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1801 CONCORDAT IS RATIFIED BETWEEN NAPOLEON AND PIUS VII Following the French Revolution of 1789 and the de-Christianization of France in the 1790s, Pope Pius VII (1740-1823) at long last reached an agreement with Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), then first consul of France. The concordat was ratified on June 16, 1801, and "restored the altars" of Christianity. It also declared that sixteen pre-revolution bishops would be reinstated and thirty-two new bishops would be installed. Although this restoration of the church recognized that the majority of French citizens were Roman Catholics, the favorable terms were hindered significantly only a year later by the publication of Napoleon's Organic Articles, in which he assumed complete control of the French church. The Organic Articles remained law until 1905.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE CANE RIDGE REVIVAL August 6, 1801
Some called it America's Pentecost.
The state of the American frontier in the late 1700's was one of growing religious indifference. Christianity was on the decline as the settlers began to experience economic success.
Settlers went to the frontier to get land, not religion. Referring to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1795, Methodist James Smith feared that "the Universalists, joining with the Deists, had given Christianity a deadly stab hereabouts."
James McGready arrived in Kentucky in 1798 to pastor three small frontier Presbyterian churches. His fiery preaching and vivid depictions of heaven and hell snatched the apathy from his congregations. When the Red River church started to plan their annual Communion gathering in 1800, they decided to invite other local Presbyterian and Methodist churches to participate. The typically reverent, quiet Communion service of Presbyterianism turned surprisingly emotional and ecstatic. The ministers and parishioners alike were amazed at how God had worked in their midst. Although somewhat wary of emotionalism, the ministers began to plan a larger Communion service weekend for the following summer at Cane Ridge.
Word of the upcoming camp meeting had spread throughout the frontier. On August 6, 1801, the Cane Ridge Revival began. For seven days, thousands of people descended on the Cane Ridge meetinghouse in Bourbon County, Kentucky, about twenty miles west of Lexington. They gathered together to worship, fellowship, and celebrate the Lord's Supper.
Friday and Saturday were solemnly observed, devoted to fasting and praying in preparation for Sunday's Communion. But as thousands more than expected arrived, the crowds grew restless and sabotaged the traditional Presbyterian routine. One after the other, preachers began to take the stage, with the large crowd occasionally growing into a frenzy. Some ministers encouraged ecstasy and emotionalism, while others fought to maintain control of their audience and to return the focus to the solemnity of the Lord's Supper.
The Cane Ridge meeting was both a beginning and an end. It was the end of the long-preserved Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition of lengthy, highly ritualized large-group Communion services. The emotional events of Cane Ridge forced the end of that tradition. The meeting was also the beginning of a new institution: organized camp meetings and revivals that turned the American frontier from apathy back to Christianity.
Estimates of attendance at Cane Ridge vary widely from ten to twenty thousand. There were one to three thousand reported conversions. The banner year for camp meetings was 1811, when as many as one-third of all Americans attended at least one such meeting.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1801 CANE RIDGE REVIVAL ESTABLISHES CAMP MEETINGS Camp meetings were a significant part of the Second Great Awakening, the revival that swept the United States from 1787 to 1825. The Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, from August 6 to 13, 1801, was the first large camp meeting. It lasted for six days and drew a crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people from many different denominations. As many as three thousand conversions were reported. The success of the revival at Cane Ridge established the camp meeting as an integral part of frontier religious life during the early 1800s. Ten years later in 1811, it was estimated that one-third of all Americans had attended a camp meeting.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1802 YALE COLLEGE WITNESSES REVIVAL
When the Second Great Awakening in America reached Yale College in 1802, one-third of Yale's students converted, largely due to the preaching of Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), the president of Yale. Dwight was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the great theologian and preacher of the First Great Awakening. From Yale, the revival spread to other colleges and into the American West.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1804 THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY IS FORMED The formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1804 ushered in the aggressive modern movement of distributing Bibles. The goal of the BFBS was "to encourage the wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures, without note or comment" to the colonies of Europe and England, in addition to all English churches. Founded by a predominantly Anglican group of evangelicals, the BFBS started its work in India around 1811 and inspired the establishment of similar societies in America (1816) and Russia (1819).
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1806 HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IS DISSOLVED On August 6, 1806, due to persistent pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor Francis II (1786-1835) resigned and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. By the mid-seventeenth century, lack of imperial reform form and the stress of the Protestant Reformation had weakened the empire's relationship with the church, making it vulnerable to Napoleon's assault. It was replaced by Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1806 JEWISH NOTABLES AND SANHEDRIN ASSEMBLE IN FRANCE In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who had crowned himself emperor of the French, called together an assembly of Jewish notables, composed of delegates who were elected by the Jews of his empire. Napoleon then assembled a group of rabbis he called the Sanhedrin, to give religious sanction to the assembly's decisions. The meeting resulted in a number of resolutions, including an affirmation that French Jews did indeed love their fellow non-Jewish Frenchmen, and a decree giving French courts authority over Jewish courts. It was the Sanhedrin that attracted most of the public attention. Since it met secretly, it fueled conspiratorial speculation and contributed to anti-Semitism in France.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1806 SAMUEL MILLS LEADS PRAYER MEETING IN HAYSTACK Samuel Mills (1783-1819) was converted in his youth during the revivals that swept through New England. The son of a Congregational minister, Mills attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There he set up the Society of the Brethren, whose purpose was to spread the gospel to the world. One day in 1806, the group found themselves caught in a rainstorm while they met for prayer. Mills led the young men to the shelter of a haystack where the prayer meeting could continue. There at the haystack, four of the five committed themselves to being foreign missionaries. This was the beginning of the foreign missionary movement among students in America and led to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which sent the first American missionaries to India in 1812.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1807 ENGLISH PARLIAMENT VOTES TO ABOLISH THE SLAVE TRADE In 1807, British Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade—the first victory in the campaign to emancipate slaves in the British Empire. The abolitionist movement, begun in the late eighteenth century, was led by William Wilber-force (1759-1833) and the Clapham Sect (est. 1792). He was joined by friends John Newton (1725-1807), author of the hymn "Amazing Grace," and Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), who spent his fortune on the battle. Campaigning throughout England and in the House of Commons, the group used the increasingly popular values of liberty and happiness to undermine the main arguments for slavery, which were namely, economics and national policy. Due to their convincing arguments and ability to influence public opinion, the abolitionists were able to achieve victory in Parliament. The abolition of slavery itself was adopted in 1833.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1807 ROBERT MORRISON ARRIVES IN CHINA Robert Morrison (1782-1834), the youngest son of Scottish Presbyterian parents, felt called to missions in his early twenties. While attending a Con-gregationalist seminary near London, Morrison heard the London Missionary Society call for missionaries to China. Morrison responded, and after two more years training in medicine and Mandarin Chinese and a sea voyage of nine months, landed in Macao on September 4, 1807. Locating in Canton, Morrison immersed himself in language and culture study, becoming fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and written Chinese. In 1810, Morrison completed translating the book of Acts, and in 1819, the entire Bible. With the Bible translation as a text, Morrison helped found an English-Chinese College that trained Chinese in evangelism. Morrison, the father of Protestant missions in China, died in Canton in 1834.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1808 ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IS FORMED
In 1808, Andover Theological Seminary was formed on the campus of Andover Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was the first theological seminary in the United States. The seminary began as a reaction against the appointment of a Unitarian, Henry Ware (1764-1845), as professor of divinity at Harvard. The new seminary initially required all faculty to subscribe to the Andover Creed, grounded in the theology of John Calvin (1509-1564) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1578). In 1931, the seminary merged with Newton Theological Institute to become Andover Newton Theological School.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
FOREIGN MISSIONS IS ESTABLISHED
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was the first foreign missionary society organized in America. It was established in Massachusetts as a Congregational Church ministry in 1810, following the petition of several Andover Seminary students—including Samuel Mills (1783-1819) and Adoniram Judson (1788-1850)—to go to the mission field. In 1812, Adoniram Judson and fellow missionaries set out for India. This voyage was followed by missions to the Near East in 1818 and to Hawaii in 1819. The primary tasks of ABCFM missionaries were evangelism and church planting. These activities were supplemented and aided by translating Scripture, while social concerns were of secondary importance. Within fifty years the ABCFM established missions in Asia, China, Japan, and Africa, as well as among American Indians and African Americans.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1810 REFORM JUDAISM BEGINS
In the early nineteenth century, several Jewish rabbis in Germany started reforming Jewish traditions. In 1810, Rabbi Israel Jacobson (1768-1818) in Seesen, Germany, began to use the German language instead of Hebrew for liturgy and sermons, and to incorporate organ music. In addition to the service changes, he called the synagogue a temple. Jacobson later moved to Berlin and began a temple in his home. By 1818, a reform temple had also been built in Hamburg. Berlin and Hamburg, having many wealthy and educated Jews, became centers of Reform Judaism. The reformers' general desire was to reestablish Judaism as a religious system, de-emphasizing the identification of Jews as a nation. In Reform Judaism, rituals contributing to the formation of a Jewish-nationalist identity were removed or pronounced insignificant.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1811 CAMPBELLS FOUND THE DISCIPLES OF CHRIST
Following futile attempts to unify churches that had separated from the Church of Scotland, Scots-Irish minister Thomas Campbell (1763-1854) immigrated to America in the early nineteenth century. Hoping to establish unity among Christians, Campbell and his son Alexander (1788-1866) toured Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. The message they preached was that there were only two basic requirements for Christian unity, confessing Jesus as Lord and baptism by immersion. In 1811, Alexander Campbell organized the Disciples of Christ. In 1832, they united with the Christian Church of Barton Stone (1772-1844). From this union, the Churches of Christ later emerged.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
UNDER A HAYSTACK
June 29, 1810
Foreign mission organizations are common in America today, but in the 1800s there was not a single foreign missions board in the United States. God was to begin the American foreign missions movement in a very unlikely place—a haystack!
Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was just twelve years old in 1805, when the Second Great Awakening visited the school. In the spring of 1806, Samuel Mills, the son of a Congregational minister, joined the freshman class with a passion to spread the gospel around the world. He began leading a prayer group of four other students who had been touched by the revival. They met three afternoons a week in the maple grove of nearby Sloan's Meadow.
One sultry day in August 1806, a violent thunderstorm interrupted their prayer time and they took refuge on the sheltered side of a large haystack. There in the sanctuary of the haystack, Mills directed their prayers to their personal missionary obligations. God spoke to them as they prayed, and four of the five committed themselves to serving God overseas if he so led. The Haystack Prayer Meeting was not only the beginning of the first American student mission society, but was also the beginning of the foreign missions movement itself in America. In two years their prayer group took the name The Society of the Brethren, with the motto "We can do it if we will."
Two years later many of the group enrolled at Andover Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, where they were joined by Adoniram Judson and others interested in world missions. There they continued to believe that God was calling them to the mission field, but there was no foreign missions board in America to send them.
The students took their problem to the seminary faculty and to pastors in the area. In response, the teachers and pastors met at the home of Moses Stuart, a member of the Andover faculty. Their advice was that the students submit their case to the General Association, a body made up of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, which was to begin meetings the following day in Bradford, Massachusetts.
Acting on this advice, the students wrote a letter explaining their plight and soliciting the association's help. Adoniram Judson, Samuel Mills, and two others signed the letter. Originally Luther Rice and James Richards also signed but removed their names so there wouldn't be too many, lest the number of potential missionary candidates needing support would scare the Association.
Two days later, on June 29, 1810, the Association responded to their request by forming the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first foreign missions board in America. A year later the board sent out Adoniram Judson and three other men with their families as their first missionaries.
From that humble beginning, the foreign missions force of the United States has grown to more than sixty thousand missionaries sent out by hundreds of missions boards.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1812 ADONIRAM JUDSON SAILS FOR INDIA
While attending Andover Seminary, Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) played a significant role in establishing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The inaugural mission to India in 1812 included Judson and his wife, Ann (1789-1826), who became missionaries to Burma. Judson was convinced that to be effective, he needed to master the local language and religion, which was Theravada Buddhism. In addition to devoting his time to preaching and training pastors and evangelists, Judson created a Burman dictionary and translated Scripture into their native language. Returning to America only once, Judson spent most of his life in Burma. In 2000, there were 2 million Christian believers in Myanmar (formerly Burma), and 40 percent of the Karen people, the tribe to whom Judson directed his ministry, were Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1812 CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY IS ESTABLISHED
Formed in the late eighteenth century, the Society for Missions in Africa and the East, was one of the first major evangelical Anglican mission groups. Its first mission to Sierra Leone in 1804, however, was carried out by German Lutherans because no English ministers were able to go. Following this mission, the society sent English laymen to New Zealand in 1809, and men from both Germany and England sailed to southern India a few years later. In 1812, the society was established officially and renamed the Church Missionary Society. Among the first to send single women into the field, the organization took the name Church Mission Society in 1995 and has remained an Anglican organization.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1812 PRINCETON SEMINARY IS FOUNDED
Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) had a conversion experience at the age of seventeen, causing him to leave his position as a private tutor and enroll at Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) to study theology. He then entered the Presbyterian ministry, first as an itinerant minister on the Ohio-Virginia frontier, and later as pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly. In his final address as moderator in 1808, he suggested the formation of a Presbyterian seminary in America. As a result of his leadership, Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812 in Alexander's home of Princeton, New Jersey. Alexander was its sole faculty member for the first year, and he continued teaching there until his death in 1851.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1813 J. A. NEANDER IS APPOINTED PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY
Johann August Wilhelm Neander (1789-1850) was born David Mendel in a Jewish family in Germany. At age seventeen, he was converted to Christ and changed his name. He was initially interested in theology, but church history began to captivate his mind. In 1813, he was appointed professor of church history in Berlin. Many students enjoyed Neander for his excellent scholarship, his sacred devotion, and his ability to highlight unique details in history. Neander believed that church history was an essential part of the church's mission and ministry, rather than a mere academic pursuit. His most detailed works, History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church and A General History of the Christian Religion and Church, were translated in the 1880s, extending Neander's influence to the English-speaking world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1813 INDIA IS OPENED TO MISSIONS
Prior to 1813, mission work in India was discouraged because the East India Company feared missionary activity could give Indians a negative impression of Europeans. Although some missionaries, like William Carey (1761-1834), managed to obtain entrance into the country, it was not until the East India Company Charter was renewed in 1813 that the official missionary restrictions were lifted. This new freedom to pursue missions made it possible for groups from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark to become more active, and by the late twentieth century British missionaries were outnumbered by Americans. The British government endorsed missionary schools willing to consent to secular control but, aside from abolishing certain Hindu practices, maintained religious neutrality in India.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1814 JESUITS ARE REESTABLISHED
Though Pope Clement XIII (1693-1769) suppressed the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 1773, the society continued on in the United States, England, Germany, and Austria. With support and protection from many in these countries, the order grew and was able to regain much of its former strength. The Jesuits were finally restored in 1814, when Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) brought the order into full communion with the church. Today, the Jesuit order is a major resource for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1815 POPE PIUS VII REESTABLISHES THE GHETTO OF ROME
The conquering armies of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) broke down the Jewish ghettos wherever they encountered them, including the ghetto in Rome, which was nearly two hundred years old. Like other European ghettos, the Roman Ghetto separated the Jews from the rest of the population and forced desolation and poverty on the Jewish population. The Roman Ghetto, as well as those in other papal territories, was perhaps unique in that it was established by the church under the decree of Pope Paul IV (1476-1559). In 1815, after Napoleon's defeat, Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) reestablished the ghetto of Rome, forcing Jews to live within its confines. While many ghettos were reestablished in the nineteenth century, the Roman Ghetto was among the few where the walls Napoleon destroyed were actually rebuilt.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY IS FOUNDED
Modeled after the successful British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), the American Bible Society (ABS) was founded in 1816 in New York City by representatives of regional Bible societies throughout the country. Within a year, forty-one local and regional societies became auxiliary members of the ABS. John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) and Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) were among the ABS' first officials. As Bibles became plentiful in America, the ABS expanded their efforts to the translation and international distribution of Bibles in other languages.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY IS FORMED
The American Colonization Society originally was founded in 1816, by Robert Finley (1772-1817) with the help of the United States government. The society's purpose was to return freed slaves to Africa, and it established the nation of Liberia to that end. The society also raised money to buy slaves and give them freedom. The founders hoped that the return of Christian freed men to Africa would be a means that God would use to evangelize the African continent. The society itself experienced many setbacks in seeing its vision come to fruition. The first group of 114 that returned to Africa was almost completely wiped out by disease. When the society's authority to govern Liberia was denied by the British, an independent government was set up in 1847 that was both sponsored by and modeled after the United States. By 1867, approximately ten thousand freed slaves had been transported to Liberia.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 NETTLETON LEADS THE BRIDGEWATER REVIVAL As America's Second Great Awakening waned, Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844) tapered off his traveling evangelistic ministry and became pastor of the Congregational church in Bridgewater, Connecticut. The Bridgewater church was struggling with issues of pride and disharmony, and Nettleton's sermons addressing the need for love and unity seemed to have little effect. He decided that if his preaching was ineffectual, maybe God would use his silence. So, one Sunday in 1816, Nettleton did not show up for church, leaving a room full of waiting people. This unique rebuke by their pastor stirred the congregation into organizing a day of prayer and confession to deal with the problems in their church. By the time Nettleton returned to the Bridgewater pulpit, the church was experiencing an exciting revival that soon spread to other towns.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 HALDANE BEGINS GENEVA'S SECOND REFORMATION Robert Haldane (1764-1842) left Scotland in 1816 in order to begin a new ministry on the European continent. He first went to France but then settled in Geneva, Switzerland. A revival began quietly among divinity students at a local Geneva college. Groups of twenty to thirty young men gathered daily at Haldane's apartment after their seminary classes to hear him discuss theology. These young men reported learning more from Haldane during those afternoons than during their entire course of study at the seminary. They in turn became the carriers of revival throughout Switzerland and the French-speaking world, extending as far as Quebec, Canada, in what soon became known as Geneva's Second Reformation.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 RICHARD ALLEN IS APPOINTED BISHOP OF AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH Richard Allen (1760-1831) was born a slave in the United States. At seventeen, he was converted to Christ through the Methodists and started preaching the gospel. After teaching himself to read and write, Allen purchased his freedom. Continuing to preach, he worked several trades and headed for Philadelphia. There Allen worshiped regularly at St. George's Methodist Church. However, upon learning that the church had decided black parishioners could sit only in the balcony, Allen and his black friend Absalom Jones (1746-1818) walked out of the church, followed by other black parishioners. Allen and Jones then founded the Free African Society, the first American organization founded by African Americans for African Americans. A few years later, Allen founded Bethel Church in Philadelphia for black Methodists. Due to the uneasiness of white Methodists toward them, Allen's congregation joined other black churches to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen was appointed its first bishop in 1816.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 ROBERT MOFFAT GOES TO AFRICA While apprenticing as a gardener at High Leigh, Cheshire, England, Robert Moffat (1795-1883) was converted through the Methodists and, while attending a missionary meeting, he decided to devote his life to foreign missions. With little education and the somewhat hesitant support of the London Missionary Society, Moffat set sail for South Africa in 1816. He served for more than fifty years, mostly in Great Namaqualand (West Namibia) and in Kuruman, Bechuanaland (Botswana). He was a proficient translator of Bechuana, completing translations of the Bible, various hymns, The Pilgrim's Progress, and textbooks in their native language. In addition, his evangelistic efforts along with those of his son-in-law, David Livingstone (1813-1873), saw the establishment of many churches with trained African pastors. Known as the father of South African missions, Moffat was awarded an honorary doctorate by Edinburgh University in 1872.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1817 ELIZABETH FRY ORGANIZES RELIEF IN NEWGATE PRISON Born to English Quakers, Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845) underwent an awakening while listening to the preaching of an American Quaker. She married an affluent London merchant in 1800, who supported her ministry to the needy. While raising eleven children, Elizabeth donated clothes and medicine, rallied for school enrollment, encouraged Bible reading, started more than five hundred libraries in British coastguard stations, and founded the "Nursing Sisters of Devonshire Square" for nurses in training. Elizabeth's greatest passion, however, was reforming prisons. After having spent years teaching female prisoners in Newgate Prison to read and sew, she founded the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate in 1817. She campaigned for female wardens, education, and privacy for female prisoners. Elizabeth published notes from her prison tours in England and Scotland and testified in the House of Commons. She later traveled to France and northern Europe, inspiring prison reform there as well.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1818 HAMBURG TEMPLE IS OPENED Reform Judaism began in Germany in the early nineteenth century with reformers trying to remove any practice or ritual that identified Jews as foreigners. Among the changes they initiated, Reform Jews began referring to their synagogues as temples and started using German, the national language, in their services instead of Hebrew. The Hamburg Temple, which opened its doors in 1818, was the first Jewish place of worship built by Reform Jews. A revised prayer book, which included prayers in German, was used at the Hamburg Temple. From Germany, Reform Judaism spread to the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE PATIENT LABORER June 6, 1819
The seeds of evangelism bear fruit in God's time, not man's.
Pioneer missionary Adoniram Judson graduated from Brown University as valedictorian at the age of nineteen and then graduated in 1810 in the first class of Andover Theological Seminary. He and his wife journeyed from America to Burma (now Myanmar), arriving in 1813. Shortly thereafter they were joined by two other missionaries. However; after six years of labor not one Burmese person had trusted in Christ.
Then on June 6, 1819, Judson received a letter from Moung Nau, a Burmese man who had shown great interest in the gospel but up to that point had not acted on it. The letter read as follows:
I, Moung Nau, the constant recipient of your excellent favor, approach your feet. Whereas my Lord's three [i.e. three missionaries] come to the country of Burma—not for the purposes of trade, but to preach the religion of Jesus Christ, the Son of the eternal God—I, having heard and understood, am, with a joyful mind, filled with love.
I believe that the divine Son, Jesus Christ, suffered death, in the place of men, to atone for their sins. Like a heavy-laden man, I feel my sins are very many. The punishment of my sins I deserve to suffer. Since it is so, do you, sirs, consider that. I, taking refuge in the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ, and receiving baptism, in order to become his disciple, shall dwell one with yourselves, a band of brothers, in the happiness of heaven, and therefore grant me the ordinance of baptism.
Moreover, as it is only since I have met with you, sirs, that I have known about the eternal God, I venture to pray that you will still unfold to me the religion of God, that my old disposition may be destroyed, and my new disposition improved.
Three weeks later Moung Nau was baptized and the barrier of unbelief was broken.
What enabled Adoniram Judson to faithfully labor so many years before seeing any fruit? His motivation is evident in the following lines, which he penciled on the inner cover of a book used in his translation of the Bible into Burmese:
In joy or in pain,
Our course be onward still;
We sow on Burma's barren plain;
We reap on Zion's hill.
Today there are more than 1.5 million believers in Myanmar, and 40 percent of the Karen people to whom Adoniram Judson directed his ministry are now Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1819 CHANNING EMBRACES UNITARIAN CHRISTIANITY Born in Newport, Rhode Island, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) earned his B.A. from Harvard where he had a conversion experience. In 1803, he became the pastor of Federal Street Congregational Church in Boston where he spent the rest of his life. In 1819, he delivered a sermon at an ordination in which he embraced the basic ideas of Unitarianism by denying the Trinity, the deity of Christ, total depravity, and Christ's atoning sacrifice. While Channing upheld the Resurrection, New Testament miracles, and the moral purity of Christ, he confessed that though the Bible contained inspiration, it was not itself an inspired book. In 1820, he coordinated the meeting of liberal ministers at the Berry Street Conference, which soon after became the American Unitarian Association.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1819 HEP! HEP! RIOTS BEGIN The early nineteenth century witnessed the fall of the empire established by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). To reestablish the monarchies and their territories, representatives of the European powers that had been conquered by Napoleon's armies gathered at the Council of Vienna. Although the council granted these various rulers their right to rule, the gathering refused to uphold the rights that Napoleon had given to the Jews. Echoing the sentiment of Vienna, anti-Semitic riots broke out in Germany in 1819 and 1820. For reasons that are unclear, the rallying cry was "Hep! Hep!" The riots spread throughout Germany, reaching as far as Denmark and Poland. The response of many German Jews was to assimilate as much as possible into secular society, believing that if they became fully German they would be treated as such.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1821 LOTT CAREY BECOMES THE FIRST BLACK MISSIONARY TO AFRICA Lott Carey (c. 1780-1829) was born into slavery in Virginia. Although raised by his devout Baptist grandmother, as a young man Carey shunned Christianity. In 1807, Carey was converted and taught himself to read in order to study the Bible. He became a Baptist lay pastor while continuing to work to earn his family's freedom. Burdened for the evangelism of Africa, Carey founded the Richmond (Virginia) African Missionary Society. On January 23, 1821, Carey sailed with his family to become the first black missionary to Africa. He settled in Liberia, then a newly established haven for freed slaves. Carey helped set up a mission and schools and was serving as Liberia's interim governor at the time of his death in 1829.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LOTT CAREY January 23, 1821
His life spanned two continents.
Lott Carey didn't know the exact year of his birth because records of slave births weren't kept, but he estimated it to be around 1780 on a plantation near Richmond, Virginia. His grandmother, a devout Baptist, cared for him while his parents worked. She taught him the suffering of slaves in America and the need of those remaining in Africa to hear about Jesus.
As a young man working as a slave laborer, Carey showed no signs of espousing his grandmother's faith. Then in 1807, Carey was in the gallery of the First Baptist Church in Richmond and heard a sermon about Jesus telling Nicodemus that he must be born again. Carey was profoundly moved and put his trust in Jesus Christ. After he was baptized, he determined to learn to read the Bible for himself. After he taught himself to read and write, he continued his education in a night school started by a white Baptist named William Crane.
Carey earned repeated promotions at the Shockoe tobacco warehouse where he worked. Around the age of thirty-three he purchased freedom for himself and his two children for $850—much more than his annual salary. His first wife had died, and he later remarried.
Carey began preaching to gatherings of African Americans, eventually forming and becoming the pastor of a black church. Meanwhile, through his night classes with William Crane, he became very interested in African missions.
His church grew to over eight hundred members, while he remained respected and secure in his position at the tobacco warehouse. Yet his burden for missions to Africa increased, and finally he decided to go there himself.
In his final sermon to his congregation, Carey said, "I am about to leave you and expect to see your faces no more. I long to preach to the poor Africans the way of life and salvation. I don't know what may befall me, whether I may find a grave in the ocean, or among the savage men, or more savage wild beasts on the coast of Africa; nor am I anxious what may become of me. I feel it my duty to go.
