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NOVEMBER
 

21, 1718 --France. This evening, a large number of Huguenots assemble. After prayer, Antoine Court will be ordained to the ministry. He will address those present of the responsible duties of the ministry and of the necessity and advantages of preaching. He will then ask for prayer. With Mr. Court upon his knees, Mr. Corteiz, the elderly pastor will draw near and place a Bible upon his head in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and with the authority of the Synod, he will give him power to exercise all the functions of the ministry. Cries of joy will rend the air; then after further prayer, the assembly will break up in the darkness of the night.
     It is a time of great persecution in France against the French Protestants. As a result, the Huguenots must meet in secret places, "in dens, and caves of the earth". For this reason they refer to their church as the "Church in the Desert" in allusion to Revelation 12:6 --"And the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared of God that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days."

21, 1752 --Connecticut. Mr. Elisha Paine, a Baptist minister, has settled on Long Island, but this fall has come to Canterbury to purchase some necessities for his family. A tax collector has arrested him and he has thus been confined to prison because he has not paid the tax supporting state's paying the salary of ministers.
     Today from his prison at Windham, he writes, "I cannot but marvel to see how soon the children will forget the sword that drove their fathers into this land and take hold of it as a jewel, and kill their grandchildren therewith. O that men could see how far this is from Christ's rule; that all things that we would have others do unto us, that we should do even so unto them! ...I suppose he (Rev. Cogswell) has heard me as often as I ever have him. Yet he hath taken by force from me two cows and one steer, and now my body held in prison, only because the power is in his hands."

21, 1753 --Connecticut. The Corporation of Yale College meets and resolves that no member of the Corporation or officer of instruction therein, should hereafter be admitted, until he has given his express consent to the ancient forms of orthodoxy, renouncing all opposing views. As this is known as a condition of their admission if any should afterwards come to embrace opposing views, common honesty would oblige them to admit it and to resign their positions. And when by act of their Legislature to establish a professorship of divinity in the college, the professor will himself take great pains to prove only orthodox ministers should ever be elected as members of the college corporation.
     However, under a liberalizing influence, the conviction that unorthodox men ought to be expelled from membership will be dispelled as "bigotry and tyranny" which they will say, "degrades men from their just rank, into the class of brutes; It damps their spirits; it suppresses acts; it extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breast of those who are enslaved by it . . .. " "There are virtuous and candid men in all sects," they will say, and "all such are to be esteemed. There are also vicious men and bigots in all sects; all such ought to be despised." Such are the words of Jonathan Mayhew who will make such "advancements" in the Christian faith in five years as to maintain the doctrine of the Trinity to be of Popish or ecumenical origin and that it was a contemptible doctrine. He will further declare, "that the Scripture teaches no such doctrine as that of God imputing the perfect righteousness of Christ to sinners for justification."

21, 1905 --New York. At the annual meeting of the National Federation of Churches and Christian Workers held in Washington, D. C. in 1903, it was decided upon to request "the highest ecclesiastical or advisory bodies of the Evangelical churches to appoint representative delegates to a National conference." Thirty denominations representing seventeen million members have responded. Nearly five hundred delegates have met here since November 15th, and today the convention terminates. It has adopted a plan to create a "Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America" and will conduct its first meeting in December 1908. This Council declares it "has no authority to draw up a common creed or form of government or worship, or in any way to limit the full autonomy of the Christian bodies adhering to it;” but is a national movement “for the prosecution of work that can be better done in union than in separation."


 

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