grant of land from an English king cannot be perfect, except the grantees "compounded with the natives."
     The same magistrates who punished John Eliot, the "Apostle to the Indians", because he censured their measures, could not brook the independence of Roger Williams.
 

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