On January 23, 1821, Carey sailed with his family as the first black missionary to Africa. In Liberia he founded and served as pastor of Providence Baptist Church. He helped to establish schools and was the first president of the Monrovia Baptist Missionary Society. When the white governor of the colony was forced to leave because of illness, he appointed Carey as provisional governor.
In 1829, as Carey was preparing to rescue some of his men who had been imprisoned while negotiating with a native tribe, he and seven coworkers died in an explosion of gunpowder apparently set off by an overturned candle. It had been eight years since Carey had set sail for Africa and forty-nine since he had been born a slave in America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1821 SCHLEIERMACHER PUBLISHES THE CHRISTIAN FAITH Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was among the most prominent German theologians of the nineteenth century. In 1821, while a professor at the newly established university in Berlin, Schleiermacher published his magnum opus, The Christian Faith. In it, he rejected both historic orthodoxy and strict natural theology. Instead, he posited a religion loosely based on Christian orthodoxy but ultimately defined in terms of human experience. For Schleiermacher, the basis of religion was the human self-consciousness. A right self-understanding would result in a feeling of divine dependence. This self-understanding was the basis for all religion. He also rejected the divine nature of Christ, claiming that Jesus was a man whose intense dependence on God resulted in his full experience of God's existence. Schleiermacher's work helped shape the developing theological liberalism of the early twentieth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1822 THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH In 1815, the Catholic bishop Louis-Guillaume-Valentin Dubourg (1766-1833) of New Orleans traveled to Lyons, France, to collect money for his diocese. While there he shared with Mrs. Petit, a woman from the United States, his idea of founding a missionary society to evangelize the Louisiana Territory. Her brother wrote a letter to Pauline Marie Jaricot (1782-1862) of Lyons, who then conceived a plan in which parishioners would contribute one penny per week to propagate missionary efforts. In 1822, Bishop Dubourg sent his vicar-general from New Orleans to Lyons to discuss a possible American counterpart to the missionary effort. However, after meeting in Lyons, they decided that American and European societies would be united as the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The society was formally established on May 3, 1822, and became the primary institution for funding Catholic missions in the nineteenth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN ATTORNEY WHO SWITCHED CLIENTS October 10, 1821
In 1818, a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Finney began a law apprenticeship in Adams, New York. Although having had a limited formal education, within just three years he became a junior partner in the law firm.
As Finney studied law, the authors he read often quoted the Bible. Realizing his own ignorance of the Scriptures, he began to study them for himself.
When a new minister came to the local Presbyterian church, Finney began to attend. In the summer of 1821, the pastor took a trip and told his replacement just to read sermons from a book. Surprisingly, the Holy Spirit began to move among the church members, and Finney started to spend a lot of time wondering about his own salvation.
He later recounted what happened on October 10, 1821:
Just before I arrived at the office, something seemed to confront me with questions like these: ... "Did you not promise to give your heart to God? And what are you trying to do? Are you endeavoring to work out a righteousness of your own?"
Just at that point the whole question of God's salvation opened to my mind.....I saw that his work was a finished work; that instead of having, or needing, any righteousness of my own to recommend me to God, I had to submit myself to the righteousness of God through Christ. It was full and complete, and all that was necessary on my part was to ... give up my sins and accept Christ. Salvation, it seemed to me, instead of being a thing to be wrought out by one's own works, was a thing to be found entirely in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Instead of going to his office, Finney went into a nearby woods and spent the morning wrestling with God in prayer until he reported, "I found that my mind had become most wonderfully quiet and peaceful."
The next day, a client who was a deacon from his church came into his office and reminded him, "Mr. Finney, do you recollect that my case is to be tried at ten this morning?"
Finney replied, "Deacon, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause, and I cannot plead yours."
Charles Finney went on to become the leading revivalist of the nineteenth century with approximately a half million people coming to Christ through the influence of his ministry. Beginning in upstate New York, his revivals swept through New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. In 1835, he became professor of theology at the newly formed Oberlin Collegiate Institute, now Oberlin College. He served as the college's president from 1851 to 1866. Theologically, Finney was his own man. His point of departure was Calvinism, but he placed great emphasis on man's ability to repent and made perfectionism the trademark of Oberlin theology.
It all started on that fateful day in 1821, when Charles Finney switched from the practice of law to pleading the cause of Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 FINNEY ORDAINED AND BEGINS REVIVALS Charles Finney (1792-1874) was born in Connecticut and raised in Oneida County, New York. While working as an attorney, Finney started attending church with a friend but was skeptical at first. After studying Scripture for himself, Finney put his faith in Christ. He soon began preaching and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1824. That year, the Female Missionary Society of the Western District commissioned Finney to evangelize settlers in New York. Finney held evangelistic meetings, often lasting for days, and his preaching led to many revivals. Over the next eight years, Finney held revivals throughout the eastern United States, in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Rochester. His teaching emphasized mankind's ability to repent and to achieve sinless perfection.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 THE AMERICAN SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION IS FOUNDED The American Sunday School Union was founded in 1824 as an outgrowth of the Sunday and Adult School Union in Philadelphia. Its purpose was to develop Sunday schools "wherever there is a population." Run mainly by the laity, the society established thousands of schools, especially on the frontier along the Mississippi River. Following the Civil War, however, an increasing number of denominations began assuming responsibility for their own Christian education. In 1970, the American Sunday School Union changed its name to the American Missionary Society, redirecting its focus to assisting multicultural communities.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 REFORM CONGREGATION IS FOUNDED IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA Although Reform Judaism took root in Germany in the early nineteenth century, the majority of synagogues built in the United States were Orthodox. However, Reform Judaism spread to the United States within fifteen years of its 1810 beginning in Europe. The first Reform congregation was established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1824. Shortly thereafter, a Reform synagogue named the Emanu-El Temple was founded in New York City. The changes peculiar to American Reform Judaism included the use of the organ, mixing of the sexes during worship, and the introduction of English to the service. Like the reformers in Europe, Reform Jews in the United States hoped to promote the identity of Jews as assimilated American citizens rather than foreigners.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN APE OF A COLD GOD August 26, 1824
Baptism didn't do him any good.
Kar| Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Truer, Prussia, descending from a distinguished line of Jewish scholars, His father was an attorney, who became a Lutheran when an 1816 Prussian decree prohibited Jews from holding prestigious law positions. Karl and his siblings were baptized on August 26, 1824.
Karl was confirmed at fifteen and for a while appeared to be a committed Christian. However, as he continued his education, all appearances of Christianity faded away. He received a doctorate in philosophy from Jena University and settled in London in 1849, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Marx was a poet, whose early writing revolved around two themes: his love for Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in 1841, and the destruction of the world. In one poem he wrote, "We are the apes of a cold God." One of his favorite phrases was from Faust: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." The theme of a coming apocalyptic conflagration occupied his thinking throughout his life. This vision of doomsday was an artistic notion in Marx's mind, not a scientific conclusion. It was a theory from which he as a political scientist worked backwards.
Many of his favorite phrases showed his disdain for religion: "Religion is the opiate of the people"; "Religion is only the illusionary sun around which man revolves, until he begins to revolve around himself."
What kind of fruit would attitudes like these produce in a man's life? Marx had a very unhealthy lifestyle. He smoked and drank heavily. He seldom bathed or washed. He was totally incompetent at handling money. He never seriously tried to get a job but, instead, lived off loans from family and friends that he never repaid.
Marx was saved financially by substantial inheritances that provided an annual income equal to three times the earnings of a skilled workman at that time. Even with this generous inheritance, all Marx and his wife knew how to do was spend and borrow. The family's silver service was often at the pawnbrokers, as were their clothes.
In spite of writing about the struggle of the working class, Marx personally knew only one member of that class, a woman named Lenchen Demuth, who was the Marx family's servant from 1845 until her death in 1890. Although Marx collected reports of many low-paid workers, he never found evidence of a worker who was paid no wages at all. Yet one such person lived in his own house. Lenchen never received a cent from Marx for her labors, only room and board. Marx fathered a son, Freddy, by her but convinced his protege Friedrich Engels to claim paternity in his stead. Freddy was allowed to visit Lenchen only by coming to the back door. Marx met his son once, at the back door, but Freddy never realized that the radical philosopher was his father.
Marx's life serves as an example of the wasted potential of a human heart without God.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1825 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY BEGINS ITS PUBLICATIONS In 1825, the New York and Massachusetts Tract Societies merged to form the American Tract Society. The society pioneered many innovative printing techniques and by 1830 had printed more than 5 million tracts, in addition to books and other periodicals. Although intentionally nondenominational, the society represented mainline Calvinism during its early years. In spite of its unwillingness to oppose slavery, the society continued to flourish during the 1850s and 1860s. After the Civil War, the society was heavily involved in the evangelism of freed slaves. As support waned in the early twentieth century, the society ceased publication of other materials and began to focus exclusively on the publication of small tracts and pamphlets. The American Tract Society continues to publish more than 30 million tracts annually.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1825 LA REVEIL REVIVAL SPREADS THROUGH EUROPE As the Second Great Awakening was sweeping through the United States, the first signs of reawakening in Europe were seen in Geneva in 1810, spreading to French-speaking Swiss churches in 1825. La Reveil (literally "the Awakening") was a spiritual reaction against the Rationalism and materialism that had increasingly characterized the churches on the Continent since the Enlightenment. The newly revived pastors preached the supremacy of God in human affairs, the Bible as the standard for truth, and personal spiritual awakening as the evidence of saving faith. La Reveil spread from Switzerland to France and the Netherlands by 1825, touching a thousand congregations with renewal and drawing several thousand new believers to saving faith in Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1826 THOLUCK BEGINS TEACHING AT HALLE Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799-1877) was a German Protestant theologian whose undergraduate studies at Breslau and Berlin focused on Eastern languages. After he was converted to Christ, however, he redirected his study to theology. In 1826, after a short term teaching theology at Berlin, Tholuck was appointed professor of theology at the University of Halle, where he stayed for forty-nine years. An opponent of rationalism, he wrote commentaries on John, Romans, Hebrews, Psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount. Involved in the revival movements of his day and acclaimed for his ministry to students, Tholuck did much to further the cause of evangelical scholarship during his lifetime.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1827 CZAR NICHOLAS I ISSUES THE CANTONIST DECREES IN RUSSIA Russian rulers were threatened by the significant presence of the Jewish population since the division of Poland in the 1770s. In 1827, Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855) devised a scheme to absorb Jews into Russian culture. Nicholas issued the Cantonist Decrees (a canton being a military recruiting district), which forced Jewish community leaders to provide a certain number of Jewish recruits between the ages of twelve and twenty-five who were then required to complete twenty-five years of military service. Twelve-year-olds had to spend an additional six years in training before their twenty-five-year commitment began. The czar created Cantonist battalions, which forced the Jewish boys into Russian Orthodox Christianity. In addition to creating a captive audience for religious conversion, the czar's Cantonist Decrees caused much dissension among Jews, as leaders tended to protect their own families, sending the poor instead.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1829 MENDELSSOHN CONDUCTS BACH'S ST. MATTHEW PASSION Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was raised in Berlin by Jewish converts to the Lutheran church. Mendelssohn was a gifted pianist and a precocious composer who had written twelve symphonies by the age of twelve. His musical mentors introduced him to the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whose work at the time was largely ignored by all but a small circle of musical connoisseurs. Mendelssohn loved Bach's music. At age twenty, Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St. Matthew Passion oratorio, which had not been performed since before Bach's death in 1750. The concert marked the beginning of a revival of Bach's music that continues today. Mendelssohn went on to write his own oratorios, including Elijah (1846), considered to be the premier choral work of the nineteenth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1830 JOSEPH SMITH JR. FOUNDS THE MORMON CHURCH On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1841) and five others met in Fayette, New York, to found a new religious society called the Church of Christ. Eventually renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is popularly known as the Mormon Church. Smith claimed to have found their Scripture, The Book of Mormon, on "golden plates" he unearthed from a hill near Palmyra, New York, then translated from "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics." No one but Smith ever saw the golden tablets. Today, the Mormons claim more than eleven million members, more than half of whom live outside the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1830 JOHN NELSON DARBY BEGINS DEVELOPING DISPENSATIONALISM In 1825, a group of men led by John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) began meeting in Dublin because of their dissatisfaction with the Protestant churches of the area. The group was particularly interested in eschatology. In 1830, Darby visited Margaret MacDonald in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and heard how earlier in the year she had received a revelation that a select group of Christians would be raptured before the time of the Antichrist. Darby began popularizing the doctrine of the pretribulation rapture of the church in prophecy conferences. In succeeding years he developed his theology of dispensationalism from his premise of the pretribulation rapture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 EVANGELICAL SOCIETY OF GENEVA IS FORMED Orthodox Christianity in Geneva, Switzerland, had sunk to a low point since the days of John Calvin (1509-1564). In this climate in 1816, Louis Gaussen (1790-1863) became pastor of the village parish of Satigny near Geneva after being converted to Christ through the ministry of Robert Haldane (1764-1842). Gaussen republished the Helvetic Confession in French. In 1831, Gaussen and two colleagues formed the Evangelical Society of Geneva for the distribution of Bibles and tracts. As a result, he was suspended by the local consistory. Undaunted, the Evangelical Society also founded a new theological school where Louis Gaussen became professor of dogmatics.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LATTER-DAY SAINTS? April 6, 1830
It's amazing what can result from unsubstantiated claims.
In 1820, a fourteen-year-old boy named Joseph Smith Jr. claimed to have received a vision in which God the Father and God the Son appeared to him and told him they had chosen him to launch a restoration of true Christianity. He apparently was not overly moved by this revelation because he went back to digging for Captain Kidd's treasure with his father and his brother.
When he was seventeen, he claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni who supposedly told him that he would receive the "golden plates" of The Book of Mormon to translate. In 1827, Smith alleged that he unearthed the plates in the hill Cumorah, hear Palmyra, New York. Smith claimed he translated the "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics" with the help of miraculous glasses he supposedly received from Moroni. Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher and a convert of Smith's, assisted in his translation, although ho one but Smith ever saw the golden tablets. In 1829, during the translation, the "Prophet," as Smith liked to be called, alleged that John the Baptist was sent by Peter, James, and John to bestow the "Aaronic Priesthood" on himself and Oliver. They completed their translation in early 1830, and The Book of Mormon was published and copyrighted.
On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith Jr., his two brothers Hyrum and Samuel, Oliver Cowdery, and David and Peter Whitmer Jr. met in Fayette, New York, to found a new religious society they called the Church of Christ. Eventually known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church was begun.
Soon after their founding, the Mormons moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where in six years they grew to more than sixteen thousand members. Accusations that Smith's religion was a hoax caused the new church to move several times. From Ohio they moved to Jackson County, Missouri, and then on to Nauvoo, Illinois. Despite the moves, their problems followed them to each new location. The trouble heightened in Nauvoo when their practice of polygamy became known. Although the exact number of Smith's wives is unknown, it has been estimated to be as high as fifty. When Smith called for destruction of an outspokenly anti-Mormon newspaper, the state of Illinois stepped in and jailed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. On June 27, 1844, an angry mob stormed the jail and murdered both men.
After the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young became the leader of the Mormons. Young led the group across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains to the Salt Lake Valley in 1846. Under his leadership the Mormons were granted recognition as a legitimate religion. Brigham Young had twenty-seven wives and fifty-six children.
Today the Mormons claim more than eleven million members, over half residing outside the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 PLYMOUTH BRETHREN BEGIN The Plymouth Brethren formed under the leadership of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) as a protest to both the formalism of worship and the spiritual deadness of the Church of England. They desired to remove the barriers that divided Christians and return to the simplicity and authenticity of worship in apostolic days. In 1831, the group formalized their first congregation in Plymouth, England. Their numbers grew rapidly, despite significant church divisions. In 1848, there was a split between the mainstream of the movement (Open Brethren) and the Darbyist group (Exclusive Brethren). Today the Brethren continue to be an influential denomination in many parts of the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 TONGUES ARE SPOKEN IN EDWARD IRVING'S CHURCH Edward Irving (1792-1834), ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1815, played an important role in preparing for later charismatic and millenarian movements. In July 1822, when he was thirty, Irving was called to the Caledonian Chapel in London, where his forceful preaching style attracted great crowds. Under Irving's leadership, the church quickly became the largest in London. His teaching emphasized the supernatural and the imminence of Christ's return. In the fall of 1831, members of Irving's church began to speak in tongues, practice faith healing, and have prophetic visions, although Irving himself did not possess these gifts. After his death, some of Irving's followers formed the Catholic Apostolic Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 SLAVERY IS ABOLISHED IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE William Wilberforce (1759-1833) decided that he could best serve God through a career in politics. Elected to the English Parliament in 1780, he devoted his life to the fight against slavery. Largely as a result of his efforts, the slave trade within the British Empire was abolished in 1807. Just before his death on July 29, 1833, Wilberforce was gratified to learn that a bill abolishing slavery itself in all British territories finally was assured of passage.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
DEDICATION TO A CAUSE July 26, 1833
He never gave up.
William Wilberforce was born to affluence in Hull, England, in 1759. His schooling began at Hull Grammar School, where he came under the influence of two brothers, headmaster Joseph Milner and teacher Isaac Milner.
Wilberforce developed a social conscience at a young age. When he was only fourteen he wrote a letter to the local newspaper on the evils of the slave trade. He completed his education at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he largely wasted his time. However, in 1780 he was elected to Parliament where he became a supporter and confidant of British Prime Minister William Pitt, the Younger. Pitt persuaded Wilberforce to focus his efforts on the abolition of slavery.
In 1785, Wilberforce was looking for a traveling companion for a European tour when he ran into Isaac Milner, his old grade-school teacher who then was a tutor at Cambridge. On an impulse he invited Milner on the trip, expenses paid, and Milner accepted. Had Wilberforce known that Milner was a committed Christian, he would not have extended the invitation.
As Wilberforce and Milner traveled together, they began arguing about religion. By the end of their trip, Wilberforce had given intellectual assent to many of the teachings of the Bible, but once back home he returned to politics and put religion on a back burner.
The next year Wilberforce took Isaac Miner on another tour of Europe. This time they studied the Greek New Testament together. Wilberforce later said, "I now fully believed the gospel and was persuaded that if I died at anytime I should perish everlastingly."
By October 1785, Wilberforce was miserable, realizing that he must choose between Christ and the world. Deciding that he needed to talk about it with someone, Wilberforce went to see his boyhood hero John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace." On December 7, 1785, he left John Newton's home with the decision settled. He had chosen Christ and committed himself to being God's man in politics.
Wilberforce became the leader of a group of wealthy Anglican evangelicals who lived mainly in the hamlet of Clapham, three miles from London. They became known as the Clapham Sect, although they were in no sense a sect. They were more like a close family, determined to change the world for Jesus. They determined which wrongs needed to be righted and then delegated to each person the work he could best perform for their mutual goals.
Wilberforce and his friends' first great achievement was the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But abolition itself proved a tougher goal to achieve.
On July 26, 1833, Wilberforce was on his deathbed at the age of seventy-three. Late that evening he received word that the Emancipation Act freeing the slaves of the British Empire was assured of passing. His final political goal had been reached. Three days later he died.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY SEEKS IMMEDIATE ABOLITION The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1833, by members of local and state abolitionist organizations, many of them followers of the revivalist Charles Finney (1792-1875). The abolition of slavery in the British Empire, also in 1833, served as the catalyst for the organization's founding. The main goal of the society was the immediate abolition of slavery, but many realized that the process would be a gradual one. The organization, however, lacked unity and was considered extreme by many supporters of abolition. The disunity in the society caused it to become ineffective by 1840.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 MASSACHUSETTS DISESTABLISHES THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH In 1631, the Massachusetts General Court declared that only church members could vote, making Congregationalism the state religion of Massachusetts. The First Amendment of the Constitution took effect in 1791, prohibiting an officially established national church. However, throughout most of New England both political meetings and church services took place in the same building. In 1824, the Congregational meetinghouse in Deerfield was the first to be used solely for worship. Finally, in 1833, the state of Massachusetts disestablished the Congregational Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 JOHN KEBLE'S SERMON LAUNCHES THE OXFORD MOVEMENT On July 14, 1833, John Keble (1792-1866)—professor of poetry at Oxford University from 1831 to 1841—preached his famous sermon entitled "National Apostasy," from which arose the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement. The movement began as a reaction against liberalism in the Anglican Church and ended as a movement toward Roman Catholicism. Several of its leaders ultimately left the Church of England and became Roman Catholics.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1835 FINNEY WRITES LECTURES ON REVIVALS Charles Finney (1792-1875) came to be known as the "father of Modern Revivalism." He was dramatically converted while working as a legal apprentice in upstate New York. Without delay, Finney began preaching in the area's villages, and then in the large East Coast cities, working out his technique and theology as he went. Confrontational, energetic, and possessing a penetrating gaze, Charles Finney brought the enthusiasm of camp meetings into the churches. In 1835, Finney wrote Lectures on Revivals of Religion based on his experiences. His "New Measures" included prayers for people by name in public, women praying in public, a designated "anxious bench" for convicted sinners, and long, protracted meetings.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 GEORGE MÜLLER OPENS ORPHANAGES George Müller (1805-1898) was born in Prussia, but became a naturalized British citizen after finishing his theological studies. In 1836, he started his first orphanage in Bristol, soon adding other houses and then moving into the suburbs. He followed the principle of making his financial needs known only to God through prayer, rather than asking other people for financial help. His autobiography, Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, acquainted people all over the world with his work and faith. Beginning in 1875, he and his second wife toured forty-two countries over a seventeen-year period, generating additional awareness of his work with orphans.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 HAWAIIAN REVIVAL BRINGS THOUSANDS TO CHRIST Titus Coan (1801-1882) was a missionary in Hawaii who supervised a teacher training college and led a small church of about twenty-three members in Hilo. He longed for revival in Hawaii, and in November 1836, he embarked on a ministry tour of the island. He preached several times a day in each village he entered, drawing large crowds and often preaching through the night. Many were converted, including the high priest and priestess of the volcano, the most influential pagan leaders. Word of the revival had spread by the time he returned to Hilo a month later, and his small church began growing. Whole villages moved to Hilo to attend Coan's church. The revival soon spread to other Hawaiian islands as well, and as a result, thousands were converted to Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 POSITION OF CHIEF RABBI IS CREATED FOR OTTOMAN EMPIRE By the end of the eighteenth century, the declining strength of the Ottoman Empire—the Muslim empire that ruled modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East—was apparent to the powers in Europe who had investments to protect within the empire. Influenced by the opinions of these European rulers, the Ottoman sultans issued a variety of laws designed to centralize their control of the empire. Among the decrees affecting Jewish life was the creation of the position of chief rabbi, also referred to as the grand rabbi or hakham bashi, who was required to make regular reports to the Ottoman government. While the Ottoman authorities intended the reports of the chief rabbis to strengthen their control over their Jewish subjects, the new rabbinical office actually afforded a greater autonomy to Jewish communities.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 GERMAN JEWS BEGIN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES A large number of German Jews began immigrating to the United States in 1836, drawn by the developing cities and inexpensive land in America. In California, they put their business skills to use by becoming gold prospectors. In cities such as New York, they tended to gather in neighborhoods with other German-speaking Jews, putting their retail and trade abilities to use in everything from pushcarts to storefronts. Despite the existence of Reform Judaism in Germany, the majority of German Jews arriving in America were more traditional and orthodox in their beliefs and practice than were Jews arriving from other nations.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1837 AUBURN DECLARATION REAFFIRMS NEW SCHOOL COMMITMENT TO CALVINISM At the 1837 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the Old School Presbyterians who controlled the church accused the New School Presbyterians of heresy by placing too much emphasis on man's initiative in salvation. As a result, the assembly forced three presbyteries controlled by the New School out of the church. In response, the New School Presbyterians issued the Auburn Declaration in August 1837, which reaffirmed their commitment to Calvinism. However, the 1838 General Assembly refused to reconsider their decisions of the previous year. Consequently, the New School and Old School Presbyterians functioned as separate denominations until 1869, when the two factions reunited based on the language of the Auburn Declaration.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A THEOLOGIAN BECOMES PRIME MINISTER October 29, 1837
How would you like to have a godly theologian lead your nation? It happened.
On October 29, 1837, a son was born to the pastor of the Reformed state church in Maasslius, the Netherlands. His name was Abraham Kuyper. Growing up in a pastor's home, young Kuyper was disenchanted by the church. In spite of his alienation, he enrolled in the pre-theology curriculum at the University of Leiden.
At this time Modernism, the belief system that exalts human reason over divine revelation, was taking over the theological faculties of Dutch universities. Kuyper did not escape this influence. He entered the university a person of orthodox faith but within a year and a half had become a religious liberal.
The next major event in Kuyper's religious pilgrimage was reading an English novel his fiancee had given to him. The Heir of Redclyffe by the Christian author Charlotte Mary Yonge proved to be life changing. Kuyper so identified with the story's proud hero that when the hero knelt and wept before God with a broken and contrite heart, Kuyper did the same. Only later would he truly understand what had occurred in his heart. From that moment on he found himself despising what he once admired and seeking what he once despised.
The final step in his pilgrimage came in his first pastorate. There was a group of individuals of low social status in his church who knew more about the Bible than he did. They had a Calvinistic world view that he envied, even though he now had a doctorate in theology. The debates Kuyper had with these folk proved to be short lived as he agreed with them more and more that the Bible taught God's sovereign grace. He later wrote, "Their unremitting perseverance has become the blessing of my heart, the rise of the morning star for my life." The wisdom and faith of these simple people taught him to find rest for his soul "in the worship of a God who works all things, both the willing and the working, according to his good pleasure."
Now fully embracing orthodox Calvinism, Kuyper held major pulpits in Utrecht and Amsterdam. Taking up the cause for private schools, he joined the Anti-Revolutionary Party, which opposed godless revolution and made orthodox Calvinism a political force. Eventually he became the head of the party, and beginning in 1874, served repeatedly in the legislature of the Netherlands, as a member of one or the other house. He edited his party's daily newspaper and wrote 16, 800 editorials for it. In 1880, Kuyper and others founded the Free University of Amsterdam, which was dedicated to Reformed theology. Kuyper became the professor of systematic theology.
In 1901, Abraham Kuyper became prime minister of the Netherlands, holding the position for four years. Through that role, God used him to shape a nation.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
WHEN GOD WENT TO HAWAII July 1, 1838
Some go to Hawaii for more than the scenery.
Titus Coan was converted at a Charles Finney revival in western New York State. Graduating from seminary in 1834, Coan went as a missionary to Hilo, Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands. Having a burning desire to bring revival to Hawaii, he applied himself vigorously to learning the native languages of Kau and Puna, and by 1836 was fluent enough to preach in both.
