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MAY

 4, 1415 --Germany. At the eighth general session of the Council of Constance, forty-five articles from the writings of John Wycliffe, which have been condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the University of Paris and the University of Prague, and by the Council of Rome are re-affirmed. He is thus declared to be a “stiff-necked heretic” and under the ban of the Church. He will be called the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation”, yet is so hated by the Roman Church that this same Council will on May 6th decree his books be burned and that his remains be exhumed. Twelve years hence, at the command of Pope Martin V, his bones will be dug up and burned, and his ashes thrown into the Swift River.
     “All things that happen,” he has declared, “do come absolutely of necessity.”

4, 1776 --Rhode Island. Two months before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence the people of Rhode Island withdraw from the authority of Great Britain repudiating all allegiance to King George III.
      Since the custom has become so general that for the gain of their princes and the pay and plunder for themselves, German troops have been engaged in every great contest that has raged in Poland to Lisbon, from the North Sea to Naples, and have been occasionally arrayed in the same battle on opposite sides. King George, unable to supply the losses in his regiments by enlistments within his own realm, has hired the services of German troops. “The giving commissions to German officers to get men, in plain English, accounts to making me a kidnapper, which I cannot think a very honorable occupation.” However, he justifies the making of a contract with a Hanoverian Lieutenant-Colonel for raising four thousand recruits in Germany, granting for the purpose the use of his electoral dominions and the “inseparably necessary assistance and support of his field marshal.” The German diet has prohibited the practice.
      Lord Irnham declares, “The landgrave of Hesse and the Duke of Brunswick render Germany vile and dishonored in the eyes of all Europe, as a nursery of men for those who have most money. Princes who thus set their subjects to be sacrificed in destructive wars, commit the additional crime of making them destroy much better and nobler beings than themselves.”
     In England and Wales, soldiers have been impressed from the plough, the workshop, and the highway: no man has been safe from the inferior agents of the princes, who kidnap without scruple. In Hesse, almost every family mourns the loss of one of its members. Joy is not to be found among its peasantry. Most of the farm work is thrown upon women, whose large hands and feet, lusterless eyes, browned and yellowing skin will show the beauty of the race suffers, and will continue to do so for a generation, and all on account of the greed of their prince.
     During the last years of his life, King George III will suffer from hopeless insanity, the result of the Divine sentence of God against him.

4, 1792 --France. In a France ruled by revolutionary forces, the Pope is today burned in effigy before the palace with the populace applauding the act.

4, 1804 --England. Rev. Joseph Hughes, a Baptist minister has urged the formation of a society to circulate Bibles. Today in London, a meeting is held at which the British and Foreign Bible Society is formed.

4, 1881 --Connecticut. Mount Hermon School for Young Men is opened for boys between the ages of eight and twelve years. It is founded by Dwight Lyman Moody and is located in New Haven.

 

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