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JANUARY

 13, 845 --Czechoslovakia. Fourteen Bohemian lords receive baptism from Louis the Fat as the country first becomes aware of the Gospel of Christ.

13, 1559 --Germany. Menno Simons dies. Though the Mennonites bear his name, he is not their founder; for they have existed in Holland seven years prior to his being converted. He is an Anabaptist. He wrote in 1544, “Up to this time, I have not been able to secure a little hut or a room in all the surrounding countries where my sick wife and our little children would have been able to live unmolested for a year, or even half a year.”

13, 1691 --England. In London, George Foxe dies. He is the founder of the “Society of Friends,” commonly known as the “Quakers.” His father, Christopher Foxe a weaver, was known as “Righteous Christer” by his neighbors, while his mother, Mary Lago, was from “the stock of the martyrs.” George Foxe tells us that “when all my hopes ... in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, oh! I heard a voice which said,    ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.’”
       He has often been arrested and imprisoned for violating laws forbidding unauthorized worship, as well as for refusing to take an oath, and for wearing his hat in court. He has visited Barbados and spent two years in English settlements in America.
      Once he went to a great “steeple house” to cry against the “hireling” ministry. “When I came there,” he declared, “the people looked like fallow ground, and the priest, like a great lump of earth, stood in the pulpit above. He took for his text these words of Peter: ‘we have also a more sure word of prophecy;’ and told the people this was the Scriptures. Now, the Lord’s power was so mighty upon me, and so strong in me that I could not hold; but was made to cry out: ‘Oh, no! It is not the Scriptures, it is the Spirit.’” He thus denied the doctrine of “Sole Scripture” enunciated during the Reformation, and that Scripture as well that teaches in all things Christ is to have the preeminence.
       “Some seek truth in books, some in learned men, but what they seek for is in themselves.” Thus he is humanistic.
      William Penn is about ready to sail to America with emigrants, but on his return from the funeral of Mr. Foxe, messengers will be sent to arrest him. Three times he will be questioned, and three times he will be acquitted. The delay in receiving his pardon, however, will completely wreck his fortunes: poverty will delay his return to the Delaware River. His wife will die and his oldest son will turn sickly on account of hardships. Even among his Quaker brethren, some will call him a “Jesuit,” a “Papist,” or a “Rogue.” But worse calumnies will be heaped upon him. Yet, in the season of almost universal war against him, he will keep his composure and remain stalwart in his principles.

13, 1836 --Scotland. Alexander Whyte is born in the Southmuir of Kirriemuir. “In God’s providence I was born in a poor rank of life,” he will say looking back on his life. At seven years of age, he will be handed a Gospel tract by Robert Murray McCheyne three months before McCheyne’s death by typhoid fever at the age of twenty-nine years. As a young man, he will sit under the teaching of Mr. Thomas Chalmers.

13, 1886 --New York. Mrs. Margaret Bottome founds the International Order of the King’s Daughters and Sons, an interdenominational young people’s society. Their watchword “In His Name” is inscribed on their badge, a silver Maltese cross, by the letters “I.H.N.”, and the date 1886.

 

 

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