Coan's official responsibility was to train teachers and oversee about two dozen schools. But Coan's vision went far beyond teacher training. His prayer was that Ha-waiians would come to Christ, and he determined to take the gospel directly to the people himself. In November 1836, he gave his students a long Christmas vacation and went on a walking tour of the island. He preached each time he came to a village. As he had hoped, crowds of people gathered to hear him. He was able to preach in three to five villages a day.
When Coan reached the Puna region, large crowds gathered to hear him. In the largest city he preached ten times in two days. Many wept as they came to understand that Christ had paid the penalty for their sins on the cross.
A particularly stunning conversion in Puna was that of the high priest of the volcano. Idolatry, drunkenness, adultery, and even murder marked his priesthood. Yet upon his conversion, he became a man filled with zeal for God. His sister, the high priestess of the volcano, was initially hostile to the gospel but put her faith in Christ after seeing the change in her brother.
When Coan returned home to Hilo a month later, he found a heightened interest in the way of salvation. People, in some cases entire villages, who had heard him preach in their villages in Kau and Puna now came to Hilo to hear more. Hilo's population grew to ten thousand as people moved there just to hear Coan preach. On Sundays the two-hundred-by-eighty-five-foot building would be packed, with hundreds more listening outside. The Hawaiians decided they needed a bigger church and in three weeks built a building large enough to hold two thousand people.
In spite of thousands of conversions in 1836 and 1837, the church's membership didn't grow until 1838 and 1839. The slow growth reflected a flaw in Coan's missionary methodology, not disinterest on the part of the new converts. Coan would record the date of each person's conversion and then would wait months before recontacting the people to find out if their conversion was real. Only then would they be invited to join the church. It wasn't until July 1, 1838, that the first converts were finally baptized and received into the church. On that stirring day 1,705 were baptized. By 1853, fifty-six thousand of the seventy-one thousand native Hawaiians were professing Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1837 MOSES MONTEFIORE IS KNIGHTED Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), a wealthy English stockbroker, was also the president of the Board of Deputies that represented British Jews. In 1824, he retired from business to devote his life to the oppressed Jews of the world. He was the last of the shtadtlanim, prominent Jews whose social standing enabled them to intervene on behalf of persecuted Jews in foreign governments. He was a friend of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), who knighted him in 1837. In 1840, he not only secured the release of Jews accused of blood libel in Damascus, but also persuaded the sultan of Turkey to forbid any further arrests on that charge.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1839 WILLIAM C. BURNS PREACHES AT THE KILSYTH ANNIVERSARY REVIVAL In 1839, William Hamilton Burns (1779-1859) wanted to stir the hearts of his congregation and bring revival once again to Kilsyth, Scotland. He decided to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the revival the town had experienced under James Robe (1688-1753) by holding services at Robe's grave. He invited his son, William Chalmers Burns (1815-1868), to preach at some of the services. What was planned to be a brief visit turned into many weeks as the people of Kilsyth responded in droves to the young Burns' preaching. Although pleased with the revival he was witnessing, young Burns' true longing was to bring the gospel to unreached people. Therefore, at the peak of his ministry in Scotland, young Burns departed to join Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) in bringing the gospel to inland China.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1840 LIVINGSTONE SAILS FOR AFRICA In 1840, David Livingstone (1813-1873) received his medical degree from the University of Glasgow and sailed for Africa the same year. There he married Mary, the daughter of missionary pioneer Robert Moffat (1795-1883). He fixed his goals on taking Christianity to Africa and exploring the land, as well as fighting to end the slave trade. Due in large measure to Livingstone's reports on the scourge of slavery, it soon was outlawed in the civilized world. When Livingstone had not been heard from in quite some time, a New York Herald correspondent named Henry Stanley (1841-1904) traveled to the heart of Africa to search for him. When he finally found him, Stanley uttered the now-famous words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LIVING BY FAITH November 21, 1839
What would it be like to live by faith, telling your needs to no one but God?
God leads different people in different ways, but he led George Müller to trust him for everything in life and to let his needs be known to God alone.
Müller was born in Prussia in 1805, and though he trained for the Lutheran ministry, led a degenerate life of petty thievery. When he was twenty, a friend invited him to a private home one Saturday evening for a group time of prayer and the reading of a printed sermon (it was illegal in Prussia for laymen to explain the Scriptures). He was intrigued just hearing about such a gathering. Once he arrived, the meeting both puzzled and thrilled Müller, and he realized that his advanced education had not given him the power to pray as eloquently as these simple tradesmen. That night Müller went home feeling that he had found what he had been seeking. God had begun a work of grace in his heart, and he went to sleep peaceful and happy in Jesus.
God continued to work in his life, and in 1829 Müller went to London to train as a missionary to the Jews. Müller soon became convinced of the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren, a group of Christians who functioned without a paid clergy. Over the next years he ministered at several Plymouth Brethren chapels in England.
Earlier in his life, while a student in Halle, Germany, Muller had observed the orphanages that August Francke, German Pietist, had begun in 1696. Through the years he thought about founding an orphanage, and on November 21, 1835, after reading a book about Francke's life, he felt God definitely lead him to start an orphanage in Bristol, England. He immediately asked God for a building, funds to support it, and godly people to operate it. His orphanage was operational within five months and remained the major project of his life.
George Müller continually trusted God for the daily operations of the orphanage. November 21, 1839, four years after his decision to start the orphanage, is a case in point. On that day some small contributions were received, enough for the next day's breakfast for the children but not enough for dinner. Müller described that day's staff meeting in his journal: "Our comfort... is 'The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' Matthew 6:34. We separated very happy in God, though very poor, and our faith much tried."
Two and a half hours before dinner the next day, a large box arrived at the orphanage with a generous contribution plus some valuable items that could be sold. The joy of George Müller and his fellow workers was indescribable, as God once more had provided for his orphans.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1840 MONTEFIORE INTERCEDES IN DAMASCUS BLOOD LIBEL AFFAIR As the Ottoman Empire attempted to centralize its control, conflicts between Muslims, Christians, and Jews continued in Syria. In the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1840, a Jewish barber was accused of murdering a Christian monk and using his blood to celebrate the Jewish Passover. The accusation of "blood libel"—the belief that Jews murdered non-Jews and used their blood in secret rituals—while common in medieval Europe, was unknown in the Middle East. What became known as the Damascus Affair resulted in the imprisonment of nine Jewish religious leaders and children. Confessions obtained through torture precipitated violent attacks on Jews by Christians and Muslims. Eventually, England sent British Jew Sir Moses Montefiore (1784—1885) to intercede on behalf of his terrorized people. Montefiore's diplomacy, with the efforts of others, obtained the release of the nine prisoners.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1842 TREATY OF NANKING OPENS CHINA In the early part of the nineteenth century, British merchants were heavily involved in the Chinese opium trade. In 1839, however, the Chinese government declared the opium trade illegal and began to impound opium from the public markets. They also demanded that British merchants and mariners agree not to import opium into China. The British refused to comply with the demands and war soon broke out. Within three years, the British had defeated the Chinese on land and sea, and the Treaty of Nanking was signed on August 29, 1842. In addition to granting the British the colony of Hong Kong, the treaty opened several Chinese towns to British trade and settlements, which in turn effectively opened China to Christian missionaries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 B'NAI B'RITH IS ESTABLISHED As Jews immigrated to America and many Jewish businessmen achieved financial success, a desire grew among the wealthy to coordinate their philanthropic efforts. In 1843, B'nai B'rith, Hebrew for "Children of the covenant," became the first nonreligious Jewish organization founded in the United States. Similar to other fraternal orders, B'nai B'rith established lodges and focused its work on general Jewish service to the community. Sponsoring the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith as well as the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundations on college campuses, B'nai B'rith remains the largest Jewish fraternal order.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 KIERKEGAARD PUBLISHES PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS Seren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a leading Danish philosopher and writer, is considered to be one of the founders of existentialism. Using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, he published Philosophical Fragments in 1844. The nature of faith preoccupied him, and he frequently used words such as irrational, leap of faith, paradox, and acceptance of the "absurd." Until the twentieth century, little was known of Kierkegaard outside of Denmark. From that time his writings have become a major influence in philosophy, psychology, and theology.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 PHOEBE PALMER WRITES THE WAY TO HOLINESS Few women mounted a public platform in the 1840s and 1850s, but Phoebe Worrall Palmer (1807-1874) had something to share. Phoebe Palmer, the wife of a New York physician, had suffered the loss of three young children. Earnestly desiring a deeper faith, Phoebe experienced it on July 26, 1837. She began to share her story of the Holy Spirit's indwelling power at a weekly gathering in New York City known as the "Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness." In 1843, a collection of her essays was published as The Way to Holiness. Enormously successful, by the time of the Civil War it had appeared in thirty-six editions. Her preaching and publishing were influential in promoting holiness as well as the role of women in religious leadership.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 "THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT" LEADS TO FORMATION OF THE SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH William Miller (1782-1849)—farmer, army captain in the War of 1812, and licensed Baptist minister—calculated that Christ's return would be within a year of March 21, 1843. When Christ failed to return during that period, Miller recalculated the date to be October 22, 1844. When that date came and went without the Second Coming, Miller's followers referred to the experience as "The Great Disappointment." Many left the group, but those who remained formed the foundation for what became the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LITTLE WOMAN, LONG SHADOW December 12, 1840
She stood just four feet three inches tall.
On December 12, 1840, a tiny baby girl was born into an aristocratic family in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her name was Charlotte Diggs Moon, but everyone called her "Lottie." Her stature was small, yet her intellect and strength of character were enormous. In a day when embroidery and dancing distinguished most young ladies, Lottie spoke six languages fluently and earned a master's degree in education from the Albemarle Female Institution in 1861.
Lottie came from a family of dedicated Southern Baptists and attended church most of her life. But at seventeen, she was a staunch skeptic. Faith seemed antithetical to intellect, and Lottie had no need for it.
In December 1858, Dr. John Broadus—who eventually would be one of the first four professors at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—was holding evangelistic meetings at his Charlottesville Baptist Church. Lottie went to one of the services, intending to scoff.
That night a barking dog kept Lottie awake. As she was in the habit of using otherwise wasted hours to consider various intellectual propositions, she decided to ponder the merits of Christianity. As she laid in the dark, Lottie mentally reviewed Dr. Broadus' sermon, adding to it the Bible texts arid arguments she'd heard throughout her life. By the time she got to the evangelist's altar call, the Spirit of God prompted her to respond, and Lottie Moon, the brilliant skeptic, believed. When she finished her prayer of commitment to Jesus, she realized that the dog had stopped barking.
While working as a teacher at age thirty-three, Lottie heard a call to missions "as clear as a bell." In July 1873, the foreign mission board of the Southern Baptist Convention appointed her its first unmarried woman missionary to China.
Lottie arrived in Shantung (now Shandong) Province that year and settled in the city of Tengchow (now Qingdao), where she opened a school for girls. Over time, the focus of her ministry became personal evangelism among the poor.
In 1888, she persuaded the women of the Southern Baptist Convention to take an annual missions offering for China's poor. By 1912, thousands of people were dying of starvation every day in famine-ravaged Shantung Province. Lottie's cupboard was always open to the poor, even when she herself had to go without food.
Christmas Eve 1988 arrived, and as Southern Baptist women collected their special missions offering many were looking forward to meeting the woman who inspired their gifts. At seventy-two, Lottie Moon was coming home. But that same night, she died of complications from starvation, while aboard a ship in a Japanese harbor.
Lottie Moon helped pioneer the role of unmarried women missionaries in evangelism and planted more than thirty Chinese churches. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering continued after her death, and by 1995 it had raised over 1.5 billion dollars for missions.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 THE YMCA IS FOUNDED In 1844, George Williams (1821-1905) met with twelve young men in his London home in what was to be the first meeting of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). The purpose of the YMCA was to win young men to Jesus Christ. Williams' Bible studies grew, and the movement spread to the United States, France, Holland, and throughout the British Empire. Gradually, recreation and relief work were added to its programs, and eventually the movement was secularized.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 METHODISTS AND BAPTISTS SPLIT OVER SLAVERY Twenty years before the American Civil War, several denominations and individual churches split over the issue of slavery. In 1834, a Methodist anti-slavery association was founded, and in 1844, the Southern Methodists withdrew from the denomination. The Southern and Northern Methodist churches did not reunite until 1939. Baptists formed the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, and in 1845, the southern Baptists split from the north and formed the Southern Baptist Convention. Just as the churches divided over the issue of slavery, the nation itself was about to divide.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1845 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN BECOMES A ROMAN CATHOLIC The Oxford Movement, also called the Tractarian Movement, was an Anglo-Catholic revival within the Church of England. The leader of the movement was John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who began disseminating his views in 1833, by publishing Tracts for the Times. Of the ninety tracts distributed by the Tractarians, Newman authored twenty-three. The Anglo-Catholic movement was very successful, attracting hundreds among the clergy. Finally, on October 9, 1845, John Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church and was named a cardinal in 1875.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1846 EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE IS FORMED The Evangelical Alliance was formed in 1846 to further the cause of reconciliation and cooperation among Christian groups and across national boundaries. At the initial London conference, some nine hundred clergymen and laymen met to confess the unity of the Christian church. An American branch was formed in 1867, and it also drew support in Europe. In 1951, the Evangelical Alliance was one of the founders of the World Evangelical Fellowship.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1848 ILLINOIS INSTITUTE IS FOUNDED, LATER TO BECOME WHEATON COLLEGE In 1848, a group of Wesleyans founded the Illinois Institute in Wheaton, Illinois. On January 9, 1860, the school was rechartered as Wheaton College, with Jonathan Blanchard (1811-1892) as president over the twenty-nine students. Warren Wheaton, a founder of the city of Wheaton, donated the land for the school. The college became one of the top academic colleges in the nation and an influential leader in evangelical Christian higher education.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1848 KARL MARX PUBLISHES COMMUNIST MANIFESTO On the eve of the German revolution of 1848, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) wrote the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that presented the authors' political ideology. It was a systematic statement of Marxism: History is a series of class conflicts; the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie; a classless society will be the result; and means of production will be publicly owned. Marx and his followers believed that "man shall live by bread alone," that religion is the "opiate of the people," and that "only labor creates value." The writings of Karl Marx laid the foundation for socialism and communism, which would be primary challenges to the gospel for the next century and a half.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1851 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE PUBLISHES UNCLE TOM'S CABIN An abolitionist and writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. While teaching and then writing for magazines in Connecticut, Ohio, Maine, and Massachusetts, Beecher Stowe became increasingly concerned with the elimination of slavery. She and her seminary professor husband, Calvin Stowe (1802-1886), harbored fugitive slaves in their home while in Cincinnati. Beecher Stowe's most influential work was Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly, which was released in 1851-52 in the magazine National Era. It was published as a book in 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin played a key role in popularizing the anti-slavery movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
GO FOR ME TO CHINA December 2, 1849
Hudson Taylor was the child of devout parents and no stranger to the Bible, but at the age of seventeen, he was still a stranger to a personal walk with God.
The summer of 1849 broke warm with promise in Taylor's heart, when at last he had accepted the joyful realization God granted him of Christ's sufficiency for his sins. Many years later Taylor recalled:
Well do I remember that occasion, how in the gladness of my heart I poured out my soul before God, and again and again confessing my grateful love to Him who had done everything for me — who had saved me when I had given up all hope and even desire of salvation — I besought Him to give me some work for Him ... that I might do for Him who had done so much for me......For what service I was accepted, I knew not. But a deep consciousness that I was not my own took possession of me, which has never since been effaced.
Taylor's inner change was outwardly visible that summer. He loved spending time in the Bible and in prayer. He was so filled with the joy and wonder of salvation that he used his free time to share his faith with others.
But as fall and then winter set in, a coldness crept over Taylor's spirit. He doggedly continued to do the things he felt a Christian should do. But Bible study and prayer lost their sweetness. He went to church only out of duty, and his soul grew weary in its struggles with sin.
On Sunday, December 2, 1849, Hudson Taylor awakened feeling as sick in his physical body as he had been feeling in his spirit. As the rest of his family went to church, he stayed behind in the quiet house and began a letter to his sister: "Pray for me, dear Amelia. Thank God I feel very happy in His love, but I am so unworthy of all His blessings. I so often give way to temptation.......Oh that the Lord would take away my heart of
stone and give me a heart of flesh!"
Tormented by his thoughts, Taylor laid down his pen, and then, like Jacob of long ago, he decided that he would "lay hold of God and not let go except Thou bless me." What God did over the next few hours was so precious that Taylor never spoke of it in detail. But he did add this postscript to the letter to his sister: "Glory to God, my dear Amelia. Christ has said 'Seek and ye shall find,' and praise His name, He has revealed himself to me in an overflowing manner.... He has given me a new heart."
What filled Hudson Taylor with such praise? Six words from God that day: "Then go for me to China."
Hudson Taylor did go to China and founded the China Inland Mission, which became the largest missionary organization in the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 CHARLES SPURGEON BEGINS HIS PASTORATE IN LONDON Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was converted in 1850, after taking refuge from a snowstorm in a Methodist chapel. After a brief Baptist pastorate near Cambridge, England, he became pastor of the New Park Baptist Chapel in Southwark, London, in 1854 at age nineteen. He remained there the rest of his life. His preaching attracted such large crowds that the congregation built Metropolitan Tabernacle with seating for sixty-five hundred. Spurgeon preached there from 1861 until just before his death in 1892. The Tabernacle served not only as a preaching place, but as an educational and social center for the city. Spurgeon's tremendous gift for preaching is evidenced by the fact that his sermons are still popular and readable today, more than a century later.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 HUDSON TAYLOR ARRIVES IN CHINA From the age of five, James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) desired to be a missionary to China. Although chronic health problems almost derailed his dream, he fulfilled his goal when he arrived in Shanghai in 1854. Taylor soon began making evangelistic excursions into inland China in spite of the danger resulting from political unrest and mistrust of foreigners. Much of his success was due to his adoption of native dress and his facility with the language. When the interior of China was opened to Westerners in 1865, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 MARY'S "IMMACULATE CONCEPTION" IS DECLARED As early as the seventh century, there was debate within the church about the Catholic doctrine of the sinlessness of Mary and whether or not she had original sin. By 1476, the doctrine, along with the Feast of the Conception of Mary, was adopted and celebrated by the Roman Church. In 1854, "Immaculate" was added to the title when Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) issued a papal bull stating that, "From the first moment of her conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind, kept free from all stain of Original Sin." Protestants rejected the dogma.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1855 CONFESSIONAL LUTHERANISM WINS OVER REVIVALISTS Lutheranism in America changed significantly from the mid-1700s, when the Lutheran Church was first organized in America, to the mid-1800s. European Lutheran theology quickly took on many characteristics of American Protestantism as the immigrants assimilated. Great debate ensued among Lutherans regarding the extent of the theological Americanization, with Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799-1873) leading the Revivalist, or American, side. In 1855, Schmucker attempted to have Lutherans adopt his Definite Synodical Platform, a revision of the Augsburg Confession along Revivalist lines. This precipitated a great clash of interests that resulted in the European Lutherans, or Confessional Lutherans, mobilizing themselves and defeating the Definite Synodical Platform. The Confessional Lutheran position was strengthened by the great numbers of Lutherans who emigrated from Germany and Scandinavia during the time of this Lutheran theological debate.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1856 MOODY COMES TO CHICAGO Shortly after his conversion in Boston at age eighteen, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) moved to Chicago in 1856. He found success as a salesman, but it wasn't long before he turned more and more toward Christian work. By 1860, he was working full-time with the YMCA, ministering to young men and establishing Sunday school programs for poor children. By the early 1870s, he was a well-known evangelical leader in Chicago and by 1875, was known throughout the world after a very successful evangelistic tour of Great Britain with his song leader Ira Sankey (1840-1908). Returning to America, Moody focused his efforts on revival meetings in large cities. He also invested himself in education, founding Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and boys' and girls' schools in his hometown of Northfield, Massachusetts. From 1875 until 1899, D. L. Moody was the chief spokesman for American evangelicals.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A SMALL BEGINNING October 22, 1851
Imagine a theological seminary with a faculty of one.
Archibald Alexander was born in 1772, to a Presbyterian family near Lexington, Virginia. At the age of seventeen he became the tutor for the family of a general in the army of the new nation. Mrs. Tyler, an elderly woman in the general's home, took young Archibald under her wing. She was a Baptist who viewed Presbyterians as sound in doctrine but often not having the experience of spiritual rebirth.
The general hired a millwright, who also was a Baptist, for his plantation. One day the millwright asked Archibald whether he believed that to enter the kingdom of heaven one must be born again. Uncertain how to answer, Archibald said yes. The millwright then asked him whether he had experienced the new birth. Archibald answered, "Not that I know of."
"Ah," said the millwright, "if you had ever experienced this change, you would know something about it!"
The conversation got Alexander thinking. Surely the new birth was in the Bible, but he had never heard any Presbyterians talk about it.
Old Mrs. Tyler had poor eyesight and would frequently ask Alexander to read to her. On Sunday evenings Alexander was asked to read to the whole family. One particular Sunday night he read the family a sermon on Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, "Behold I stand at the door and knock.. .." As Alexander read the sermon, every word seemed to apply to him. By the time he finished, his voice was quivering with emotion. He laid down the book and ran to his room. Shutting the door, he fell to his knees and poured out his soul in prayer, inviting Jesus into his life. He had not prayed long when he was overwhelmed by a joy that he had never experienced. The joy was accompanied by a full assurance that, if he were to die, he would go to heaven.
Giving up tutoring, Alexander went to study theology at Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) and entered the Presbyterian ministry. After serving as an itinerant minister on the Ohio-Virginia frontier, he became president of Hampden-Sydney College in 1796 at the age of twenty-four.
In 1807, Alexander became pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly. In his final address as moderator in 1808, he suggested the formation of a Presbyterian seminary in America. As a result of his leadership, Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812, with Alexander as its sole faculty member for the first year. The first fall he had three students, who were joined by six more in the spring and five more during the summer. Alexander's modest home served as library, chapel, and classroom. He continued teaching at Princeton Seminary until his death on October 22, 1851.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1857 PRAYER MEETING REVIVAL BEGINS IN NEW YORK In the summer of 1857, the North Dutch (Reformed) Church on Fulton Street in New York City decided to hire lay evangelist Jeremiah Lanphier (1809— c. l890) to minister to the immigrants living in poverty around their church. When Lanphier had difficulty reaching the church's neighbors, he decided to start a daily noon-hour prayer meeting for businessmen to gather and pray for revival. The first day—September 23, 1857—he knelt alone. As he prayed, men slowly trickled in, with six in attendance by one o'clock. Each day, the group grew and within a month averaged more than one hundred. Soon many other local churches and even the police and fire stations were housing noontime prayer meetings. Within two years, approximately one million converts were added to the churches of America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1857 HAMILTON'S WESLEYAN METHODIST REVIVAL FUELS PRAYER REVIVAL The Methodist lay preachers Walter and Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) led very successful camp revival meetings during the summer of 1857 throughout Ontario, Canada. By October, the crowds reached five thousand during the week and twenty thousand on the weekends. During their return trip home by train to New York, the Palmers became separated from their luggage and ended up spending the night in Hamilton, Ontario, while waiting for their bags to arrive. A local Methodist pastor heard of their presence and requested that they preach at an impromptu Friday night service. One night turned into several weeks as the crowds grew and several hundred souls came to Christ, including the mayor of Hamilton. The Hamilton revival was reported widely in Christian newspapers and journals, which helped fuel the laymen's prayer revival that soon swept the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 PATON SAILS FOR NEW HEBRIDES John Gibson Paton (1824-1907), son of a devout Christian man, left home to devote his life to mission work. Having applied for a post as a tract distributor, Paton began training at the Free Church Normal Seminary in Glasgow, Scotland. While preparing for foreign mission work, he continued his studies in medicine and theology, and worked for the Glasgow City Mission for ten years.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE FULTON STREET PRAYER MEETING September 23, 1857
What do you do if you announce a prayer meeting but no one comes?
The summer of 1857 was a frustrating time to be a Christian in New York City. In the commercial district wealthy bankers and businessmen thanked God for their profitable deals. Yet in the vast slums poverty was inescapable.
Jeremiah Lanphier was a man who wanted to make a difference. Born south of Albany, he had come to New York City to enter the mercantile business. Then at the age of thirty-three he unexpectedly discovered that Jesus Christ was real and that he had paid the penalty for Jeremiah's sins. Lanphier gave his life to Jesus and joined Brick Presbyterian Church, spending much of his spare time as a street evangelist. In the summer of 1857 the North Dutch (Reformed) Church on Fulton Street decided to hire a full-time lay evangelist to reach the immigrants living in the surrounding neighborhoods. They chose Jeremiah Lanphier.
Lanphier began praying, Lord, what do you want me to do? The answer he received was that God wanted people to pray. He decided to have a prayer meeting for businessmen from noon to one o'clock in the afternoon when they could come for a few minutes or for the whole hour.
Lanphier printed up a handbill inviting the public to a weekly prayer meeting at noon on Wednesdays in the third-floor meeting room of North Dutch Church on Fulton Street. The first prayer meeting would be held September 23, 1857.
The appointed day arrived, and at noon Lanphier went to the room and knelt to pray. Twenty minutes passed and still he was alone. Finally at 12:30 one man entered the room and without saying a word knelt down next to Lanphier. Then another man came, followed by another until by one o'clock there were six.
The following week there were twenty. By the first week of October the meetings were held daily and the number increased to forty. The fourth week they averaged over one hundred with many under conviction and inquiring how they might be saved.
New York City was to see a great need for God when on October 18, a financial panic seized the city, collapsing the economy into a brief but steep recession. "The Fulton Street Meetings," as they became known, soon filled the rooms at North Dutch Church and spilled over into the nearby John Street Methodist Church. Before long many other churches welcomed people to pray both at noon and before work in the morning. Even police stations and firehouses opened their doors to meet the need for places to pray. Within six months, ten thousand businessmen were gathering for prayer daily.
Although the revival was the most spectacular in New York City, businessmen's prayer meetings sprang up in many cities around the country. Within the next two years approximately one million converts were added to America's churches.
On April 16, 1858, following his ordination as a Reformed Presbyterian minister, Paton sailed with his wife to New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu). Following the deaths of his wife and infant son, Paten left the islands to regroup. In 1866, he returned to the island of Aniwa, and over the next fifteen years he saw the majority of the native people put their faith in Jesus Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 BERNADETTE SOUBRIOUS CLAIMS A MIRACLE AT LOURDES On February 11, 1858, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubrious (1844-1879) was gathering firewood on the banks of the Gave de Pau River in Lourdes, France, when she reported seeing a bright light in a grotto. The light formed the figure of a beautiful lady whom Bernadette recognized as the Virgin Mary. Bernadette reported that the Virgin asked her to deliver a message of repentance and prayer to the world. Crowds began following Bernadette to the grotto, hoping to witness another miracle. She had seventeen additional visions through July 16, 1858, seen only by her, causing many to dismiss them as the product of superstitious hysteria. A decade later, the Catholic Church officially recognized Bernadette's experience as miraculous, largely because visitors to the spring inside the grotto claimed miraculous healing. She was canonized in 1933.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 FIRST JEW IS SEATED IN ENGLISH HOUSE OF COMMONS Prior to 1828, only Anglicans could be elected to the English House of Commons because members had to swear allegiance to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. In 1828, all Protestants were allowed to be elected, and the following year Roman Catholics were as well. In 1847, a Jew named Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879) was elected but was not allowed to be seated because of the required oath "on the true faith of a Christian." He repeatedly was elected but was not seated because the House of Lords refused to eliminate the oath. Finally, in 1858, Rothschild was seated in the House of Commons, and in 1885, his son became the first practicing Jew to join the House of Lords.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1859 JAPAN REOPENS TO FOREIGN MISSIONARIES In the mid-nineteenth century, for the first time in more than 250 years, missionaries made their way back into Japan. Following a treaty between France and the Japanese government, Japan opened its borders for trade, and in May 1859, the first Protestant missionaries arrived. Despite more than two centuries of severe persecution of Christians in Japan, both Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries found secret groups of Christians who had maintained the faith for generations, without the aid of formal education or clergy.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE PRECOCIOUS YOUNG PASTOR August 16, 1859
Would your church call a nineteen-year-old pastor? Here's one that did.
On a Saturday afternoon in December 1853, a nineteen-year-old lad made his first trip to London from Cambridge on the Eastern Counties Railway. No one observing him would have guessed that this young fellow was about to begin a ministry to the city of London that would last thirty-eight years.
His name was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. His father and grandfather were Congregational pastors. His grandfather had been the pastor of the Independent Church in Essex for fifty-four years, and his father pastored a number of independent churches throughout England. The family had descended from Huguenots who had fled France and settled in Essex.
When Spurgeon was just ten years old he met a pastor friend of his grandfather's, while vacationing at his grandfather's home. The friend was extremely impressed at how well Spurgeon read from the Bible in the Sunday service. Before leaving the next day, the pastor told the family he had a conviction that someday Spurgeon would preach the gospel to thousands.
After being converted at a Primitive Methodist chapel at the age of sixteen, Spurgeon began to study the issue of baptism. He became convinced that the New Testament taught baptism was to be for believers and by immersion. In spite of their belief in infant baptism, his parents encouraged him to follow his own convictions, and so he was baptized. Shortly thereafter, Spurgeon joined a Baptist church in Cambridge.
He soon discovered his gift of preaching, and in spite of his young age he was in much demand. After accepting a brief pastorate near Cambridge, eighteen-year-old Spurgeon was called the following year to the pastorate of the New Park Street Baptist Chapel in London. It was a small church, but within a few weeks of his arrival he was attracting great crowds. The chapel soon proved to be too small, so the church decided to enlarge the building. During construction the church moved to a large hall, but once again the crowds wanting to hear Spurgeon preach surpassed what the hall could accommodate. The decision was finally made to build a tabernacle sufficiently large to seat the crowds coming to hear the twenty-five-year-old preacher. On August 16, 1859, the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Tabernacle was laid. The church was built to hold sixty-five hundred worshipers. Metropolitan Tabernacle opened debt free in May 1861. Spurgeon preached there until shortly before his death in 1892.
The Metropolitan Tabernacle was more than just a preaching station. It was an educational and social center. Spurgeon founded a pastor's college and an orphanage, both of which continue to minister to this day. He also began a literature ministry and provided many services to the nearby slums. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle was one of the great churches of all time.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1859 DARWIN PUBLISHES THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES In 1831, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) graduated from Christ College in Cambridge, England, intending to become a clergyman. However, he continually vacillated between faith and agnosticism, a tension that brought him psychosomatic pain as well. He became a "naturalist" and began formulating his theory of evolution during a five-year voyage around South America from 1831 to 1836. Upon his return he started studying the transmutation of species. In 1857, a debate at Oxford between T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), Darwin's representative, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) resulted in firmly pitting evolution and religion against each other. Darwin had hesitated in publishing his theories, apparently due to his own inner conflict. However, after A. R. Wallace (1823-1913) published a theory similar to evolution, Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 THE SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH IS FOUNDED Ellen Gould White (1827-1915) was a teenager when William Miller (1782-1849) predicted the second coming of Christ in 1843 and again in 1844, resulting in "The Great Disappointment." As one of those who remained committed to the movement, White became the most prominent leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, formally organized in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1860. Over her lifetime, White claimed to have experienced some two thousand visions, one of which was a vision confirming worship on Saturday rather than on Sunday.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 JAMAICA EXPERIENCES REVIVAL As word of the amazing laymen's prayer revival in the United States spread to Jamaica, believers there fervently prayed that revival would also come to them.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A PEEP OF DAY MEETING September 28, 1860
It all began with people praying.
In 1860, Christians in Jamaica had heard about the prayer revival sweeping the world. Wanting to become part of it, they held "peep of day" (dawn) prayer meetings throughout the island, Most were held in plantations so that people could meet for prayer before they went out to work the fields.
Their prayers for revival were first answered in a Moravian chapel. The Moravians were the spiritual descendants of Jan Hus, the Czech reformer martyred in 1415. They had settled at Herrnhut, Germany, and had become a major missionary-sending movement. Theodor Sonderrnan, a Moravian missionary from Germany, regularly visited the town of Clifton, Jamaica, as part of his ministry.
On September 28, 1860, Sonderman began what he expected to be a typical Moravian service. A hymn was sung, followed by an opening prayer. Then someone else prayed, and another and another. Even children led in prayer. As one boy poured out his soul to God, Sonderman saw tears streaming down everyone's cheeks as they cried to God for mercy. Even notorious sinners groaned to God in prayer. When a young girl prayed, men started to tremble on their knees. So many people were weeping that Sonderman became concerned for maintaining order. The meeting finally broke up after three hours so that Sonderman could deal with those who were in greatest distress.
After four weeks Theodor Sonderman was dealing with over three hundred inquir-ers, and the revival was still continuing. It spilled over into other denominations, including the Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
At the Mount Carey Chapel the local justice of the peace presided over the Sunday morning service because there was no pastor. Even so, twelve hundred crowded into the chapel. In three smaller communities, three thousand were awakened to faith in Christ with no pastor preaching.
Among the Methodists of Montego Bay, the chapel of eight hundred members witnessed 547 people come to Christ. The eighty Baptist churches of Jamaica reported twelve thousand conversions during the revival. The Congregational churches grew so much that the missionary board called in its missionaries, leaving the church in able local hands, while the Presbyterian churches of Jamaica saw over three thousand conversions in 1860 and another seventeen hundred the following year.
A Congregational minister summarized the results of the revival: "It closed the rum shop and the gambling houses, reconciled long-separated husbands and wives, restored prodigal children, produced scores of bans to be read for marriage, crowded every place of worship, quickened the zeal of ministers, purified the churches, and brought many sinners to repentance. It also excited the rage of those ungodly people whom it had not humbled."
And it all began with prayer.
In September 1860, the much-anticipated revival began in a Moravian chapel in the town of Clifton and quickly spread throughout the island, crossing denominational boundaries to the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congrega-tionalists, and Baptists. Individuals of all ages and classes gathered together on plantations and in churches for prayer meetings and services in all parts of the island. Many meetings numbered more than a thousand people. During the last few months of 1860, several thousand Jamaicans professed faith in Christ, drastically changing the culture of this nation of recently liberated slaves.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 WOMEN'S UNION MISSIONARY SOCIETY IS ESTABLISHED The eighteenth century saw a significant increase in foreign missions, including an increase in single women choosing to be missionaries. Among the faith missions established to support missionaries during the last half of the nineteenth century, a variety of influential societies were founded, supported, and managed by women. Established in 1860, the Women's Union Missionary Society was the first missionary society of this kind in the United States. Other societies founded by and for women included the Female Education Society and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society in Britain. Like other faith missions, the Women's Union Missionary Society developed a comprehensive ministry of evangelism, education, and medical care, attempting to meet the needs of the whole person. Today the society has merged with the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 ALLIANCE ISRAELITE UNIVERSELLE IS FOUNDED IN PARIS In 1860, the Alliance Israelite Universelle was established in Paris, focusing on assisting Jews in the Middle East, where France had numerous settlements. In addition to working for the freedom and well-being of Jews in French territories, the alliance sought to improve the status of Jews around the world. Its most significant achievement was the creation of a network of educational institutions through which religious and general education was available to Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The school system, which taught classes in both French and Hebrew, included an agricultural program in Palestine. The alliance, with its Western bias, provided Jewish students an understanding of Western culture and society.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1861 UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR BEGINS On April 12, 1861, the newly seceded Confederate States of America opened fire on the United States at Fort Sumter off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. After thirty-six hours, the fort fell to the Confederacy. The opening shots in the American Civil War had been decades in the making as the Southern states increasingly longed for freedom from the Northern conceptions of union and liberty. Slavery, which eventually became the war's defining issue, was simply one manifestation of the deep philosophical differences between North and South. Christians on both sides defended their positions from the Bible and prayed for an end to America's bloodiest war. Their prayers were answered on April 9, 1865, when the Confederacy surrendered to the sovereignty of the United States of America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1861-1865 REVIVALS ARE COMMON DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR During the American Civil War, preaching and praying in both the North and South tended to emphasize God's blessing for their side. In the battlefields and among the soldiers, however, preachers usually emphasized the need for personal repentance and faith. Revivals were common among the ranks of both the Confederate and Union armies with thousands of soldiers being converted. Some have suggested that the Confederate troops in particular were the most evangelical army of all time.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1862 MOSES HESS PUBLISHES ROME AND JERUSALEM When Moses Hess (1812-1875) published his work Rome and Jerusalem in Germany in 1862, it became the first Jewish book to present the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland. Hess was not alone in his beliefs, and the following decades saw a growing number who planned to settle in Palestine in hopes of building a nation in the land of Israel.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1863 GENERAL STONEWALL JACKSON'S CAREER CUT SHORT General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (1824-1863) was one of the greatest tactical geniuses of military history. He was converted to Jesus Christ in 1848 while fighting in the Mexican War. Jackson did not support the secession of the southern states, yet his loyalty as a Virginian caused him to accept a commission in the Army of Northern Virginia in 1861. He earned the nickname "Stonewall" in the first battle of Bull Run when his brigade stood firm against attack—like a stone wall. From 1861 to 1863, Jackson demonstrated his tactical genius in multiple campaigns. He prayed passionately before making every decision. During the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, Jackson was wounded by errant fire from his own troops. On May 10, 1863, the great Christian general passed into the peace of God.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
REVIVAL IN THE ARMY August 21, 1863
Reverend J. W. Jones was a Chaplain in the army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. In his book, Christ in the Camp, he related how God worked among the Confederate Army troops. Jones attributed thousands of conversions directly and indirectly to a day of prayer and fasting that Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, called for on August 21, 1863.
Robert E. Lee issued the following message in response to President Davis' request:
Soldiers! We have sinned against Almighty God. We have forgotten His signal mercies, and have cultivated a revengeful, haughty, and boastful spirit. We have not remembered that the defenders of a just cause should be pure in His eyes; that "our times are in His hands;" and we have relied too much on our own arms for the achievement of our independence. God is our only refuge and our strength. Let us humble ourselves before Him. R.E. Lee, General
A revival of sorts had begun and the soldiers were receptive to a day dedicated to prayer and fasting. The services were well attended, and many miraculous events resulted from the day's observance. The following excerpts are from letters during that period.
Reverend Haley wrote, "There are religious revivals all over the army. Many are turning to God."
Chaplain Tomkies of the Seventh Florida Regiment wrote, "On last evening fifteen were buried with Christ in Baptism. ... Each evening scores of soldiers are inquiring, 'What shall we do to be saved?'"
The chaplain of the Tenth Alabama Regiment wrote, "I believe that 100 anxious souls presented themselves for prayer last night after the sermon."
The Richmond Christian Advocate reported:
Not for years has such a revival prevailed in the Confederate States... The Pentecostal fire lights the camp, and the hosts of armed men sleep beneath the wings of angels rejoicing over the many sinners that have repented. The people at home are beginning to feel the kindling of the same grace in their hearts. It is inspiring to read the correspondence, now, between converts in the camp and friends at home, and to hear parents praise God for tidings from their absent sons who have lately given their hearts to the Lord. "Father is converted," says a bright-faced child of twelve years; "Mamma got a letter to-day, and father says that there is a great revival in his regiment." What glorious news from the army is this!
The revival spread at home in Virginia as well.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1864 SAMUEL CROWTHER IS NAMED BISHOP IN WEST AFRICA Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891) was born in Yorubaland (present-day Nigeria). Captured by slave traders at fifteen and then freed by the British navy, he was taken to Sierra Leone. There, he put his faith in Christ and took his English name, Samuel. Excelling in school, he became a teacher for the Church Missionary Society and traveled to London in 1843, for ordination as an Anglican priest. Convinced that Africa's greatest need was native African missionaries, he returned home to preach the gospel. Among his first converts were his long-lost mother and sister. In 1864, Crowther became the first African Anglican bishop when he was made bishop of Western Africa. With an all-African staff energized by his unflagging vision, Crowther strengthened the Anglican Church and evangelized the tribes of the Niger territories.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1864 POPE PIUS IX WRITES THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS Beginning in 1849, a call sounded within the Catholic Church to condemn formally the errors brought by modern liberalism. Bishops began working on the list of errors in 1852, completing it in 1864. On December 8, 1864, Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) issued the Syllabus of Errors, a list of eighty errors and refutations under ten subheadings: 1) Pantheism, Naturalism, and Absolute Rationalism; 2) Moderate Rationalism; 3) Indifferentism and False Tolerance in Religious Matters; 4) Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies, Bible Societies, and Liberal Clerical Associations; 5) the Church and Its Rights; 6) the State and Its Relation to the Church; 7) Natural and Christian Ethics; 8) Christian Marriage; 9) Temporal Power of the Pope; and 10) Modern Liberalism. This document was immediately controversial throughout Europe because it was seen as a formal rejection of modern culture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1865 AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES BREAK FROM WHITE CONTROL During the aftermath of the Civil War, freed slaves began to leave white churches to form their own denominations and churches. In the South, African Americans founded the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Black Baptists, although slow to organize, eventually formed the National Baptist Convention. Already established Northern denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, increased their influence in the South. In addition to the denominational expansion, many communities of freed slaves formed independent churches. As these groups continued to prosper, the denominations formed colleges and began publishing periodicals. In later years, many African American Baptist churches were instrumental in the expansion of the Holiness movement. These developments produced the black church movement in America, which has had a primary influence on African American culture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1865 HUDSON TAYLOR FOUNDS THE CHINA INLAND MISSION In 1854, James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) became the first foreign missionary to enter inland China. He originally was backed by the Chinese Evangelization Society, but quickly severed his ties with them because of his displeasure with their fund-raising methods. Instead, he worked on his own, depending solely on God for support. When Taylor had to return to England because of illness, his burden for inland China grew stronger, and he tried in vain to find a mission to back his return. Therefore, in 1865, Taylor founded the interdenominational China Inland Mission, which in 1866, fulfilled his dream of sending missionaries to all twelve unreached provinces of inland China. The CIM missionaries, known for wearing Chinese dress and depending on God alone for support, numbered 641 by 1895. By 1914, the China Inland Mission was the largest missionary organization in the world, reaching its peak in 1934 with 1, 368 missionaries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1867 SCRIPTURE UNION IS FOUNDED IN ENGLAND Founded in 1867, as the "Children's Special Service Mission" in England, the Scripture Union became an international, interdenominational, evangelical youth organization promoting Bible reading. Its main thrust is youth work and child evangelism, especially through groups in schools. The union publishes books, Sunday school materials, and training literature for all ages. A distinction of the organization is that it is controlled largely by laypeople.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1870 FIRST VATICAN COUNCIL DECLARES PAPAL INFALLIBILITY The First Vatican Council was convened by Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) and met from December 8, 1869, to July 18, 1870. The pope had come to the papal throne in 1846, and had a very strong influence over this council. He and his supporters felt that the time had come to officially endorse papal absolutism, which had been a controversial issue within the church but had gained ground under powerful popes during the previous centuries. The council consisted of 276 Italian bishops and 265 from the rest of Europe. After months of intense debate, the council endorsed papal primacy and infallibility.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1870 THE GHETTO OF ROME IS ABOLISHED The ghetto in Rome first established in 1555 by Pope Paul IV (1476-1559) was destroyed by Napoleon Bonaparte's (1769-1821) armies and then was reestablished by Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) in 1815. While the official purpose of the ghetto was to separate Jews from non-Jews, the state of life inside its walls was so deplorable that it served to destroy both the wealth and morale of the Jews. The Roman Ghetto was finally abolished in 1870, when the Roman Catholic Church lost much of its secular authority to the Italian nationalists. The new government of the Italian nationalists came to power on October 13, 1870, bringing freedom to the Jewish community.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1871 BISMARCK BEGINS HIS CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE CATHOLIC CHURCH When Prussia defeated France in 1870, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), son of Prussian aristocrats, seized his opportunity to establish a German empire. Fragmented since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a united Germany would be much stronger than the sum of its parts. In 1871, Bismarck arranged for William I (1797-1888) to be crowned emperor of Germany and established an elected governing body. His actions fully united more than two dozen kingdoms, states, and cities into the new Germany. Knowing two-thirds of his German empire was Protestant, Bismarck thought making the Roman Catholic Church the enemy would further unite Germany. He closed Catholic schools, prohibited priests from preaching against the state, and opposed the Vatican at every opportunity. In the end, however, it was Bismarck who was forced to relent, and Germany and the Vatican resumed diplomatic relations in 1882.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1872 BETHEL INSTITUTIONS MEET PRACTICAL NEEDS Friedrich Bodelschwingh (1831-1910), a pietistic Lutheran pastor and social reformer, was born in Westphalia, Germany. In 1872, he was appointed the head of a home for epileptic children in Bielefield, Germany. He named the institution "Bethel," or House of God. As a fruit of the revival in Europe and as part of the German Protestant Innere Mission movement, Bethel embraced the philosophy that the love of Christ is demonstrated by meeting practical human needs. The work rapidly expanded to include the education of lay ministers, seminarians, and secondary students who were involved in ministry to institutionalized people, refugees, paroled convicts, and in missions work in East Africa. Today, under the German Evangelical Church, Bethel Institutions house more than ten thousand individuals, making them one of the most significant social outreach ministries in Europe.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 UNION OF AMERICAN HEBREW CONGREGATIONS IS FOUNDED In the United States, the Reform Judaism movement blossomed in the late nineteenth century, particularly from the efforts of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900). Wise, who served as a rabbi in Albany, New York, before taking a position with a synagogue in Cincinnati, Ohio, devoted his life to unifying Reform Jews throughout the United States. In 1873, Wise established the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and two years later, a Reformed Jewish seminary he called Hebrew Union College. The foundation of these American Jewish institutions was part of Wise's effort to assist Jews in achieving a normal life in the United States. Wise's actions and the movement's ideology were specifically outlined in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which denounced any effort to establish a national homeland for Jews and dismissed the majority of traditional Jewish rituals.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
BAPTISM OF FIRE October 6, 1871|
You have to be careful what you pray for.
In 1871, Dwight L. Moody was a well-known evangelical leader in Chicago. Seven years before, he had founded the Illinois Street Church, which today is Moody Memorial Church. In the late 1860s, he was president of the Chicago YMCA and built 3,000-seat Farwell Hall, the first YMCA building in America. He preached there on Sunday nights because congregational attendance had outgrown the Illinois Street Church.
At the time Moody was struggling with what God wanted him to do. He knew that he had to decide between being a social-religious organizer through the YMCA and being an evangelist. His inner conflict began to diminish the power of his preaching. This became especially clear to two women in his church, Sarah Anne Cook and a Mrs. Hawxhurst. They became convinced that Moody needed the baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire. The women shared their concern with Moody and eventually set up a weekly Friday prayer time with him. Moody's spiritual frustration was so great that as they prayed on October 6, 1871, he rolled on the floor asking God to baptize him with the Holy Spirit and fire.
The next Sunday night Farwell Hall was full as Moody preached on "What then shall I do with Jesus which is called Christ?" He closed by saying, "I wish you would take this text home with you and turn it over in your minds during the week, and next Sabbath we will come to Calvary and the cross, and we will decide what to do with Jesus of Nazareth." Then his song leader, Ira Sankey, sang:
Today the Saviour calls, For refuge fly
The storm of Justice falls, And death is nigh.
Suddenly Ira's voice was drowned out by the sound of fire engines rushing past the hall. It was the Great Chicago Fire and it lasted until Wednesday. Everything that held Moody to Chicago was in ashes. The only chain still binding him there was his own will. Weeks later that last chain snapped, and he surrendered his will to God. Moody went on . to become the leading evangelist in the English-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century. He traveled over one million miles and presented the gospel by voice and written word to over one hundred million people.
On the twenty-second anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, Moody spoke reflectively: "I have never seen that congregation since, and I never will meet those people again until I meet them in another world. But I want to tell you of one lesson I learned that night, which I have never forgotten, and that is, when I preach, to press Christ upon the people then and there, and try to bring them to a decision on the spot.... I have asked God many times to forgive me for telling people that night to take a week to think it over."
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 LOTTIE MOON ARRIVES IN CHINA After earning a master's degree in classics from Albemarle Female Institution, Charlotte "Lottie" Diggs Moon (1840-1912) began teaching in Georgia. Feeling called as a missionary, Moon joined the Southern Baptist Convention, and in 1873, she arrived in Tengzhou, China. After working for twelve years at a girls' school, Moon relocated to P'ing-tu, becoming the first single woman to independently open a Chinese missionary post. Moon employed friendship as the basis of her evangelism. Her church-planting efforts in P'ing-tu led to the establishment of thirty churches. Known for her extreme generosity, Moon died of starvation on Christmas Eve 1912. The Southern Baptist Convention still collects the annual Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions established by Moon and renamed the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering after her death.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 MOODY'S BRITISH CAMPAIGN WITNESSES ANSWERS TO PRAYER Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), the American evangelist, traveled to England in 1873 to hold evangelistic meetings. He agreed to preach once for an old friend pastoring a London church. The congregation was cold and unresponsive to his morning sermon, and Moody regretted having committed to the evening service as well. Unknown to him, a bedridden woman from the church had been praying for months for Moody to come and bring revival. When she heard of his unannounced visit, she fasted and prayed all afternoon for the evening service. Much to Moody's surprise, that evening almost the entire congregation answered his altar call. As a result, the church received four hundred new converts. This answer to one woman's prayer opened the door for Moody to preach to 2.5 million people throughout England during the next two years.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1875 REVIVAL IS SPARKED AT THE FIRST KESWICK CONVENTION In 1875, at the end of American evangelist Dwight L. Moody's (1837-1899) two-year evangelistic tour of England, the vicar of Keswick, a town in England's Lake District, invited him to speak there. God used Moody to spark a revival in Keswick that birthed the annual summer Keswick Convention, a nondenomi-national gathering of evangelicals that continues there today. The hallmarks of Keswick are prayer, Bible study, and dependence on the Holy Spirit. Thousands have been called into ministry and missions at the Keswick Convention.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL
June 17, 1873
In the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American communications were difficult for everyone. Yet God was in charge then, too.
On June 17, 1873, Dwight L. Moody and his new and inexperienced song leader, Ira Sankey, along with their wives and the Moody children, arrived in Liverpool, England, to hold evangelistic meetings. They had come at the invitation of three Christian men who had promised to pay their travel expenses even though the men had never actually met Moody. Having exhausted all his own funds for the steamship tickets, Moody arrived in England only to learn that two of the men had died and the third had forgotten his promise. No arrangements had been made for any meetings, there was no sponsoring committee and no funds. They were stranded with no money three thousand miles from home.
Moody said to Sankey, "God seems to have closed the doors. We'll not open any ourselves. If He opens the door, we'll go in. If He doesn't, we'll return to America."
At their hotel that night Moody remembered that the one specific invitation he had received from England was from George Bennett, a young chemist in York who was the founder/secretary of the local YMCA. Moody had only vaguely replied to Bennett's invitation when he had first received it. Telling Sankey, "This door is only ajar," Moody had the secretary of the Liverpool YMCA send Bennett a telegram: "Moody here—are you ready for him."
Since he had received no firm reply to his invitation, Bennett had not pursued the idea any further and had told only one person that he had sent the invitation. Thus he was justifiably shocked when he received Moody's telegram. Bennett replied with a telegram to Moody: "Please fix date when you can come to York." Moody replied immediately, "I will be in York tonight ten o'clock—Make no arrangements till I come."
Bennett appeared dazed as he met Moody at the train station that evening. Over supper Moody suggested a course of action. "I propose we make arrangements tomorrow, Saturday, to commence meetings Sunday." As they ate, they came up with a plan to have posters printed and posted on Saturday as soon as Bennett could find a place for him to preach.
Starting that Sunday, Moody began holding services in local churches including one pastored by F. B. Meyer. Initially the meetings were only moderately successful, but the experience of having Moody preach in his church was life changing for Meyer. In the church's small vestry room, Moody and Meyer prayed many hours for England, kneeling together at the leather-covered table in the center of the room. Moody later referred to that little room as "the foundation from which the river of blessing for all England had sprung," for during the next two years, two and a half million people heard Moody preach throughout England. It was the greatest British revival since John Wesley's day.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1875 MARY BAKER EDDY WRITES SCIENCE AND HEALTH
In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the founder of the Christian Science Church, published Science and Health, With a Key to Scripture. She claimed that God had dictated it to her, although she hired a pastor to correct its bad grammar. Eddy proposed that all sickness was a result of mental error and that the way to cure sickness was not with medicine, but by the practice of a spiritual science that she had rediscovered from Jesus. She banned preaching in her churches, replacing it with readings from selected Bible texts and from her book. Mary Baker Eddy claimed that her teachings guaranteed health; however, she suffered considerably at the end of her life, requiring large doses of morphine to cope with her pain.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 CALVIN COLLEGE IS FOUNDED
On March 15, 1876, G. E. Boer (1832-1904) founded a school to train ministers for the Christian Reformed Church, a denomination composed of immigrants from Holland. During its first session, the school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had only seven students. In 1894, the school began to admit students who did not plan to study for the ministry. The curriculum was expanded in 1900, and the name was changed to John Calvin Junior College. Twenty years later, the college began offering baccalaureate programs and was known simply as Calvin College. The college and seminary, now offering multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees, remain the center of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Christian Reformed Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 BIBLE CONFERENCE MOVEMENT BEGINS
In July 1876, a small group of Christian men met in Swampscott, Massachusetts, for fellowship and Bible study. They called their group "Believers' Meeting for Bible Study." This meeting marked the birth of the Bible Conference movement.
The "Believers" meeting became an annual and growing event. From 1883 to 1897, the group met annually in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, hence becoming known as the Niagara Bible Conferences. The conferences typically began with a Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and then a week followed with two morning, two afternoon, and one evening Bible lesson. The meetings were strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren and the teachings of J. N. Darby (1800-1882).
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES PUBLISH THE WATCHTOWER
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, more commonly known as the Jehovah's Witnesses, grew out of a Bible study group started by Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916) in 1870. After years of independent Bible study, Russell began to teach his small group of followers an extreme form of Adventism. In 1876, Russell published the first edition of his magazine, Zion's Watchtower. The magazine, now known simply as The Watchtower, is currently published in 106 languages with a claimed circulation of 64 million. After Russell's death in 1916, his followers took the name Millennial Dawnists, but today they are known as Jehovah's Witnesses. In 2004, they claimed their membership to be 6 million in 230 countries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 JEWS ARE GRANTED CITIZENSHIP IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Because of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, which extended from Bulgaria to North Africa, and the fear that its collapse would upset the balance of power in Europe, the European nations began to exert pressure on the empire to institute reform. In particular, they pressured its leaders to assure the rights of their subject peoples. The changes had long-term effects on the Jews of the empire. In 1839, the empire granted civil equality to non-Muslims. Then finally in 1876, citizenship was granted to all Ottoman subjects, including the Jews.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 MARY SLESSOR SAILS FOR AFRICA
Mary Slessor (1848-1915) was converted to Christ as a teenager in Scotland. While helping young people in Dundee, Scotland, she became interested in the United Presbyterian Church's mission to Nigeria. In 1876, Slessor set sail for Nigeria where she worked among the Ibo tribe. She personally cared for multiple babies in the fight against twin killing. Slessor, affectionately known as "the White Queen," established fifty locally run churches and schools, and when British rule was established in Nigeria she became the first female magistrate in 1892. In addition to encouraging trade between inland regions and the coast, Slessor established the Hope Waddell Institute, where Africans were instructed in medicine and other trades. As a result of her work, the Ibo tribe became one of the most Christian peoples of Africa.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1877 THE PACIFIC GARDEN MISSION IS FOUNDED
On September 15, 1877, in the midst of Chicago's skid row, George Roger Clarke (d. 1892) and his wife, Sarah, opened the doors to Clarke's Mission. The mission outgrew its one-room facility within three years, and the Clarkes procured a new building called the Pacific Beer Garden. At the prompting of Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), they renamed their mission the Pacific Garden Mission. Among the mission's more famous converts were Billy Sunday (1862-1935), a baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings who went on to become a famous evangelist, and Mel Trotter (1870-1940), a derelict who later founded a similar mission in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The ongoing success and influence of the Pacific Garden Mission makes it a leader among urban rescue ministries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1878 BOOTHS FOUND THE SALVATION ARMY
William Booth (1829-1912) and his wife, Catherine (1829-1890), had been ministering among the unchurched slum dwellers of London for over a decade when, in 1878, they founded the Salvation Army with Booth as its first general. Claiming that "we can't get at the masses in a chapel," the Booths and their army preached in taverns, jails, theaters, factories, and poorhouses, and held open-air meetings with live bands playing loud music. Food centers, night shelters, and employment exchanges were opened. Souls were saved, lives transformed. When Booth died at age eighty-three, he left behind him a committed body of sixteen thousand officers to lead his army of socially conscious and spiritually vibrant believers. The Salvation Army was one of the nineteenth century's most successful revival movements, and the Booths' vision continues to inspire selfless and compassionate social work among the urban needy of the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1879 FRANCES WILLARD BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION
Frances Willard (1839-1898) was an accomplished educator and diligent activist for suffrage and women's rights. Converted to Christ while attending Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, she became a Methodist. Willard devoted sixteen years to educational administration before becoming involved in the temperance movement. In 1879, she became the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, retaining the office until her death. Prominent in national reform political circles, she helped organize the Prohibition Party in 1882. Willard's unique role lay in combining conservative ideals with a commitment to radical social reform.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1880 ABRAHAM KUYPER FOUNDS THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was brought up in a strict Dutch Reformed home where the value of books and learning was emphasized. After earning a doctorate from the University of Leyden in the Netherlands in 1867, Kuyper became pastor in Beesd. He was then called to a church in Amsterdam in 1870, and his involvement in politics increased. In 1872, Kuyper became the editor of De Standard, a local Christian newspaper. Two years later, Kuyper was elected to the national parliament. During his time in the pastorate and parliament, Kuyper had become increasingly burdened about the need for a university where Christian leaders could receive a specifically Christian education. While in the parliament, he enabled legislation to be enacted that allowed for equal treatment of private religious universities. This laid the foundation for Kuyper to help establish the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, where he became professor of systematic theology.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1880 MOODY LEADS NORTHFIELD CONFERENCES In the summer of 1880, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) launched the first of his annual Northfield Conferences in his hometown of Northfield, Massachusetts. Moody's goal for the conferences was to offer laypeople in-depth Bible training and a time of spiritual renewal. As was the case with most other Bible conferences of the day, the Northfield Conferences promoted dispensational premillennialism. Also, Moody's association with the Keswick movement in England resulted in an emphasis on the Holy Spirit's power in sanctification. The meetings were held in 1880 and 1881, and then were suspended while Moody spent several years in England. When Moody returned in 1885, the conferences were reinstated and held annually until after his death.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 CLARK FOUNDS THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR SOCIETY In February 1881, Pastor Francis E. Clark (1851-1927) of Williston Church in Portland, Maine, founded the Christian Endeavor Society. His goal in founding the youth organization was to sustain and build on the results of a week of prayer at his church the previous month. The weekly meetings and monthly consecration meeting were organized and led exclusively by youth. The aim was to evangelize young people and to train them to serve. As the societies multiplied around the country, Clark later became the full-time president of the organization. The organization was the first of many similar nondenominational youth societies that sprung up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 ELIEZER BEN YEHUDA ARRIVES IN PALESTINE The articulation of the desire to establish a Jewish nation, which began with Moses Hess' work Rome and Jerusalem (1862), found a new voice in Eliezer Ben Yehuda's (1858-1922) publications. Ben Yehuda spent his life on efforts to restore what he considered the lost aspects of Judaism, specifically the use of Hebrew as a living language and the settlement of their ancient homeland in Israel. In 1881, he and his wife relocated to Palestine, where Ben Yehuda told her he would talk to her only in Hebrew, the proper language of the Jews. In addition to publishing newspapers in Hebrew, he compiled a seventeen-volume historical dictionary of Hebrew that is still the most comprehensive resource available on the language. When Israel became a nation, Hebrew was declared the official Jewish national language.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 MASS MIGRATION OF JEWS FROM EASTERN EUROPE TO THE UNITED STATES BEGINS While the Russian persecution of Jews in 1881 coincided with the beginning of mass migration to the United States from Eastern Europe, violence was not the primary reason for the emigration. In fact, a large number of Eastern European Jews fled from areas where they had been relatively safe. Instead, the main force driving them to seek refuge in America was to flee poverty. The New World offered agricultural and business opportunities in addition to religious freedom. Unfortunately, many of the Jewish immigrants ended up in the slums of American cities. Many Russian Jews found work in New York City in the garment industry, where their skill excelled. The mass immigration, one of the most pronounced movements in Jewish history, forever altered the fabric of Jewish life in the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 LEON PINSKER PUBLISHES AUTOEMANCIPATION Although the book Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess (1812-1875), published in 1862, advocated the establishment of a Jewish state, relatively little action was taken to achieve this goal. In 1882, Russian Jew Leon Pinsker (1821-1891) wrote Autoemancipation, carrying the message to a new generation of Jews. Pinsker's articulation of the hope for a Jewish nation was particularly meaningful, and a movement began among his fellow Eastern European Jews following the terrible Russian persecutions of 1881. Feeling that all hope of normal relations with Gentiles was gone, the Jews of Russia were the first to press for the formation of a Jewish state.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 FIRST ALIYAH BEGINS TO PALESTINE In 1882, a year after Eastern European Jews started their mass migration to the United States, Jews began a slow immigration to Palestine, their ancient homeland. The immigration to Palestine, which was ruled by the Turks at the time, is typically divided into six waves. The term used for these migrations was aliyah, the Hebrew word for "going up." The first aliyah lasted for just over twenty years and consisted of approximately twenty-five thousand Jews moving to Palestine. In contrast, during the same period more than a million Jews immigrated to the United States. The first aliyah would be the smallest wave in terms of numbers.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 BILU MOVEMENT IS ORGANIZED Toward the end of the nineteenth century a number of Jewish organizations, generally identified as the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement, arose in eastern Europe. The common desire of these groups was to establish a Jewish nation. The first to immigrate to Palestine was the Bilu movement organized in 1882, whose name is an acronym for "House of Jacob, go, let us go!" In Palestine, the Bilu settled among Jews who had been living there since the Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century. They attempted to set up agricultural colonies. While they did not possess the skills required for farming, they survived with the financial assistance of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a wealthy French Jewish philanthropist.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1883 BOYS' BRIGADE IS ESTABLISHED In 1883, Sir William A. Smith (1854-1914) established the first chapter of the Boys' Brigade in Scotland. The brigade's aim was "the advancement of Christ's Kingdom among boys and the promotion of habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self-respect and all that tends toward a true Christian manliness." The organization became a model for subsequent uniformed groups for boys and girls, such as the Boy Scouts. In 1971, the organization's executive committee ruled that it was necessary for each chapter to remain church based so that the boys would acquire genuine Christian faith. With more than 140,000 boys aged eight to nineteen in the United Kingdom and eighty thousand boys in other countries enrolled, the brigade remains one of the largest organizations of its type.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1884 PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES ARE INTRODUCED TO KOREA In the 1880s, Western nations established treaties with Korea that called for freedom of religion. As a result, beginning in 1884, Protestant missionaries— primarily Presbyterians and Methodists—from the United States, entered Korea for the first time. Protestant Christianity had been introduced a year earlier by Korean native Suh Sang-yum (1849-1926), who was converted to Christ in Manchuria. Through Sang-yum's witness and the work of missionaries, it is estimated that by 1910, there were 167,000 Protestants in Korea. A number of medical and educational institutions were established as well. By 2000, the evangelical churches of Korea had grown to more than 7 million members. Ten of the world's eleven largest churches are in Seoul, Korea.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1886-1893 ANDOVER CONTROVERSY ENDS IN SMYTH'S REMOVAL Between 1886 and 1893, a theological debate took place among the faculty members of Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, involving "future probation." The seminary originally was founded by New England Congregationalists in response to the Unitarian theology that Harvard began to embrace. The issue of "future probation" was brought to the forefront as the faculty developed a theology of missions. Egbert C. Smyth (1829-1904) and other faculty members argued in the Andover Review for future probation, stating that those who die without hearing the gospel will have an opportunity in their future life to accept or reject the gospel before experiencing final judgment. Smyth eventually was removed from his position at Andover Seminary, but in 1891, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts overturned his removal.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1886 THE STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT BEGINS In 1882, Robert Wilder (1863-1938), the son of a former missionary to India, enrolled at Princeton University. During his time at Princeton, Wilder helped start the Princeton Foreign Mission Society. During his senior year, Wilder and his friends began boldly praying for one thousand missionaries to be sent out from American colleges. In the summer of 1886, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) allowed Robert Wilder and nine other students to speak at a Northfield Bible conference. During the conference, one hundred students pledged themselves as foreign missionaries. In 1891, these missionary candidates met for the first Student Volunteer Conference. During the next seventy-six years, the Student Volunteer Movement met every four years. By 1948, more than twenty thousand foreign missionaries had been sent out as a direct result of the movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1887 B.B. WARFIELD BECOMES PROFESSOR AT PRINCETON SEMINARY Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921) was the greatest theologian of his time. After graduating from Princeton University he went to Europe to pursue graduate studies in math and science. However, he decided in 1872 to enter the ministry instead. Warfield returned to the United States and entered Princeton Theological Seminary, graduating in 1876. He was professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary from 1879 to 1887. In 1887, he became professor of theology at Princeton Seminary, where he taught until his death in 1921, just hours after teaching his last class. While at Princeton, Warfield became his generation's leading exponent of Calvinistic theology in general and the authority of Scripture in particular. He was an outspoken critic of the liberal scholarship of his day and a prolific author. His collected works fill ten volumes.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1889 MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE IS FOUNDED The Chicago Evangelization Society of Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) founded the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in 1889. The school, which was renamed Moody Bible Institute in 1900 after Moody's death, was established to counter the growing influence of the liberal theology being taught in seminaries at the time. Support for the school came from financially successful Chicago businessmen who were evangelical Christians. Moody Bible Institute was a groundbreaking institution in the early twentieth century, and its curriculum became a model for many other Bible institutes. The institute went on to become the world's greatest missionary training school.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1891 JEWS ARE EXPELLED FROM MOSCOW AND ST. PETERSBURG
After the assassination of Czar Alexander II (1818-1881) of Russia in 1881, his son, Czar Alexander III (1845-1894), launched pograms against the Jews that included mass murder, rape, and looting. The anti-Semitic "May Laws" of 1882 also had a terribly negative impact on the Jewish businessmen living in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite the limits of the Pale of Settlement—a region Catherine the Great (1729-1796) established to keep Jews in a contained area—Jewish professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, had been given permission to live in Russia's largest cities. In 1891, all the Jews of Moscow and St. Petersburg were ejected and forced to move back to the Pale, in most cases losing all of their assets.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1891 BARON MAURICE DE HIRSCH ESTABLISHES THE JEWISH COLONIZATION ASSOCIATION
Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896) was a wealthy Jewish financier and philanthropist living in England. In 1891, he founded the Jewish Colonization Association to coordinate agricultural settlements in the New World. During the association's first year, Hirsch purchased land in Argentina to support the settlement efforts of fifty Jewish families who had emigrated from Russia to South America. Not only did Hirsch proceed to purchase more than 1.5 million additional acres in Argentina through the association, but he also assisted groups of Jewish settlers to establish villages. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were twenty Jewish villages on land provided by Hirsch, and at its height, the Jewish population of the region was about thirty thousand.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1893 SUDAN INTERIOR MISSION BEGINS
In 1893, two Canadians named Roland Bingham (1872-1942) and Walter Gowans (1868-1894), and an American named Thomas Kent arrived in Sudan (present-day Nigeria) to spread the gospel. Bingham, the only one of the three to survive the first year, set up the first missionary station on the Niger River, thus establishing the Sudan Interior Mission. In the 1980s, the Sudan Interior Mission united with the Ceylon and India General Mission, the Puna India Village Mission, and the Bolivia Indian Mission and changed their name to simply SIM. In 2001, the mission had 1, 693 missionaries from twenty-six countries on fifty-four mission fields.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1894 THE DREYFUS AFFAIR BEGINS
On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) of the French army was arrested on charges of treason. The accusations were based on forged documents that purported to prove that Dreyfus, a Jew, was a spy for the German government. Because of the strong anti-Jewish feelings of many French leaders, when the documents were discovered to be in error, the army attempted to cover up the entire affair. After spending five years on Devil's Island, an island for criminals, Dreyfus was released, though he was not acquitted until 1906.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1894 COHN'S ORGANIZATION IS THE FORERUNNER OF CHOSEN PEOPLE MINISTRIES
Leopold Cohn (d. 1937), a Jew from Hungary, immigrated to the United States in 1892. Not long after his arrival in New York City, Cohn became a Christian. In 1894, he founded the Williamsburg Mission and began printing a newsletter called "Chosen People." In 1924, the organization's name was changed to the American Board of Missions to the Jews, and at Cohn's death in 1937, his son Joseph assumed the leadership of the mission. In 1986, the nearly one-hundred-year-old organization, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, changed its name to Chosen People Ministries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 BILLY SUNDAY BEGINS HIS EVANGELISTIC MINISTRY
William "Billy" Sunday (1862-1935), was a professional baseball player with the Chicago White Stockings. In 1886, he was converted to Christ at Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission. Five years later he ended his baseball career to work for the YMCA. After two years he became an advance man for evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918). In 1895, when Chapman ended his evangelistic ministry, he invited Billy Sunday to take his place. Over the next ten years, Sunday acquired his own informal preaching style, which appealed to the masses. He preached to more than 100 million people during his lifetime, and it is estimated that as many as one million people were converted to Christ in his evangelistic meetings.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 THE AFRICA INLAND MISSION IS FOUNDED
Peter Cameron Scott (1876-1896) established the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) in 1895. A Scottish missionary to Kenya, Scott greatly desired to impede the spread of Islam into southern Africa. Although he died only a year after founding AIM, his vision was carried on by the missionary board. By 2000, the society had more than eight hundred missionaries in fourteen African countries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 FREUD PUBLISHES HIS FIRST WORK ON PSYCHOANALYSIS
In 1895, the Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published his first extended work on psychoanalysis, which he titled Studies on Hysteria. Psychoanalytic theory was a significant step in the evolution of Rationalism, in which man's reason replaced God as the source of determination and truth. In Freudian theory, man's unconscious governed his reasoning, and therefore his behavior. Psychotherapy had two goals: to raise unconscious thought to conscious levels through techniques such as hypnosis and free association, and through analysis, to lessen its effects on behavior. Freud believed the unconscious consisted of suppressed emotional energy. Therapists who disagreed with Freud's emphasis on repressed sexuality founded variant schools of psychoanalysis. These schools, with Freudian theory at their root, have profoundly influenced the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, including many forms of Christian counseling.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
CHRISTIANS
Beginning in 1895, Turkish forces commenced a terrible massacre of the Armenian Christians living in Turkey, killing at least three hundred thousand. The genocide, which lasted until 1897, was the first of two large Armenian massacres to take place in Turkey within a twenty-year period, the second occurring in 1915. Both campaigns sought to annihilate the Armenians, a people with Christian roots since ancient times.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 WORLD STUDENT CHRISTIAN FEDERATION IS FOUNDED The World Student Christian Federation was founded in Sweden in 1895, combining forty autonomous Christian student groups from around the world. Led by John R. Mott (1865-1955), then student secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA, this group actively pursued the cause of Christ in world missions. Unfortunately the organization gradually moved away from its evangelical beginnings, shifting its emphasis from missions to the ecumenical movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1896 HERZL PUBLISHES THE JEWISH STATE
After reporting on the Dreyfus Affair (1893), Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Hungarian reporter who covered Paris news, was overwhelmed at the hatred for Jews that the French leadership displayed. The racism he witnessed caused Herzl to spend the rest of his life seeking a solution to anti-Semitism. A Western European of Jewish descent, Herzl initially knew very little about his faith. When he published The Jewish State in 1896, Herzl argued for the establishment of a Jewish state. Although he found little support from the Jews of Western Europe, the Jews of Eastern Europe hailed him as a hero.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1897 HERZL COORDINATES THE FIRST ZIONIST CONGRESS Following the publication of his work The Jewish State in 1896, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) coordinated the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Held in Basel, Switzerland, the gathering defined the purpose of Zionism as a movement aimed at obtaining "a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, guaranteed by public law." After the Congress adjourned, Herzl began negotiating with England, hoping to start a Jewish settlement in Uganda. But Palestine remained the focus of most Zionists, and when England showed little interest in Herzl's Ugandan proposal, he turned his attention back to creating a Jewish nation in Palestine.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1897 CHRISTIAN AND MISSIONARY ALLIANCE IS FOUNDED
In 1897, two missionary societies that had been formed by A. B. Simpson (1843-1919), a former Presbyterian minister, combined their resources and efforts to form the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) denomination. The new denomination continued to carry Simpson's focus on mission work that the Christian Alliance, founded for home missions, and the International Missionary Alliance, established for foreign missions, had begun a decade earlier. In addition to missions, one of the central beliefs of Simpson and the CMA is called the Fourfold Gospel, which describes Jesus as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. By the twenty-first century, the denomination included more than fifteen hundred churches. Continuing their original missionary focus, the CMA has more than twelve hundred missionaries in more than fifty nations worldwide.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
DETOUR TO LIFE
January 19, 1897
He had walked in their shoes—until the night he sold them.
The son of a saloonkeeper, Mel Trotter learned bartending from his father. But as a young man, Trotter resolved to escape the saloon and left home to take up barbering. He was such a successful barber that, unfortunately, he had enough income to gamble and drink.
Trying to escape big-city temptations, Mel Trotter moved to Iowa around 1890 and managed to stay sober long enough to marry. But his wife soon discovered that she was married to an alcoholic. He repeatedly vowed to stop drinking, once staying sober for eleven months. But even the birth of a beloved son could not keep him from drinking. After one ten-day binge, Trotter returned home to find his wife weeping over the dead body of their two-year-old son.
Trotter left his son's funeral for a saloon. Then he hopped a train to Chicago, running from the certainty that he couldn't conquer his addiction. He knew his life was running out, so he resolved to end it in anonymity.
On the night of January 19, 1897, homeless, hatless, and coatless, Mel Trotter sold his shoes for one last drink before committing suicide. The alcohol barely warmed him as he trudged barefoot through a Chicago blizzard, trying to find Lake Michigan so he could drown his sorrows forever. Passing the darkened businesses on Van Buren Street, Trotter stumbled. A young man stepped out of the doorway of the only lit building, helped Trotter up, and invited him inside. Trotter followed, too numb to read the sigh over the door: Pacific Garden Mission.
The man sat Trotter down in a warm room full of derelict men. The mission's superintendent, Harry Monroe, was in the middle of his evening message but stopped when he saw Trotter. Monroe felt compelled to pray aloud, "Oh, God, save that poor, poor boy." Monroe then shared the story of his own troubled life before he met Christ. "Jesus loves you," he concluded, "and so do I. He wants to save you tonight. Put up your hand for prayer. Let God know you want to make room in your heart for Him." Barely understanding what he was doing, Trotter raised his hand. Something inside him rose up and accepted the invitation in simple faith. And in that moment, the shackles of alcoholism and despair fell away.
Trotter spent the next forty-three years ministering to men and women he met on the streets, as lost and hopeless as he had been. His message was simple: "God loves you in the midst of the deepest failure and despair, and his love has the power to change even the most ruined life." For forty years he served as the supervisor of a rescue mission in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alumni of his mission founded sixty-eight other rescue missions across the United States.
Mel Trotter's life didn't end that dark night in Chicago—it began!
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE BOXERS
August 3, 1900
This was not a boxing match; it was a struggle of life and death.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century China had opened itself to foreign missions because of Western pressure. The results, however, were not all positive. Disease accompanied the missionaries, and life expectancy dropped to forty years. Rebellions were frequent.
By 1898, the young emperor of China, Kuang-hsu, determined that the only hope for his nation was Christian moral and social reforms. He invited an influential Baptist missionary to the palace to help him draw up his reforms. The very day the missionary arrived at the palace the emperor was overthrown by a secret Chinese society that feared he would sell out to foreigners.
The secret society called itself Righteous and Harmonious Fists, but Westerners nicknamed them the "Boxers." The Boxers were desperate to hold on to the old pagan Chinese religions and had formed secret cells across China. They performed black-magic rituals that even included human sacrifices to temple idols.
Following the coup, the Boxers installed the emperor's mentally ill aunt as empress. At their urging, the new empress sent a secret decree to officials in the provinces calling on them to kill all foreigners and to exterminate Christianity. The messengers to southern China altered one Chinese character in the decree to make it read "protect" instead of "kill" foreigners. So the bloodletting was confined to the north. When the disobedience of the messengers was discovered, their bodies were cut in half.
Most local Chinese officials sought to protect the missionaries. The magistrate at Fenchow in north Shandi province was particularly friendly to them, so a missionary couple living there invited five missionaries from other areas to stay with them in July when the mob violence was at its peak. However, no sooner had the missionaries arrived than the vindictive provincial governor appointed a new magistrate for Fenchow. The new official ordered the missionaries out of Fenchow and gave them armed guards supposedly for their protection.
The missionaries apparently could read the handwriting on the wall. On August 3, 1900, Lizzie Atwater, an American missionary wife and mother wrote to her family:
Dear ones, I long for a sight of your dear faces, but I fear we shall not meet on earth. They beheaded thirty-three of us last week in Taiwan. I am preparing for the end very quietly and calmly. The Lord is wonderfully near, and He will not fail me. I was being restless and excited while there seemed to be a chance of life, but God has taken away that feeling, and now I just pray for grace to meet the terrible end bravely. The pain will soon be over, and oh the sweetness of the welcome above!
Twelve days later the guards assigned to them by the magistrate murdered the seven missionaries and their children.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1899 BUSINESSMEN FOUND THE GIDEONS
In 1898, two businessmen named Samuel E. Hill (1867-1936) and John H. Nicholson (1859-1946) met in the Central Hotel of Boscobel, Wisconsin, and discovered they both were Christians. They met again on July 1, 1899, along with William J. Knights (1853-1940), and formed the Gideons, now known as Gideons International. Currently, with 263,000 members in 179 countries, the Gideons aim is to win people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ through service, personal testimony, and the distribution of free Bibles "in the traffic lanes of everyday life." In 1908, the Gideons began placing Bibles in hotels, hospitals, prisons, rescue missions, schools, and through police and military chaplains. The organization is the oldest Christian business and professional men's association in the United States. In 2002, the Gideons distributed nearly 60 million free copies of Scripture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE CANE RIDGE REVIVAL August 6, 1801
Some called it America's Pentecost.
The state of the American frontier in the late 1700's was one of growing religious indifference. Christianity was on the decline as the settlers began to experience economic success.
Settlers went to the frontier to get land, not religion. Referring to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1795, Methodist James Smith feared that "the Universalists, joining with the Deists, had given Christianity a deadly stab hereabouts."
James McGready arrived in Kentucky in 1798 to pastor three small frontier Presbyterian churches. His fiery preaching and vivid depictions of heaven and hell snatched the apathy from his congregations. When the Red River church started to plan their annual Communion gathering in 1800, they decided to invite other local Presbyterian and Methodist churches to participate. The typically reverent, quiet Communion service of Presbyterianism turned surprisingly emotional and ecstatic. The ministers and parishioners alike were amazed at how God had worked in their midst. Although somewhat wary of emotionalism, the ministers began to plan a larger Communion service weekend for the following summer at Cane Ridge.
Word of the upcoming camp meeting had spread throughout the frontier. On August 6, 1801, the Cane Ridge Revival began. For seven days, thousands of people descended on the Cane Ridge meetinghouse in Bourbon County, Kentucky, about twenty miles west of Lexington. They gathered together to worship, fellowship, and celebrate the Lord's Supper.
Friday and Saturday were solemnly observed, devoted to fasting and praying in preparation for Sunday's Communion. But as thousands more than expected arrived, the crowds grew restless and sabotaged the traditional Presbyterian routine. One after the other, preachers began to take the stage, with the large crowd occasionally growing into a frenzy. Some ministers encouraged ecstasy and emotionalism, while others fought to maintain control of their audience and to return the focus to the solemnity of the Lord's Supper.
The Cane Ridge meeting was both a beginning and an end. It was the end of the long-preserved Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition of lengthy, highly ritualized large-group Communion services. The emotional events of Cane Ridge forced the end of that tradition. The meeting was also the beginning of a new institution: organized camp meetings and revivals that turned the American frontier from apathy back to Christianity.
Estimates of attendance at Cane Ridge vary widely from ten to twenty thousand. There were one to three thousand reported conversions. The banner year for camp meetings was 1811, when as many as one-third of all Americans attended at least one such meeting.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1801 CANE RIDGE REVIVAL ESTABLISHES CAMP MEETINGS Camp meetings were a significant part of the Second Great Awakening, the revival that swept the United States from 1787 to 1825. The Cane Ridge Revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, from August 6 to 13, 1801, was the first large camp meeting. It lasted for six days and drew a crowd of between ten and twenty thousand people from many different denominations. As many as three thousand conversions were reported. The success of the revival at Cane Ridge established the camp meeting as an integral part of frontier religious life during the early 1800s. Ten years later in 1811, it was estimated that one-third of all Americans had attended a camp meeting.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1802 YALE COLLEGE WITNESSES REVIVAL
When the Second Great Awakening in America reached Yale College in 1802, one-third of Yale's students converted, largely due to the preaching of Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), the president of Yale. Dwight was the grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), the great theologian and preacher of the First Great Awakening. From Yale, the revival spread to other colleges and into the American West.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1804 THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY IS FORMED The formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1804 ushered in the aggressive modern movement of distributing Bibles. The goal of the BFBS was "to encourage the wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures, without note or comment" to the colonies of Europe and England, in addition to all English churches. Founded by a predominantly Anglican group of evangelicals, the BFBS started its work in India around 1811 and inspired the establishment of similar societies in America (1816) and Russia (1819).
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1806 HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE IS DISSOLVED On August 6, 1806, due to persistent pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor Francis II (1786-1835) resigned and the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved. By the mid-seventeenth century, lack of imperial reform form and the stress of the Protestant Reformation had weakened the empire's relationship with the church, making it vulnerable to Napoleon's assault. It was replaced by Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine.
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1806 JEWISH NOTABLES AND SANHEDRIN ASSEMBLE IN FRANCE In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who had crowned himself emperor of the French, called together an assembly of Jewish notables, composed of delegates who were elected by the Jews of his empire. Napoleon then assembled a group of rabbis he called the Sanhedrin, to give religious sanction to the assembly's decisions. The meeting resulted in a number of resolutions, including an affirmation that French Jews did indeed love their fellow non-Jewish Frenchmen, and a decree giving French courts authority over Jewish courts. It was the Sanhedrin that attracted most of the public attention. Since it met secretly, it fueled conspiratorial speculation and contributed to anti-Semitism in France.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1806 SAMUEL MILLS LEADS PRAYER MEETING IN HAYSTACK Samuel Mills (1783-1819) was converted in his youth during the revivals that swept through New England. The son of a Congregational minister, Mills attended Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There he set up the Society of the Brethren, whose purpose was to spread the gospel to the world. One day in 1806, the group found themselves caught in a rainstorm while they met for prayer. Mills led the young men to the shelter of a haystack where the prayer meeting could continue. There at the haystack, four of the five committed themselves to being foreign missionaries. This was the beginning of the foreign missionary movement among students in America and led to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which sent the first American missionaries to India in 1812.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1807 ENGLISH PARLIAMENT VOTES TO ABOLISH THE SLAVE TRADE In 1807, British Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade—the first victory in the campaign to emancipate slaves in the British Empire. The abolitionist movement, begun in the late eighteenth century, was led by William Wilber-force (1759-1833) and the Clapham Sect (est. 1792). He was joined by friends John Newton (1725-1807), author of the hymn "Amazing Grace," and Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), who spent his fortune on the battle. Campaigning throughout England and in the House of Commons, the group used the increasingly popular values of liberty and happiness to undermine the main arguments for slavery, which were namely, economics and national policy. Due to their convincing arguments and ability to influence public opinion, the abolitionists were able to achieve victory in Parliament. The abolition of slavery itself was adopted in 1833.
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1807 ROBERT MORRISON ARRIVES IN CHINA Robert Morrison (1782-1834), the youngest son of Scottish Presbyterian parents, felt called to missions in his early twenties. While attending a Con-gregationalist seminary near London, Morrison heard the London Missionary Society call for missionaries to China. Morrison responded, and after two more years training in medicine and Mandarin Chinese and a sea voyage of nine months, landed in Macao on September 4, 1807. Locating in Canton, Morrison immersed himself in language and culture study, becoming fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and written Chinese. In 1810, Morrison completed translating the book of Acts, and in 1819, the entire Bible. With the Bible translation as a text, Morrison helped found an English-Chinese College that trained Chinese in evangelism. Morrison, the father of Protestant missions in China, died in Canton in 1834.
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1808 ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY IS FORMED
In 1808, Andover Theological Seminary was formed on the campus of Andover Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It was the first theological seminary in the United States. The seminary began as a reaction against the appointment of a Unitarian, Henry Ware (1764-1845), as professor of divinity at Harvard. The new seminary initially required all faculty to subscribe to the Andover Creed, grounded in the theology of John Calvin (1509-1564) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1578). In 1931, the seminary merged with Newton Theological Institute to become Andover Newton Theological School.
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FOREIGN MISSIONS IS ESTABLISHED
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was the first foreign missionary society organized in America. It was established in Massachusetts as a Congregational Church ministry in 1810, following the petition of several Andover Seminary students—including Samuel Mills (1783-1819) and Adoniram Judson (1788-1850)—to go to the mission field. In 1812, Adoniram Judson and fellow missionaries set out for India. This voyage was followed by missions to the Near East in 1818 and to Hawaii in 1819. The primary tasks of ABCFM missionaries were evangelism and church planting. These activities were supplemented and aided by translating Scripture, while social concerns were of secondary importance. Within fifty years the ABCFM established missions in Asia, China, Japan, and Africa, as well as among American Indians and African Americans.
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1810 REFORM JUDAISM BEGINS
In the early nineteenth century, several Jewish rabbis in Germany started reforming Jewish traditions. In 1810, Rabbi Israel Jacobson (1768-1818) in Seesen, Germany, began to use the German language instead of Hebrew for liturgy and sermons, and to incorporate organ music. In addition to the service changes, he called the synagogue a temple. Jacobson later moved to Berlin and began a temple in his home. By 1818, a reform temple had also been built in Hamburg. Berlin and Hamburg, having many wealthy and educated Jews, became centers of Reform Judaism. The reformers' general desire was to reestablish Judaism as a religious system, de-emphasizing the identification of Jews as a nation. In Reform Judaism, rituals contributing to the formation of a Jewish-nationalist identity were removed or pronounced insignificant.
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1811 CAMPBELLS FOUND THE DISCIPLES OF CHRIST
Following futile attempts to unify churches that had separated from the Church of Scotland, Scots-Irish minister Thomas Campbell (1763-1854) immigrated to America in the early nineteenth century. Hoping to establish unity among Christians, Campbell and his son Alexander (1788-1866) toured Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. The message they preached was that there were only two basic requirements for Christian unity, confessing Jesus as Lord and baptism by immersion. In 1811, Alexander Campbell organized the Disciples of Christ. In 1832, they united with the Christian Church of Barton Stone (1772-1844). From this union, the Churches of Christ later emerged.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
UNDER A HAYSTACK
June 29, 1810
Foreign mission organizations are common in America today, but in the 1800s there was not a single foreign missions board in the United States. God was to begin the American foreign missions movement in a very unlikely place—a haystack!
Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was just twelve years old in 1805, when the Second Great Awakening visited the school. In the spring of 1806, Samuel Mills, the son of a Congregational minister, joined the freshman class with a passion to spread the gospel around the world. He began leading a prayer group of four other students who had been touched by the revival. They met three afternoons a week in the maple grove of nearby Sloan's Meadow.
One sultry day in August 1806, a violent thunderstorm interrupted their prayer time and they took refuge on the sheltered side of a large haystack. There in the sanctuary of the haystack, Mills directed their prayers to their personal missionary obligations. God spoke to them as they prayed, and four of the five committed themselves to serving God overseas if he so led. The Haystack Prayer Meeting was not only the beginning of the first American student mission society, but was also the beginning of the foreign missions movement itself in America. In two years their prayer group took the name The Society of the Brethren, with the motto "We can do it if we will."
Two years later many of the group enrolled at Andover Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, where they were joined by Adoniram Judson and others interested in world missions. There they continued to believe that God was calling them to the mission field, but there was no foreign missions board in America to send them.
The students took their problem to the seminary faculty and to pastors in the area. In response, the teachers and pastors met at the home of Moses Stuart, a member of the Andover faculty. Their advice was that the students submit their case to the General Association, a body made up of the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts, which was to begin meetings the following day in Bradford, Massachusetts.
Acting on this advice, the students wrote a letter explaining their plight and soliciting the association's help. Adoniram Judson, Samuel Mills, and two others signed the letter. Originally Luther Rice and James Richards also signed but removed their names so there wouldn't be too many, lest the number of potential missionary candidates needing support would scare the Association.
Two days later, on June 29, 1810, the Association responded to their request by forming the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first foreign missions board in America. A year later the board sent out Adoniram Judson and three other men with their families as their first missionaries.
From that humble beginning, the foreign missions force of the United States has grown to more than sixty thousand missionaries sent out by hundreds of missions boards.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1812 ADONIRAM JUDSON SAILS FOR INDIA
While attending Andover Seminary, Adoniram Judson (1788-1850) played a significant role in establishing the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The inaugural mission to India in 1812 included Judson and his wife, Ann (1789-1826), who became missionaries to Burma. Judson was convinced that to be effective, he needed to master the local language and religion, which was Theravada Buddhism. In addition to devoting his time to preaching and training pastors and evangelists, Judson created a Burman dictionary and translated Scripture into their native language. Returning to America only once, Judson spent most of his life in Burma. In 2000, there were 2 million Christian believers in Myanmar (formerly Burma), and 40 percent of the Karen people, the tribe to whom Judson directed his ministry, were Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1812 CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY IS ESTABLISHED
Formed in the late eighteenth century, the Society for Missions in Africa and the East, was one of the first major evangelical Anglican mission groups. Its first mission to Sierra Leone in 1804, however, was carried out by German Lutherans because no English ministers were able to go. Following this mission, the society sent English laymen to New Zealand in 1809, and men from both Germany and England sailed to southern India a few years later. In 1812, the society was established officially and renamed the Church Missionary Society. Among the first to send single women into the field, the organization took the name Church Mission Society in 1995 and has remained an Anglican organization.
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1812 PRINCETON SEMINARY IS FOUNDED
Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) had a conversion experience at the age of seventeen, causing him to leave his position as a private tutor and enroll at Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) to study theology. He then entered the Presbyterian ministry, first as an itinerant minister on the Ohio-Virginia frontier, and later as pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly. In his final address as moderator in 1808, he suggested the formation of a Presbyterian seminary in America. As a result of his leadership, Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812 in Alexander's home of Princeton, New Jersey. Alexander was its sole faculty member for the first year, and he continued teaching there until his death in 1851.
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1813 J. A. NEANDER IS APPOINTED PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY
Johann August Wilhelm Neander (1789-1850) was born David Mendel in a Jewish family in Germany. At age seventeen, he was converted to Christ and changed his name. He was initially interested in theology, but church history began to captivate his mind. In 1813, he was appointed professor of church history in Berlin. Many students enjoyed Neander for his excellent scholarship, his sacred devotion, and his ability to highlight unique details in history. Neander believed that church history was an essential part of the church's mission and ministry, rather than a mere academic pursuit. His most detailed works, History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church and A General History of the Christian Religion and Church, were translated in the 1880s, extending Neander's influence to the English-speaking world.
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1813 INDIA IS OPENED TO MISSIONS
Prior to 1813, mission work in India was discouraged because the East India Company feared missionary activity could give Indians a negative impression of Europeans. Although some missionaries, like William Carey (1761-1834), managed to obtain entrance into the country, it was not until the East India Company Charter was renewed in 1813 that the official missionary restrictions were lifted. This new freedom to pursue missions made it possible for groups from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark to become more active, and by the late twentieth century British missionaries were outnumbered by Americans. The British government endorsed missionary schools willing to consent to secular control but, aside from abolishing certain Hindu practices, maintained religious neutrality in India.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1814 JESUITS ARE REESTABLISHED
Though Pope Clement XIII (1693-1769) suppressed the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 1773, the society continued on in the United States, England, Germany, and Austria. With support and protection from many in these countries, the order grew and was able to regain much of its former strength. The Jesuits were finally restored in 1814, when Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) brought the order into full communion with the church. Today, the Jesuit order is a major resource for the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world.
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1815 POPE PIUS VII REESTABLISHES THE GHETTO OF ROME
The conquering armies of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) broke down the Jewish ghettos wherever they encountered them, including the ghetto in Rome, which was nearly two hundred years old. Like other European ghettos, the Roman Ghetto separated the Jews from the rest of the population and forced desolation and poverty on the Jewish population. The Roman Ghetto, as well as those in other papal territories, was perhaps unique in that it was established by the church under the decree of Pope Paul IV (1476-1559). In 1815, after Napoleon's defeat, Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) reestablished the ghetto of Rome, forcing Jews to live within its confines. While many ghettos were reestablished in the nineteenth century, the Roman Ghetto was among the few where the walls Napoleon destroyed were actually rebuilt.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY IS FOUNDED
Modeled after the successful British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), the American Bible Society (ABS) was founded in 1816 in New York City by representatives of regional Bible societies throughout the country. Within a year, forty-one local and regional societies became auxiliary members of the ABS. John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) and Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) were among the ABS' first officials. As Bibles became plentiful in America, the ABS expanded their efforts to the translation and international distribution of Bibles in other languages.
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1816 AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY IS FORMED
The American Colonization Society originally was founded in 1816, by Robert Finley (1772-1817) with the help of the United States government. The society's purpose was to return freed slaves to Africa, and it established the nation of Liberia to that end. The society also raised money to buy slaves and give them freedom. The founders hoped that the return of Christian freed men to Africa would be a means that God would use to evangelize the African continent. The society itself experienced many setbacks in seeing its vision come to fruition. The first group of 114 that returned to Africa was almost completely wiped out by disease. When the society's authority to govern Liberia was denied by the British, an independent government was set up in 1847 that was both sponsored by and modeled after the United States. By 1867, approximately ten thousand freed slaves had been transported to Liberia.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 NETTLETON LEADS THE BRIDGEWATER REVIVAL As America's Second Great Awakening waned, Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844) tapered off his traveling evangelistic ministry and became pastor of the Congregational church in Bridgewater, Connecticut. The Bridgewater church was struggling with issues of pride and disharmony, and Nettleton's sermons addressing the need for love and unity seemed to have little effect. He decided that if his preaching was ineffectual, maybe God would use his silence. So, one Sunday in 1816, Nettleton did not show up for church, leaving a room full of waiting people. This unique rebuke by their pastor stirred the congregation into organizing a day of prayer and confession to deal with the problems in their church. By the time Nettleton returned to the Bridgewater pulpit, the church was experiencing an exciting revival that soon spread to other towns.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 HALDANE BEGINS GENEVA'S SECOND REFORMATION Robert Haldane (1764-1842) left Scotland in 1816 in order to begin a new ministry on the European continent. He first went to France but then settled in Geneva, Switzerland. A revival began quietly among divinity students at a local Geneva college. Groups of twenty to thirty young men gathered daily at Haldane's apartment after their seminary classes to hear him discuss theology. These young men reported learning more from Haldane during those afternoons than during their entire course of study at the seminary. They in turn became the carriers of revival throughout Switzerland and the French-speaking world, extending as far as Quebec, Canada, in what soon became known as Geneva's Second Reformation.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 RICHARD ALLEN IS APPOINTED BISHOP OF AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH Richard Allen (1760-1831) was born a slave in the United States. At seventeen, he was converted to Christ through the Methodists and started preaching the gospel. After teaching himself to read and write, Allen purchased his freedom. Continuing to preach, he worked several trades and headed for Philadelphia. There Allen worshiped regularly at St. George's Methodist Church. However, upon learning that the church had decided black parishioners could sit only in the balcony, Allen and his black friend Absalom Jones (1746-1818) walked out of the church, followed by other black parishioners. Allen and Jones then founded the Free African Society, the first American organization founded by African Americans for African Americans. A few years later, Allen founded Bethel Church in Philadelphia for black Methodists. Due to the uneasiness of white Methodists toward them, Allen's congregation joined other black churches to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Allen was appointed its first bishop in 1816.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1816 ROBERT MOFFAT GOES TO AFRICA While apprenticing as a gardener at High Leigh, Cheshire, England, Robert Moffat (1795-1883) was converted through the Methodists and, while attending a missionary meeting, he decided to devote his life to foreign missions. With little education and the somewhat hesitant support of the London Missionary Society, Moffat set sail for South Africa in 1816. He served for more than fifty years, mostly in Great Namaqualand (West Namibia) and in Kuruman, Bechuanaland (Botswana). He was a proficient translator of Bechuana, completing translations of the Bible, various hymns, The Pilgrim's Progress, and textbooks in their native language. In addition, his evangelistic efforts along with those of his son-in-law, David Livingstone (1813-1873), saw the establishment of many churches with trained African pastors. Known as the father of South African missions, Moffat was awarded an honorary doctorate by Edinburgh University in 1872.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1817 ELIZABETH FRY ORGANIZES RELIEF IN NEWGATE PRISON Born to English Quakers, Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780-1845) underwent an awakening while listening to the preaching of an American Quaker. She married an affluent London merchant in 1800, who supported her ministry to the needy. While raising eleven children, Elizabeth donated clothes and medicine, rallied for school enrollment, encouraged Bible reading, started more than five hundred libraries in British coastguard stations, and founded the "Nursing Sisters of Devonshire Square" for nurses in training. Elizabeth's greatest passion, however, was reforming prisons. After having spent years teaching female prisoners in Newgate Prison to read and sew, she founded the Association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate in 1817. She campaigned for female wardens, education, and privacy for female prisoners. Elizabeth published notes from her prison tours in England and Scotland and testified in the House of Commons. She later traveled to France and northern Europe, inspiring prison reform there as well.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1818 HAMBURG TEMPLE IS OPENED Reform Judaism began in Germany in the early nineteenth century with reformers trying to remove any practice or ritual that identified Jews as foreigners. Among the changes they initiated, Reform Jews began referring to their synagogues as temples and started using German, the national language, in their services instead of Hebrew. The Hamburg Temple, which opened its doors in 1818, was the first Jewish place of worship built by Reform Jews. A revised prayer book, which included prayers in German, was used at the Hamburg Temple. From Germany, Reform Judaism spread to the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE PATIENT LABORER June 6, 1819
The seeds of evangelism bear fruit in God's time, not man's.
Pioneer missionary Adoniram Judson graduated from Brown University as valedictorian at the age of nineteen and then graduated in 1810 in the first class of Andover Theological Seminary. He and his wife journeyed from America to Burma (now Myanmar), arriving in 1813. Shortly thereafter they were joined by two other missionaries. However; after six years of labor not one Burmese person had trusted in Christ.
Then on June 6, 1819, Judson received a letter from Moung Nau, a Burmese man who had shown great interest in the gospel but up to that point had not acted on it. The letter read as follows:
I, Moung Nau, the constant recipient of your excellent favor, approach your feet. Whereas my Lord's three [i.e. three missionaries] come to the country of Burma—not for the purposes of trade, but to preach the religion of Jesus Christ, the Son of the eternal God—I, having heard and understood, am, with a joyful mind, filled with love.
I believe that the divine Son, Jesus Christ, suffered death, in the place of men, to atone for their sins. Like a heavy-laden man, I feel my sins are very many. The punishment of my sins I deserve to suffer. Since it is so, do you, sirs, consider that. I, taking refuge in the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ, and receiving baptism, in order to become his disciple, shall dwell one with yourselves, a band of brothers, in the happiness of heaven, and therefore grant me the ordinance of baptism.
Moreover, as it is only since I have met with you, sirs, that I have known about the eternal God, I venture to pray that you will still unfold to me the religion of God, that my old disposition may be destroyed, and my new disposition improved.
Three weeks later Moung Nau was baptized and the barrier of unbelief was broken.
What enabled Adoniram Judson to faithfully labor so many years before seeing any fruit? His motivation is evident in the following lines, which he penciled on the inner cover of a book used in his translation of the Bible into Burmese:
In joy or in pain,
Our course be onward still;
We sow on Burma's barren plain;
We reap on Zion's hill.
Today there are more than 1.5 million believers in Myanmar, and 40 percent of the Karen people to whom Adoniram Judson directed his ministry are now Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1819 CHANNING EMBRACES UNITARIAN CHRISTIANITY Born in Newport, Rhode Island, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) earned his B.A. from Harvard where he had a conversion experience. In 1803, he became the pastor of Federal Street Congregational Church in Boston where he spent the rest of his life. In 1819, he delivered a sermon at an ordination in which he embraced the basic ideas of Unitarianism by denying the Trinity, the deity of Christ, total depravity, and Christ's atoning sacrifice. While Channing upheld the Resurrection, New Testament miracles, and the moral purity of Christ, he confessed that though the Bible contained inspiration, it was not itself an inspired book. In 1820, he coordinated the meeting of liberal ministers at the Berry Street Conference, which soon after became the American Unitarian Association.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1819 HEP! HEP! RIOTS BEGIN The early nineteenth century witnessed the fall of the empire established by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). To reestablish the monarchies and their territories, representatives of the European powers that had been conquered by Napoleon's armies gathered at the Council of Vienna. Although the council granted these various rulers their right to rule, the gathering refused to uphold the rights that Napoleon had given to the Jews. Echoing the sentiment of Vienna, anti-Semitic riots broke out in Germany in 1819 and 1820. For reasons that are unclear, the rallying cry was "Hep! Hep!" The riots spread throughout Germany, reaching as far as Denmark and Poland. The response of many German Jews was to assimilate as much as possible into secular society, believing that if they became fully German they would be treated as such.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1821 LOTT CAREY BECOMES THE FIRST BLACK MISSIONARY TO AFRICA Lott Carey (c. 1780-1829) was born into slavery in Virginia. Although raised by his devout Baptist grandmother, as a young man Carey shunned Christianity. In 1807, Carey was converted and taught himself to read in order to study the Bible. He became a Baptist lay pastor while continuing to work to earn his family's freedom. Burdened for the evangelism of Africa, Carey founded the Richmond (Virginia) African Missionary Society. On January 23, 1821, Carey sailed with his family to become the first black missionary to Africa. He settled in Liberia, then a newly established haven for freed slaves. Carey helped set up a mission and schools and was serving as Liberia's interim governor at the time of his death in 1829.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LOTT CAREY January 23, 1821
His life spanned two continents.
Lott Carey didn't know the exact year of his birth because records of slave births weren't kept, but he estimated it to be around 1780 on a plantation near Richmond, Virginia. His grandmother, a devout Baptist, cared for him while his parents worked. She taught him the suffering of slaves in America and the need of those remaining in Africa to hear about Jesus.
As a young man working as a slave laborer, Carey showed no signs of espousing his grandmother's faith. Then in 1807, Carey was in the gallery of the First Baptist Church in Richmond and heard a sermon about Jesus telling Nicodemus that he must be born again. Carey was profoundly moved and put his trust in Jesus Christ. After he was baptized, he determined to learn to read the Bible for himself. After he taught himself to read and write, he continued his education in a night school started by a white Baptist named William Crane.
Carey earned repeated promotions at the Shockoe tobacco warehouse where he worked. Around the age of thirty-three he purchased freedom for himself and his two children for $850—much more than his annual salary. His first wife had died, and he later remarried.
Carey began preaching to gatherings of African Americans, eventually forming and becoming the pastor of a black church. Meanwhile, through his night classes with William Crane, he became very interested in African missions.
His church grew to over eight hundred members, while he remained respected and secure in his position at the tobacco warehouse. Yet his burden for missions to Africa increased, and finally he decided to go there himself.
In his final sermon to his congregation, Carey said, "I am about to leave you and expect to see your faces no more. I long to preach to the poor Africans the way of life and salvation. I don't know what may befall me, whether I may find a grave in the ocean, or among the savage men, or more savage wild beasts on the coast of Africa; nor am I anxious what may become of me. I feel it my duty to go.
On January 23, 1821, Carey sailed with his family as the first black missionary to Africa. In Liberia he founded and served as pastor of Providence Baptist Church. He helped to establish schools and was the first president of the Monrovia Baptist Missionary Society. When the white governor of the colony was forced to leave because of illness, he appointed Carey as provisional governor.
In 1829, as Carey was preparing to rescue some of his men who had been imprisoned while negotiating with a native tribe, he and seven coworkers died in an explosion of gunpowder apparently set off by an overturned candle. It had been eight years since Carey had set sail for Africa and forty-nine since he had been born a slave in America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1821 SCHLEIERMACHER PUBLISHES THE CHRISTIAN FAITH Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was among the most prominent German theologians of the nineteenth century. In 1821, while a professor at the newly established university in Berlin, Schleiermacher published his magnum opus, The Christian Faith. In it, he rejected both historic orthodoxy and strict natural theology. Instead, he posited a religion loosely based on Christian orthodoxy but ultimately defined in terms of human experience. For Schleiermacher, the basis of religion was the human self-consciousness. A right self-understanding would result in a feeling of divine dependence. This self-understanding was the basis for all religion. He also rejected the divine nature of Christ, claiming that Jesus was a man whose intense dependence on God resulted in his full experience of God's existence. Schleiermacher's work helped shape the developing theological liberalism of the early twentieth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1822 THE SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE FAITH In 1815, the Catholic bishop Louis-Guillaume-Valentin Dubourg (1766-1833) of New Orleans traveled to Lyons, France, to collect money for his diocese. While there he shared with Mrs. Petit, a woman from the United States, his idea of founding a missionary society to evangelize the Louisiana Territory. Her brother wrote a letter to Pauline Marie Jaricot (1782-1862) of Lyons, who then conceived a plan in which parishioners would contribute one penny per week to propagate missionary efforts. In 1822, Bishop Dubourg sent his vicar-general from New Orleans to Lyons to discuss a possible American counterpart to the missionary effort. However, after meeting in Lyons, they decided that American and European societies would be united as the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. The society was formally established on May 3, 1822, and became the primary institution for funding Catholic missions in the nineteenth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN ATTORNEY WHO SWITCHED CLIENTS October 10, 1821
In 1818, a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Finney began a law apprenticeship in Adams, New York. Although having had a limited formal education, within just three years he became a junior partner in the law firm.
As Finney studied law, the authors he read often quoted the Bible. Realizing his own ignorance of the Scriptures, he began to study them for himself.
When a new minister came to the local Presbyterian church, Finney began to attend. In the summer of 1821, the pastor took a trip and told his replacement just to read sermons from a book. Surprisingly, the Holy Spirit began to move among the church members, and Finney started to spend a lot of time wondering about his own salvation.
He later recounted what happened on October 10, 1821:
Just before I arrived at the office, something seemed to confront me with questions like these: ... "Did you not promise to give your heart to God? And what are you trying to do? Are you endeavoring to work out a righteousness of your own?"
Just at that point the whole question of God's salvation opened to my mind.....I saw that his work was a finished work; that instead of having, or needing, any righteousness of my own to recommend me to God, I had to submit myself to the righteousness of God through Christ. It was full and complete, and all that was necessary on my part was to ... give up my sins and accept Christ. Salvation, it seemed to me, instead of being a thing to be wrought out by one's own works, was a thing to be found entirely in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Instead of going to his office, Finney went into a nearby woods and spent the morning wrestling with God in prayer until he reported, "I found that my mind had become most wonderfully quiet and peaceful."
The next day, a client who was a deacon from his church came into his office and reminded him, "Mr. Finney, do you recollect that my case is to be tried at ten this morning?"
Finney replied, "Deacon, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause, and I cannot plead yours."
Charles Finney went on to become the leading revivalist of the nineteenth century with approximately a half million people coming to Christ through the influence of his ministry. Beginning in upstate New York, his revivals swept through New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. In 1835, he became professor of theology at the newly formed Oberlin Collegiate Institute, now Oberlin College. He served as the college's president from 1851 to 1866. Theologically, Finney was his own man. His point of departure was Calvinism, but he placed great emphasis on man's ability to repent and made perfectionism the trademark of Oberlin theology.
It all started on that fateful day in 1821, when Charles Finney switched from the practice of law to pleading the cause of Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 FINNEY ORDAINED AND BEGINS REVIVALS Charles Finney (1792-1874) was born in Connecticut and raised in Oneida County, New York. While working as an attorney, Finney started attending church with a friend but was skeptical at first. After studying Scripture for himself, Finney put his faith in Christ. He soon began preaching and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1824. That year, the Female Missionary Society of the Western District commissioned Finney to evangelize settlers in New York. Finney held evangelistic meetings, often lasting for days, and his preaching led to many revivals. Over the next eight years, Finney held revivals throughout the eastern United States, in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Rochester. His teaching emphasized mankind's ability to repent and to achieve sinless perfection.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 THE AMERICAN SUNDAY SCHOOL UNION IS FOUNDED The American Sunday School Union was founded in 1824 as an outgrowth of the Sunday and Adult School Union in Philadelphia. Its purpose was to develop Sunday schools "wherever there is a population." Run mainly by the laity, the society established thousands of schools, especially on the frontier along the Mississippi River. Following the Civil War, however, an increasing number of denominations began assuming responsibility for their own Christian education. In 1970, the American Sunday School Union changed its name to the American Missionary Society, redirecting its focus to assisting multicultural communities.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1824 REFORM CONGREGATION IS FOUNDED IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA Although Reform Judaism took root in Germany in the early nineteenth century, the majority of synagogues built in the United States were Orthodox. However, Reform Judaism spread to the United States within fifteen years of its 1810 beginning in Europe. The first Reform congregation was established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1824. Shortly thereafter, a Reform synagogue named the Emanu-El Temple was founded in New York City. The changes peculiar to American Reform Judaism included the use of the organ, mixing of the sexes during worship, and the introduction of English to the service. Like the reformers in Europe, Reform Jews in the United States hoped to promote the identity of Jews as assimilated American citizens rather than foreigners.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN APE OF A COLD GOD August 26, 1824
Baptism didn't do him any good.
Kar| Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Truer, Prussia, descending from a distinguished line of Jewish scholars, His father was an attorney, who became a Lutheran when an 1816 Prussian decree prohibited Jews from holding prestigious law positions. Karl and his siblings were baptized on August 26, 1824.
Karl was confirmed at fifteen and for a while appeared to be a committed Christian. However, as he continued his education, all appearances of Christianity faded away. He received a doctorate in philosophy from Jena University and settled in London in 1849, where he remained for the rest of his life.
Marx was a poet, whose early writing revolved around two themes: his love for Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in 1841, and the destruction of the world. In one poem he wrote, "We are the apes of a cold God." One of his favorite phrases was from Faust: "Everything that exists deserves to perish." The theme of a coming apocalyptic conflagration occupied his thinking throughout his life. This vision of doomsday was an artistic notion in Marx's mind, not a scientific conclusion. It was a theory from which he as a political scientist worked backwards.
Many of his favorite phrases showed his disdain for religion: "Religion is the opiate of the people"; "Religion is only the illusionary sun around which man revolves, until he begins to revolve around himself."
What kind of fruit would attitudes like these produce in a man's life? Marx had a very unhealthy lifestyle. He smoked and drank heavily. He seldom bathed or washed. He was totally incompetent at handling money. He never seriously tried to get a job but, instead, lived off loans from family and friends that he never repaid.
Marx was saved financially by substantial inheritances that provided an annual income equal to three times the earnings of a skilled workman at that time. Even with this generous inheritance, all Marx and his wife knew how to do was spend and borrow. The family's silver service was often at the pawnbrokers, as were their clothes.
In spite of writing about the struggle of the working class, Marx personally knew only one member of that class, a woman named Lenchen Demuth, who was the Marx family's servant from 1845 until her death in 1890. Although Marx collected reports of many low-paid workers, he never found evidence of a worker who was paid no wages at all. Yet one such person lived in his own house. Lenchen never received a cent from Marx for her labors, only room and board. Marx fathered a son, Freddy, by her but convinced his protege Friedrich Engels to claim paternity in his stead. Freddy was allowed to visit Lenchen only by coming to the back door. Marx met his son once, at the back door, but Freddy never realized that the radical philosopher was his father.
Marx's life serves as an example of the wasted potential of a human heart without God.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1825 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY BEGINS ITS PUBLICATIONS In 1825, the New York and Massachusetts Tract Societies merged to form the American Tract Society. The society pioneered many innovative printing techniques and by 1830 had printed more than 5 million tracts, in addition to books and other periodicals. Although intentionally nondenominational, the society represented mainline Calvinism during its early years. In spite of its unwillingness to oppose slavery, the society continued to flourish during the 1850s and 1860s. After the Civil War, the society was heavily involved in the evangelism of freed slaves. As support waned in the early twentieth century, the society ceased publication of other materials and began to focus exclusively on the publication of small tracts and pamphlets. The American Tract Society continues to publish more than 30 million tracts annually.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1825 LA REVEIL REVIVAL SPREADS THROUGH EUROPE As the Second Great Awakening was sweeping through the United States, the first signs of reawakening in Europe were seen in Geneva in 1810, spreading to French-speaking Swiss churches in 1825. La Reveil (literally "the Awakening") was a spiritual reaction against the Rationalism and materialism that had increasingly characterized the churches on the Continent since the Enlightenment. The newly revived pastors preached the supremacy of God in human affairs, the Bible as the standard for truth, and personal spiritual awakening as the evidence of saving faith. La Reveil spread from Switzerland to France and the Netherlands by 1825, touching a thousand congregations with renewal and drawing several thousand new believers to saving faith in Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1826 THOLUCK BEGINS TEACHING AT HALLE Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799-1877) was a German Protestant theologian whose undergraduate studies at Breslau and Berlin focused on Eastern languages. After he was converted to Christ, however, he redirected his study to theology. In 1826, after a short term teaching theology at Berlin, Tholuck was appointed professor of theology at the University of Halle, where he stayed for forty-nine years. An opponent of rationalism, he wrote commentaries on John, Romans, Hebrews, Psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount. Involved in the revival movements of his day and acclaimed for his ministry to students, Tholuck did much to further the cause of evangelical scholarship during his lifetime.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1827 CZAR NICHOLAS I ISSUES THE CANTONIST DECREES IN RUSSIA Russian rulers were threatened by the significant presence of the Jewish population since the division of Poland in the 1770s. In 1827, Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855) devised a scheme to absorb Jews into Russian culture. Nicholas issued the Cantonist Decrees (a canton being a military recruiting district), which forced Jewish community leaders to provide a certain number of Jewish recruits between the ages of twelve and twenty-five who were then required to complete twenty-five years of military service. Twelve-year-olds had to spend an additional six years in training before their twenty-five-year commitment began. The czar created Cantonist battalions, which forced the Jewish boys into Russian Orthodox Christianity. In addition to creating a captive audience for religious conversion, the czar's Cantonist Decrees caused much dissension among Jews, as leaders tended to protect their own families, sending the poor instead.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1829 MENDELSSOHN CONDUCTS BACH'S ST. MATTHEW PASSION Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) was born in Hamburg, Germany, and was raised in Berlin by Jewish converts to the Lutheran church. Mendelssohn was a gifted pianist and a precocious composer who had written twelve symphonies by the age of twelve. His musical mentors introduced him to the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), whose work at the time was largely ignored by all but a small circle of musical connoisseurs. Mendelssohn loved Bach's music. At age twenty, Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St. Matthew Passion oratorio, which had not been performed since before Bach's death in 1750. The concert marked the beginning of a revival of Bach's music that continues today. Mendelssohn went on to write his own oratorios, including Elijah (1846), considered to be the premier choral work of the nineteenth century.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1830 JOSEPH SMITH JR. FOUNDS THE MORMON CHURCH On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1841) and five others met in Fayette, New York, to found a new religious society called the Church of Christ. Eventually renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is popularly known as the Mormon Church. Smith claimed to have found their Scripture, The Book of Mormon, on "golden plates" he unearthed from a hill near Palmyra, New York, then translated from "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics." No one but Smith ever saw the golden tablets. Today, the Mormons claim more than eleven million members, more than half of whom live outside the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1830 JOHN NELSON DARBY BEGINS DEVELOPING DISPENSATIONALISM In 1825, a group of men led by John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) began meeting in Dublin because of their dissatisfaction with the Protestant churches of the area. The group was particularly interested in eschatology. In 1830, Darby visited Margaret MacDonald in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and heard how earlier in the year she had received a revelation that a select group of Christians would be raptured before the time of the Antichrist. Darby began popularizing the doctrine of the pretribulation rapture of the church in prophecy conferences. In succeeding years he developed his theology of dispensationalism from his premise of the pretribulation rapture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 EVANGELICAL SOCIETY OF GENEVA IS FORMED Orthodox Christianity in Geneva, Switzerland, had sunk to a low point since the days of John Calvin (1509-1564). In this climate in 1816, Louis Gaussen (1790-1863) became pastor of the village parish of Satigny near Geneva after being converted to Christ through the ministry of Robert Haldane (1764-1842). Gaussen republished the Helvetic Confession in French. In 1831, Gaussen and two colleagues formed the Evangelical Society of Geneva for the distribution of Bibles and tracts. As a result, he was suspended by the local consistory. Undaunted, the Evangelical Society also founded a new theological school where Louis Gaussen became professor of dogmatics.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LATTER-DAY SAINTS? April 6, 1830
It's amazing what can result from unsubstantiated claims.
In 1820, a fourteen-year-old boy named Joseph Smith Jr. claimed to have received a vision in which God the Father and God the Son appeared to him and told him they had chosen him to launch a restoration of true Christianity. He apparently was not overly moved by this revelation because he went back to digging for Captain Kidd's treasure with his father and his brother.
When he was seventeen, he claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni who supposedly told him that he would receive the "golden plates" of The Book of Mormon to translate. In 1827, Smith alleged that he unearthed the plates in the hill Cumorah, hear Palmyra, New York. Smith claimed he translated the "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics" with the help of miraculous glasses he supposedly received from Moroni. Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher and a convert of Smith's, assisted in his translation, although ho one but Smith ever saw the golden tablets. In 1829, during the translation, the "Prophet," as Smith liked to be called, alleged that John the Baptist was sent by Peter, James, and John to bestow the "Aaronic Priesthood" on himself and Oliver. They completed their translation in early 1830, and The Book of Mormon was published and copyrighted.
On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith Jr., his two brothers Hyrum and Samuel, Oliver Cowdery, and David and Peter Whitmer Jr. met in Fayette, New York, to found a new religious society they called the Church of Christ. Eventually known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church was begun.
Soon after their founding, the Mormons moved to Kirtland, Ohio, where in six years they grew to more than sixteen thousand members. Accusations that Smith's religion was a hoax caused the new church to move several times. From Ohio they moved to Jackson County, Missouri, and then on to Nauvoo, Illinois. Despite the moves, their problems followed them to each new location. The trouble heightened in Nauvoo when their practice of polygamy became known. Although the exact number of Smith's wives is unknown, it has been estimated to be as high as fifty. When Smith called for destruction of an outspokenly anti-Mormon newspaper, the state of Illinois stepped in and jailed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. On June 27, 1844, an angry mob stormed the jail and murdered both men.
After the death of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young became the leader of the Mormons. Young led the group across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains to the Salt Lake Valley in 1846. Under his leadership the Mormons were granted recognition as a legitimate religion. Brigham Young had twenty-seven wives and fifty-six children.
Today the Mormons claim more than eleven million members, over half residing outside the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 PLYMOUTH BRETHREN BEGIN The Plymouth Brethren formed under the leadership of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) as a protest to both the formalism of worship and the spiritual deadness of the Church of England. They desired to remove the barriers that divided Christians and return to the simplicity and authenticity of worship in apostolic days. In 1831, the group formalized their first congregation in Plymouth, England. Their numbers grew rapidly, despite significant church divisions. In 1848, there was a split between the mainstream of the movement (Open Brethren) and the Darbyist group (Exclusive Brethren). Today the Brethren continue to be an influential denomination in many parts of the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1831 TONGUES ARE SPOKEN IN EDWARD IRVING'S CHURCH Edward Irving (1792-1834), ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1815, played an important role in preparing for later charismatic and millenarian movements. In July 1822, when he was thirty, Irving was called to the Caledonian Chapel in London, where his forceful preaching style attracted great crowds. Under Irving's leadership, the church quickly became the largest in London. His teaching emphasized the supernatural and the imminence of Christ's return. In the fall of 1831, members of Irving's church began to speak in tongues, practice faith healing, and have prophetic visions, although Irving himself did not possess these gifts. After his death, some of Irving's followers formed the Catholic Apostolic Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 SLAVERY IS ABOLISHED IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE William Wilberforce (1759-1833) decided that he could best serve God through a career in politics. Elected to the English Parliament in 1780, he devoted his life to the fight against slavery. Largely as a result of his efforts, the slave trade within the British Empire was abolished in 1807. Just before his death on July 29, 1833, Wilberforce was gratified to learn that a bill abolishing slavery itself in all British territories finally was assured of passage.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
DEDICATION TO A CAUSE July 26, 1833
He never gave up.
William Wilberforce was born to affluence in Hull, England, in 1759. His schooling began at Hull Grammar School, where he came under the influence of two brothers, headmaster Joseph Milner and teacher Isaac Milner.
Wilberforce developed a social conscience at a young age. When he was only fourteen he wrote a letter to the local newspaper on the evils of the slave trade. He completed his education at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he largely wasted his time. However, in 1780 he was elected to Parliament where he became a supporter and confidant of British Prime Minister William Pitt, the Younger. Pitt persuaded Wilberforce to focus his efforts on the abolition of slavery.
In 1785, Wilberforce was looking for a traveling companion for a European tour when he ran into Isaac Milner, his old grade-school teacher who then was a tutor at Cambridge. On an impulse he invited Milner on the trip, expenses paid, and Milner accepted. Had Wilberforce known that Milner was a committed Christian, he would not have extended the invitation.
As Wilberforce and Milner traveled together, they began arguing about religion. By the end of their trip, Wilberforce had given intellectual assent to many of the teachings of the Bible, but once back home he returned to politics and put religion on a back burner.
The next year Wilberforce took Isaac Miner on another tour of Europe. This time they studied the Greek New Testament together. Wilberforce later said, "I now fully believed the gospel and was persuaded that if I died at anytime I should perish everlastingly."
By October 1785, Wilberforce was miserable, realizing that he must choose between Christ and the world. Deciding that he needed to talk about it with someone, Wilberforce went to see his boyhood hero John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace." On December 7, 1785, he left John Newton's home with the decision settled. He had chosen Christ and committed himself to being God's man in politics.
Wilberforce became the leader of a group of wealthy Anglican evangelicals who lived mainly in the hamlet of Clapham, three miles from London. They became known as the Clapham Sect, although they were in no sense a sect. They were more like a close family, determined to change the world for Jesus. They determined which wrongs needed to be righted and then delegated to each person the work he could best perform for their mutual goals.
Wilberforce and his friends' first great achievement was the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. But abolition itself proved a tougher goal to achieve.
On July 26, 1833, Wilberforce was on his deathbed at the age of seventy-three. Late that evening he received word that the Emancipation Act freeing the slaves of the British Empire was assured of passing. His final political goal had been reached. Three days later he died.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY SEEKS IMMEDIATE ABOLITION The American Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Philadelphia in 1833, by members of local and state abolitionist organizations, many of them followers of the revivalist Charles Finney (1792-1875). The abolition of slavery in the British Empire, also in 1833, served as the catalyst for the organization's founding. The main goal of the society was the immediate abolition of slavery, but many realized that the process would be a gradual one. The organization, however, lacked unity and was considered extreme by many supporters of abolition. The disunity in the society caused it to become ineffective by 1840.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 MASSACHUSETTS DISESTABLISHES THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH In 1631, the Massachusetts General Court declared that only church members could vote, making Congregationalism the state religion of Massachusetts. The First Amendment of the Constitution took effect in 1791, prohibiting an officially established national church. However, throughout most of New England both political meetings and church services took place in the same building. In 1824, the Congregational meetinghouse in Deerfield was the first to be used solely for worship. Finally, in 1833, the state of Massachusetts disestablished the Congregational Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1833 JOHN KEBLE'S SERMON LAUNCHES THE OXFORD MOVEMENT On July 14, 1833, John Keble (1792-1866)—professor of poetry at Oxford University from 1831 to 1841—preached his famous sermon entitled "National Apostasy," from which arose the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement. The movement began as a reaction against liberalism in the Anglican Church and ended as a movement toward Roman Catholicism. Several of its leaders ultimately left the Church of England and became Roman Catholics.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1835 FINNEY WRITES LECTURES ON REVIVALS Charles Finney (1792-1875) came to be known as the "father of Modern Revivalism." He was dramatically converted while working as a legal apprentice in upstate New York. Without delay, Finney began preaching in the area's villages, and then in the large East Coast cities, working out his technique and theology as he went. Confrontational, energetic, and possessing a penetrating gaze, Charles Finney brought the enthusiasm of camp meetings into the churches. In 1835, Finney wrote Lectures on Revivals of Religion based on his experiences. His "New Measures" included prayers for people by name in public, women praying in public, a designated "anxious bench" for convicted sinners, and long, protracted meetings.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 GEORGE MÜLLER OPENS ORPHANAGES George Müller (1805-1898) was born in Prussia, but became a naturalized British citizen after finishing his theological studies. In 1836, he started his first orphanage in Bristol, soon adding other houses and then moving into the suburbs. He followed the principle of making his financial needs known only to God through prayer, rather than asking other people for financial help. His autobiography, Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, acquainted people all over the world with his work and faith. Beginning in 1875, he and his second wife toured forty-two countries over a seventeen-year period, generating additional awareness of his work with orphans.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 HAWAIIAN REVIVAL BRINGS THOUSANDS TO CHRIST Titus Coan (1801-1882) was a missionary in Hawaii who supervised a teacher training college and led a small church of about twenty-three members in Hilo. He longed for revival in Hawaii, and in November 1836, he embarked on a ministry tour of the island. He preached several times a day in each village he entered, drawing large crowds and often preaching through the night. Many were converted, including the high priest and priestess of the volcano, the most influential pagan leaders. Word of the revival had spread by the time he returned to Hilo a month later, and his small church began growing. Whole villages moved to Hilo to attend Coan's church. The revival soon spread to other Hawaiian islands as well, and as a result, thousands were converted to Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 POSITION OF CHIEF RABBI IS CREATED FOR OTTOMAN EMPIRE By the end of the eighteenth century, the declining strength of the Ottoman Empire—the Muslim empire that ruled modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East—was apparent to the powers in Europe who had investments to protect within the empire. Influenced by the opinions of these European rulers, the Ottoman sultans issued a variety of laws designed to centralize their control of the empire. Among the decrees affecting Jewish life was the creation of the position of chief rabbi, also referred to as the grand rabbi or hakham bashi, who was required to make regular reports to the Ottoman government. While the Ottoman authorities intended the reports of the chief rabbis to strengthen their control over their Jewish subjects, the new rabbinical office actually afforded a greater autonomy to Jewish communities.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1836 GERMAN JEWS BEGIN IMMIGRATION TO THE UNITED STATES A large number of German Jews began immigrating to the United States in 1836, drawn by the developing cities and inexpensive land in America. In California, they put their business skills to use by becoming gold prospectors. In cities such as New York, they tended to gather in neighborhoods with other German-speaking Jews, putting their retail and trade abilities to use in everything from pushcarts to storefronts. Despite the existence of Reform Judaism in Germany, the majority of German Jews arriving in America were more traditional and orthodox in their beliefs and practice than were Jews arriving from other nations.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1837 AUBURN DECLARATION REAFFIRMS NEW SCHOOL COMMITMENT TO CALVINISM At the 1837 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, the Old School Presbyterians who controlled the church accused the New School Presbyterians of heresy by placing too much emphasis on man's initiative in salvation. As a result, the assembly forced three presbyteries controlled by the New School out of the church. In response, the New School Presbyterians issued the Auburn Declaration in August 1837, which reaffirmed their commitment to Calvinism. However, the 1838 General Assembly refused to reconsider their decisions of the previous year. Consequently, the New School and Old School Presbyterians functioned as separate denominations until 1869, when the two factions reunited based on the language of the Auburn Declaration.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A THEOLOGIAN BECOMES PRIME MINISTER October 29, 1837
How would you like to have a godly theologian lead your nation? It happened.
On October 29, 1837, a son was born to the pastor of the Reformed state church in Maasslius, the Netherlands. His name was Abraham Kuyper. Growing up in a pastor's home, young Kuyper was disenchanted by the church. In spite of his alienation, he enrolled in the pre-theology curriculum at the University of Leiden.
At this time Modernism, the belief system that exalts human reason over divine revelation, was taking over the theological faculties of Dutch universities. Kuyper did not escape this influence. He entered the university a person of orthodox faith but within a year and a half had become a religious liberal.
The next major event in Kuyper's religious pilgrimage was reading an English novel his fiancee had given to him. The Heir of Redclyffe by the Christian author Charlotte Mary Yonge proved to be life changing. Kuyper so identified with the story's proud hero that when the hero knelt and wept before God with a broken and contrite heart, Kuyper did the same. Only later would he truly understand what had occurred in his heart. From that moment on he found himself despising what he once admired and seeking what he once despised.
The final step in his pilgrimage came in his first pastorate. There was a group of individuals of low social status in his church who knew more about the Bible than he did. They had a Calvinistic world view that he envied, even though he now had a doctorate in theology. The debates Kuyper had with these folk proved to be short lived as he agreed with them more and more that the Bible taught God's sovereign grace. He later wrote, "Their unremitting perseverance has become the blessing of my heart, the rise of the morning star for my life." The wisdom and faith of these simple people taught him to find rest for his soul "in the worship of a God who works all things, both the willing and the working, according to his good pleasure."
Now fully embracing orthodox Calvinism, Kuyper held major pulpits in Utrecht and Amsterdam. Taking up the cause for private schools, he joined the Anti-Revolutionary Party, which opposed godless revolution and made orthodox Calvinism a political force. Eventually he became the head of the party, and beginning in 1874, served repeatedly in the legislature of the Netherlands, as a member of one or the other house. He edited his party's daily newspaper and wrote 16, 800 editorials for it. In 1880, Kuyper and others founded the Free University of Amsterdam, which was dedicated to Reformed theology. Kuyper became the professor of systematic theology.
In 1901, Abraham Kuyper became prime minister of the Netherlands, holding the position for four years. Through that role, God used him to shape a nation.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
WHEN GOD WENT TO HAWAII July 1, 1838
Some go to Hawaii for more than the scenery.
Titus Coan was converted at a Charles Finney revival in western New York State. Graduating from seminary in 1834, Coan went as a missionary to Hilo, Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands. Having a burning desire to bring revival to Hawaii, he applied himself vigorously to learning the native languages of Kau and Puna, and by 1836 was fluent enough to preach in both.
Coan's official responsibility was to train teachers and oversee about two dozen schools. But Coan's vision went far beyond teacher training. His prayer was that Ha-waiians would come to Christ, and he determined to take the gospel directly to the people himself. In November 1836, he gave his students a long Christmas vacation and went on a walking tour of the island. He preached each time he came to a village. As he had hoped, crowds of people gathered to hear him. He was able to preach in three to five villages a day.
When Coan reached the Puna region, large crowds gathered to hear him. In the largest city he preached ten times in two days. Many wept as they came to understand that Christ had paid the penalty for their sins on the cross.
A particularly stunning conversion in Puna was that of the high priest of the volcano. Idolatry, drunkenness, adultery, and even murder marked his priesthood. Yet upon his conversion, he became a man filled with zeal for God. His sister, the high priestess of the volcano, was initially hostile to the gospel but put her faith in Christ after seeing the change in her brother.
When Coan returned home to Hilo a month later, he found a heightened interest in the way of salvation. People, in some cases entire villages, who had heard him preach in their villages in Kau and Puna now came to Hilo to hear more. Hilo's population grew to ten thousand as people moved there just to hear Coan preach. On Sundays the two-hundred-by-eighty-five-foot building would be packed, with hundreds more listening outside. The Hawaiians decided they needed a bigger church and in three weeks built a building large enough to hold two thousand people.
In spite of thousands of conversions in 1836 and 1837, the church's membership didn't grow until 1838 and 1839. The slow growth reflected a flaw in Coan's missionary methodology, not disinterest on the part of the new converts. Coan would record the date of each person's conversion and then would wait months before recontacting the people to find out if their conversion was real. Only then would they be invited to join the church. It wasn't until July 1, 1838, that the first converts were finally baptized and received into the church. On that stirring day 1,705 were baptized. By 1853, fifty-six thousand of the seventy-one thousand native Hawaiians were professing Christians.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1837 MOSES MONTEFIORE IS KNIGHTED Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), a wealthy English stockbroker, was also the president of the Board of Deputies that represented British Jews. In 1824, he retired from business to devote his life to the oppressed Jews of the world. He was the last of the shtadtlanim, prominent Jews whose social standing enabled them to intervene on behalf of persecuted Jews in foreign governments. He was a friend of Queen Victoria (1819-1901), who knighted him in 1837. In 1840, he not only secured the release of Jews accused of blood libel in Damascus, but also persuaded the sultan of Turkey to forbid any further arrests on that charge.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1839 WILLIAM C. BURNS PREACHES AT THE KILSYTH ANNIVERSARY REVIVAL In 1839, William Hamilton Burns (1779-1859) wanted to stir the hearts of his congregation and bring revival once again to Kilsyth, Scotland. He decided to celebrate the hundred-year anniversary of the revival the town had experienced under James Robe (1688-1753) by holding services at Robe's grave. He invited his son, William Chalmers Burns (1815-1868), to preach at some of the services. What was planned to be a brief visit turned into many weeks as the people of Kilsyth responded in droves to the young Burns' preaching. Although pleased with the revival he was witnessing, young Burns' true longing was to bring the gospel to unreached people. Therefore, at the peak of his ministry in Scotland, young Burns departed to join Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) in bringing the gospel to inland China.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1840 LIVINGSTONE SAILS FOR AFRICA In 1840, David Livingstone (1813-1873) received his medical degree from the University of Glasgow and sailed for Africa the same year. There he married Mary, the daughter of missionary pioneer Robert Moffat (1795-1883). He fixed his goals on taking Christianity to Africa and exploring the land, as well as fighting to end the slave trade. Due in large measure to Livingstone's reports on the scourge of slavery, it soon was outlawed in the civilized world. When Livingstone had not been heard from in quite some time, a New York Herald correspondent named Henry Stanley (1841-1904) traveled to the heart of Africa to search for him. When he finally found him, Stanley uttered the now-famous words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LIVING BY FAITH November 21, 1839
What would it be like to live by faith, telling your needs to no one but God?
God leads different people in different ways, but he led George Müller to trust him for everything in life and to let his needs be known to God alone.
Müller was born in Prussia in 1805, and though he trained for the Lutheran ministry, led a degenerate life of petty thievery. When he was twenty, a friend invited him to a private home one Saturday evening for a group time of prayer and the reading of a printed sermon (it was illegal in Prussia for laymen to explain the Scriptures). He was intrigued just hearing about such a gathering. Once he arrived, the meeting both puzzled and thrilled Müller, and he realized that his advanced education had not given him the power to pray as eloquently as these simple tradesmen. That night Müller went home feeling that he had found what he had been seeking. God had begun a work of grace in his heart, and he went to sleep peaceful and happy in Jesus.
God continued to work in his life, and in 1829 Müller went to London to train as a missionary to the Jews. Müller soon became convinced of the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren, a group of Christians who functioned without a paid clergy. Over the next years he ministered at several Plymouth Brethren chapels in England.
Earlier in his life, while a student in Halle, Germany, Muller had observed the orphanages that August Francke, German Pietist, had begun in 1696. Through the years he thought about founding an orphanage, and on November 21, 1835, after reading a book about Francke's life, he felt God definitely lead him to start an orphanage in Bristol, England. He immediately asked God for a building, funds to support it, and godly people to operate it. His orphanage was operational within five months and remained the major project of his life.
George Müller continually trusted God for the daily operations of the orphanage. November 21, 1839, four years after his decision to start the orphanage, is a case in point. On that day some small contributions were received, enough for the next day's breakfast for the children but not enough for dinner. Müller described that day's staff meeting in his journal: "Our comfort... is 'The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' Matthew 6:34. We separated very happy in God, though very poor, and our faith much tried."
Two and a half hours before dinner the next day, a large box arrived at the orphanage with a generous contribution plus some valuable items that could be sold. The joy of George Müller and his fellow workers was indescribable, as God once more had provided for his orphans.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1840 MONTEFIORE INTERCEDES IN DAMASCUS BLOOD LIBEL AFFAIR As the Ottoman Empire attempted to centralize its control, conflicts between Muslims, Christians, and Jews continued in Syria. In the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1840, a Jewish barber was accused of murdering a Christian monk and using his blood to celebrate the Jewish Passover. The accusation of "blood libel"—the belief that Jews murdered non-Jews and used their blood in secret rituals—while common in medieval Europe, was unknown in the Middle East. What became known as the Damascus Affair resulted in the imprisonment of nine Jewish religious leaders and children. Confessions obtained through torture precipitated violent attacks on Jews by Christians and Muslims. Eventually, England sent British Jew Sir Moses Montefiore (1784—1885) to intercede on behalf of his terrorized people. Montefiore's diplomacy, with the efforts of others, obtained the release of the nine prisoners.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1842 TREATY OF NANKING OPENS CHINA In the early part of the nineteenth century, British merchants were heavily involved in the Chinese opium trade. In 1839, however, the Chinese government declared the opium trade illegal and began to impound opium from the public markets. They also demanded that British merchants and mariners agree not to import opium into China. The British refused to comply with the demands and war soon broke out. Within three years, the British had defeated the Chinese on land and sea, and the Treaty of Nanking was signed on August 29, 1842. In addition to granting the British the colony of Hong Kong, the treaty opened several Chinese towns to British trade and settlements, which in turn effectively opened China to Christian missionaries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 B'NAI B'RITH IS ESTABLISHED As Jews immigrated to America and many Jewish businessmen achieved financial success, a desire grew among the wealthy to coordinate their philanthropic efforts. In 1843, B'nai B'rith, Hebrew for "Children of the covenant," became the first nonreligious Jewish organization founded in the United States. Similar to other fraternal orders, B'nai B'rith established lodges and focused its work on general Jewish service to the community. Sponsoring the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith as well as the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundations on college campuses, B'nai B'rith remains the largest Jewish fraternal order.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 KIERKEGAARD PUBLISHES PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS Seren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a leading Danish philosopher and writer, is considered to be one of the founders of existentialism. Using the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, he published Philosophical Fragments in 1844. The nature of faith preoccupied him, and he frequently used words such as irrational, leap of faith, paradox, and acceptance of the "absurd." Until the twentieth century, little was known of Kierkegaard outside of Denmark. From that time his writings have become a major influence in philosophy, psychology, and theology.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1843 PHOEBE PALMER WRITES THE WAY TO HOLINESS Few women mounted a public platform in the 1840s and 1850s, but Phoebe Worrall Palmer (1807-1874) had something to share. Phoebe Palmer, the wife of a New York physician, had suffered the loss of three young children. Earnestly desiring a deeper faith, Phoebe experienced it on July 26, 1837. She began to share her story of the Holy Spirit's indwelling power at a weekly gathering in New York City known as the "Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness." In 1843, a collection of her essays was published as The Way to Holiness. Enormously successful, by the time of the Civil War it had appeared in thirty-six editions. Her preaching and publishing were influential in promoting holiness as well as the role of women in religious leadership.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 "THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT" LEADS TO FORMATION OF THE SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH William Miller (1782-1849)—farmer, army captain in the War of 1812, and licensed Baptist minister—calculated that Christ's return would be within a year of March 21, 1843. When Christ failed to return during that period, Miller recalculated the date to be October 22, 1844. When that date came and went without the Second Coming, Miller's followers referred to the experience as "The Great Disappointment." Many left the group, but those who remained formed the foundation for what became the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
LITTLE WOMAN, LONG SHADOW December 12, 1840
She stood just four feet three inches tall.
On December 12, 1840, a tiny baby girl was born into an aristocratic family in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her name was Charlotte Diggs Moon, but everyone called her "Lottie." Her stature was small, yet her intellect and strength of character were enormous. In a day when embroidery and dancing distinguished most young ladies, Lottie spoke six languages fluently and earned a master's degree in education from the Albemarle Female Institution in 1861.
Lottie came from a family of dedicated Southern Baptists and attended church most of her life. But at seventeen, she was a staunch skeptic. Faith seemed antithetical to intellect, and Lottie had no need for it.
In December 1858, Dr. John Broadus—who eventually would be one of the first four professors at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—was holding evangelistic meetings at his Charlottesville Baptist Church. Lottie went to one of the services, intending to scoff.
That night a barking dog kept Lottie awake. As she was in the habit of using otherwise wasted hours to consider various intellectual propositions, she decided to ponder the merits of Christianity. As she laid in the dark, Lottie mentally reviewed Dr. Broadus' sermon, adding to it the Bible texts arid arguments she'd heard throughout her life. By the time she got to the evangelist's altar call, the Spirit of God prompted her to respond, and Lottie Moon, the brilliant skeptic, believed. When she finished her prayer of commitment to Jesus, she realized that the dog had stopped barking.
While working as a teacher at age thirty-three, Lottie heard a call to missions "as clear as a bell." In July 1873, the foreign mission board of the Southern Baptist Convention appointed her its first unmarried woman missionary to China.
Lottie arrived in Shantung (now Shandong) Province that year and settled in the city of Tengchow (now Qingdao), where she opened a school for girls. Over time, the focus of her ministry became personal evangelism among the poor.
In 1888, she persuaded the women of the Southern Baptist Convention to take an annual missions offering for China's poor. By 1912, thousands of people were dying of starvation every day in famine-ravaged Shantung Province. Lottie's cupboard was always open to the poor, even when she herself had to go without food.
Christmas Eve 1988 arrived, and as Southern Baptist women collected their special missions offering many were looking forward to meeting the woman who inspired their gifts. At seventy-two, Lottie Moon was coming home. But that same night, she died of complications from starvation, while aboard a ship in a Japanese harbor.
Lottie Moon helped pioneer the role of unmarried women missionaries in evangelism and planted more than thirty Chinese churches. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering continued after her death, and by 1995 it had raised over 1.5 billion dollars for missions.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 THE YMCA IS FOUNDED In 1844, George Williams (1821-1905) met with twelve young men in his London home in what was to be the first meeting of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). The purpose of the YMCA was to win young men to Jesus Christ. Williams' Bible studies grew, and the movement spread to the United States, France, Holland, and throughout the British Empire. Gradually, recreation and relief work were added to its programs, and eventually the movement was secularized.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1844 METHODISTS AND BAPTISTS SPLIT OVER SLAVERY Twenty years before the American Civil War, several denominations and individual churches split over the issue of slavery. In 1834, a Methodist anti-slavery association was founded, and in 1844, the Southern Methodists withdrew from the denomination. The Southern and Northern Methodist churches did not reunite until 1939. Baptists formed the American Baptist Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, and in 1845, the southern Baptists split from the north and formed the Southern Baptist Convention. Just as the churches divided over the issue of slavery, the nation itself was about to divide.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1845 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN BECOMES A ROMAN CATHOLIC The Oxford Movement, also called the Tractarian Movement, was an Anglo-Catholic revival within the Church of England. The leader of the movement was John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who began disseminating his views in 1833, by publishing Tracts for the Times. Of the ninety tracts distributed by the Tractarians, Newman authored twenty-three. The Anglo-Catholic movement was very successful, attracting hundreds among the clergy. Finally, on October 9, 1845, John Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church and was named a cardinal in 1875.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1846 EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE IS FORMED The Evangelical Alliance was formed in 1846 to further the cause of reconciliation and cooperation among Christian groups and across national boundaries. At the initial London conference, some nine hundred clergymen and laymen met to confess the unity of the Christian church. An American branch was formed in 1867, and it also drew support in Europe. In 1951, the Evangelical Alliance was one of the founders of the World Evangelical Fellowship.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1848 ILLINOIS INSTITUTE IS FOUNDED, LATER TO BECOME WHEATON COLLEGE In 1848, a group of Wesleyans founded the Illinois Institute in Wheaton, Illinois. On January 9, 1860, the school was rechartered as Wheaton College, with Jonathan Blanchard (1811-1892) as president over the twenty-nine students. Warren Wheaton, a founder of the city of Wheaton, donated the land for the school. The college became one of the top academic colleges in the nation and an influential leader in evangelical Christian higher education.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1848 KARL MARX PUBLISHES COMMUNIST MANIFESTO On the eve of the German revolution of 1848, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his friend Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) wrote the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that presented the authors' political ideology. It was a systematic statement of Marxism: History is a series of class conflicts; the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie; a classless society will be the result; and means of production will be publicly owned. Marx and his followers believed that "man shall live by bread alone," that religion is the "opiate of the people," and that "only labor creates value." The writings of Karl Marx laid the foundation for socialism and communism, which would be primary challenges to the gospel for the next century and a half.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1851 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE PUBLISHES UNCLE TOM'S CABIN An abolitionist and writer, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. While teaching and then writing for magazines in Connecticut, Ohio, Maine, and Massachusetts, Beecher Stowe became increasingly concerned with the elimination of slavery. She and her seminary professor husband, Calvin Stowe (1802-1886), harbored fugitive slaves in their home while in Cincinnati. Beecher Stowe's most influential work was Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly, which was released in 1851-52 in the magazine National Era. It was published as a book in 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin played a key role in popularizing the anti-slavery movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
GO FOR ME TO CHINA December 2, 1849
Hudson Taylor was the child of devout parents and no stranger to the Bible, but at the age of seventeen, he was still a stranger to a personal walk with God.
The summer of 1849 broke warm with promise in Taylor's heart, when at last he had accepted the joyful realization God granted him of Christ's sufficiency for his sins. Many years later Taylor recalled:
Well do I remember that occasion, how in the gladness of my heart I poured out my soul before God, and again and again confessing my grateful love to Him who had done everything for me — who had saved me when I had given up all hope and even desire of salvation — I besought Him to give me some work for Him ... that I might do for Him who had done so much for me......For what service I was accepted, I knew not. But a deep consciousness that I was not my own took possession of me, which has never since been effaced.
Taylor's inner change was outwardly visible that summer. He loved spending time in the Bible and in prayer. He was so filled with the joy and wonder of salvation that he used his free time to share his faith with others.
But as fall and then winter set in, a coldness crept over Taylor's spirit. He doggedly continued to do the things he felt a Christian should do. But Bible study and prayer lost their sweetness. He went to church only out of duty, and his soul grew weary in its struggles with sin.
On Sunday, December 2, 1849, Hudson Taylor awakened feeling as sick in his physical body as he had been feeling in his spirit. As the rest of his family went to church, he stayed behind in the quiet house and began a letter to his sister: "Pray for me, dear Amelia. Thank God I feel very happy in His love, but I am so unworthy of all His blessings. I so often give way to temptation.......Oh that the Lord would take away my heart of
stone and give me a heart of flesh!"
Tormented by his thoughts, Taylor laid down his pen, and then, like Jacob of long ago, he decided that he would "lay hold of God and not let go except Thou bless me." What God did over the next few hours was so precious that Taylor never spoke of it in detail. But he did add this postscript to the letter to his sister: "Glory to God, my dear Amelia. Christ has said 'Seek and ye shall find,' and praise His name, He has revealed himself to me in an overflowing manner.... He has given me a new heart."
What filled Hudson Taylor with such praise? Six words from God that day: "Then go for me to China."
Hudson Taylor did go to China and founded the China Inland Mission, which became the largest missionary organization in the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 CHARLES SPURGEON BEGINS HIS PASTORATE IN LONDON Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was converted in 1850, after taking refuge from a snowstorm in a Methodist chapel. After a brief Baptist pastorate near Cambridge, England, he became pastor of the New Park Baptist Chapel in Southwark, London, in 1854 at age nineteen. He remained there the rest of his life. His preaching attracted such large crowds that the congregation built Metropolitan Tabernacle with seating for sixty-five hundred. Spurgeon preached there from 1861 until just before his death in 1892. The Tabernacle served not only as a preaching place, but as an educational and social center for the city. Spurgeon's tremendous gift for preaching is evidenced by the fact that his sermons are still popular and readable today, more than a century later.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 HUDSON TAYLOR ARRIVES IN CHINA From the age of five, James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) desired to be a missionary to China. Although chronic health problems almost derailed his dream, he fulfilled his goal when he arrived in Shanghai in 1854. Taylor soon began making evangelistic excursions into inland China in spite of the danger resulting from political unrest and mistrust of foreigners. Much of his success was due to his adoption of native dress and his facility with the language. When the interior of China was opened to Westerners in 1865, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1854 MARY'S "IMMACULATE CONCEPTION" IS DECLARED As early as the seventh century, there was debate within the church about the Catholic doctrine of the sinlessness of Mary and whether or not she had original sin. By 1476, the doctrine, along with the Feast of the Conception of Mary, was adopted and celebrated by the Roman Church. In 1854, "Immaculate" was added to the title when Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) issued a papal bull stating that, "From the first moment of her conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Saviour of Mankind, kept free from all stain of Original Sin." Protestants rejected the dogma.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1855 CONFESSIONAL LUTHERANISM WINS OVER REVIVALISTS Lutheranism in America changed significantly from the mid-1700s, when the Lutheran Church was first organized in America, to the mid-1800s. European Lutheran theology quickly took on many characteristics of American Protestantism as the immigrants assimilated. Great debate ensued among Lutherans regarding the extent of the theological Americanization, with Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799-1873) leading the Revivalist, or American, side. In 1855, Schmucker attempted to have Lutherans adopt his Definite Synodical Platform, a revision of the Augsburg Confession along Revivalist lines. This precipitated a great clash of interests that resulted in the European Lutherans, or Confessional Lutherans, mobilizing themselves and defeating the Definite Synodical Platform. The Confessional Lutheran position was strengthened by the great numbers of Lutherans who emigrated from Germany and Scandinavia during the time of this Lutheran theological debate.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1856 MOODY COMES TO CHICAGO Shortly after his conversion in Boston at age eighteen, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) moved to Chicago in 1856. He found success as a salesman, but it wasn't long before he turned more and more toward Christian work. By 1860, he was working full-time with the YMCA, ministering to young men and establishing Sunday school programs for poor children. By the early 1870s, he was a well-known evangelical leader in Chicago and by 1875, was known throughout the world after a very successful evangelistic tour of Great Britain with his song leader Ira Sankey (1840-1908). Returning to America, Moody focused his efforts on revival meetings in large cities. He also invested himself in education, founding Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and boys' and girls' schools in his hometown of Northfield, Massachusetts. From 1875 until 1899, D. L. Moody was the chief spokesman for American evangelicals.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A SMALL BEGINNING October 22, 1851
Imagine a theological seminary with a faculty of one.
Archibald Alexander was born in 1772, to a Presbyterian family near Lexington, Virginia. At the age of seventeen he became the tutor for the family of a general in the army of the new nation. Mrs. Tyler, an elderly woman in the general's home, took young Archibald under her wing. She was a Baptist who viewed Presbyterians as sound in doctrine but often not having the experience of spiritual rebirth.
The general hired a millwright, who also was a Baptist, for his plantation. One day the millwright asked Archibald whether he believed that to enter the kingdom of heaven one must be born again. Uncertain how to answer, Archibald said yes. The millwright then asked him whether he had experienced the new birth. Archibald answered, "Not that I know of."
"Ah," said the millwright, "if you had ever experienced this change, you would know something about it!"
The conversation got Alexander thinking. Surely the new birth was in the Bible, but he had never heard any Presbyterians talk about it.
Old Mrs. Tyler had poor eyesight and would frequently ask Alexander to read to her. On Sunday evenings Alexander was asked to read to the whole family. One particular Sunday night he read the family a sermon on Revelation 3:20, where Jesus says, "Behold I stand at the door and knock.. .." As Alexander read the sermon, every word seemed to apply to him. By the time he finished, his voice was quivering with emotion. He laid down the book and ran to his room. Shutting the door, he fell to his knees and poured out his soul in prayer, inviting Jesus into his life. He had not prayed long when he was overwhelmed by a joy that he had never experienced. The joy was accompanied by a full assurance that, if he were to die, he would go to heaven.
Giving up tutoring, Alexander went to study theology at Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) and entered the Presbyterian ministry. After serving as an itinerant minister on the Ohio-Virginia frontier, he became president of Hampden-Sydney College in 1796 at the age of twenty-four.
In 1807, Alexander became pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia and moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly. In his final address as moderator in 1808, he suggested the formation of a Presbyterian seminary in America. As a result of his leadership, Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812, with Alexander as its sole faculty member for the first year. The first fall he had three students, who were joined by six more in the spring and five more during the summer. Alexander's modest home served as library, chapel, and classroom. He continued teaching at Princeton Seminary until his death on October 22, 1851.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1857 PRAYER MEETING REVIVAL BEGINS IN NEW YORK In the summer of 1857, the North Dutch (Reformed) Church on Fulton Street in New York City decided to hire lay evangelist Jeremiah Lanphier (1809— c. l890) to minister to the immigrants living in poverty around their church. When Lanphier had difficulty reaching the church's neighbors, he decided to start a daily noon-hour prayer meeting for businessmen to gather and pray for revival. The first day—September 23, 1857—he knelt alone. As he prayed, men slowly trickled in, with six in attendance by one o'clock. Each day, the group grew and within a month averaged more than one hundred. Soon many other local churches and even the police and fire stations were housing noontime prayer meetings. Within two years, approximately one million converts were added to the churches of America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1857 HAMILTON'S WESLEYAN METHODIST REVIVAL FUELS PRAYER REVIVAL The Methodist lay preachers Walter and Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) led very successful camp revival meetings during the summer of 1857 throughout Ontario, Canada. By October, the crowds reached five thousand during the week and twenty thousand on the weekends. During their return trip home by train to New York, the Palmers became separated from their luggage and ended up spending the night in Hamilton, Ontario, while waiting for their bags to arrive. A local Methodist pastor heard of their presence and requested that they preach at an impromptu Friday night service. One night turned into several weeks as the crowds grew and several hundred souls came to Christ, including the mayor of Hamilton. The Hamilton revival was reported widely in Christian newspapers and journals, which helped fuel the laymen's prayer revival that soon swept the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 PATON SAILS FOR NEW HEBRIDES John Gibson Paton (1824-1907), son of a devout Christian man, left home to devote his life to mission work. Having applied for a post as a tract distributor, Paton began training at the Free Church Normal Seminary in Glasgow, Scotland. While preparing for foreign mission work, he continued his studies in medicine and theology, and worked for the Glasgow City Mission for ten years.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE FULTON STREET PRAYER MEETING September 23, 1857
What do you do if you announce a prayer meeting but no one comes?
The summer of 1857 was a frustrating time to be a Christian in New York City. In the commercial district wealthy bankers and businessmen thanked God for their profitable deals. Yet in the vast slums poverty was inescapable.
Jeremiah Lanphier was a man who wanted to make a difference. Born south of Albany, he had come to New York City to enter the mercantile business. Then at the age of thirty-three he unexpectedly discovered that Jesus Christ was real and that he had paid the penalty for Jeremiah's sins. Lanphier gave his life to Jesus and joined Brick Presbyterian Church, spending much of his spare time as a street evangelist. In the summer of 1857 the North Dutch (Reformed) Church on Fulton Street decided to hire a full-time lay evangelist to reach the immigrants living in the surrounding neighborhoods. They chose Jeremiah Lanphier.
Lanphier began praying, Lord, what do you want me to do? The answer he received was that God wanted people to pray. He decided to have a prayer meeting for businessmen from noon to one o'clock in the afternoon when they could come for a few minutes or for the whole hour.
Lanphier printed up a handbill inviting the public to a weekly prayer meeting at noon on Wednesdays in the third-floor meeting room of North Dutch Church on Fulton Street. The first prayer meeting would be held September 23, 1857.
The appointed day arrived, and at noon Lanphier went to the room and knelt to pray. Twenty minutes passed and still he was alone. Finally at 12:30 one man entered the room and without saying a word knelt down next to Lanphier. Then another man came, followed by another until by one o'clock there were six.
The following week there were twenty. By the first week of October the meetings were held daily and the number increased to forty. The fourth week they averaged over one hundred with many under conviction and inquiring how they might be saved.
New York City was to see a great need for God when on October 18, a financial panic seized the city, collapsing the economy into a brief but steep recession. "The Fulton Street Meetings," as they became known, soon filled the rooms at North Dutch Church and spilled over into the nearby John Street Methodist Church. Before long many other churches welcomed people to pray both at noon and before work in the morning. Even police stations and firehouses opened their doors to meet the need for places to pray. Within six months, ten thousand businessmen were gathering for prayer daily.
Although the revival was the most spectacular in New York City, businessmen's prayer meetings sprang up in many cities around the country. Within the next two years approximately one million converts were added to America's churches.
On April 16, 1858, following his ordination as a Reformed Presbyterian minister, Paton sailed with his wife to New Hebrides (present-day Vanuatu). Following the deaths of his wife and infant son, Paten left the islands to regroup. In 1866, he returned to the island of Aniwa, and over the next fifteen years he saw the majority of the native people put their faith in Jesus Christ.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 BERNADETTE SOUBRIOUS CLAIMS A MIRACLE AT LOURDES On February 11, 1858, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubrious (1844-1879) was gathering firewood on the banks of the Gave de Pau River in Lourdes, France, when she reported seeing a bright light in a grotto. The light formed the figure of a beautiful lady whom Bernadette recognized as the Virgin Mary. Bernadette reported that the Virgin asked her to deliver a message of repentance and prayer to the world. Crowds began following Bernadette to the grotto, hoping to witness another miracle. She had seventeen additional visions through July 16, 1858, seen only by her, causing many to dismiss them as the product of superstitious hysteria. A decade later, the Catholic Church officially recognized Bernadette's experience as miraculous, largely because visitors to the spring inside the grotto claimed miraculous healing. She was canonized in 1933.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1858 FIRST JEW IS SEATED IN ENGLISH HOUSE OF COMMONS Prior to 1828, only Anglicans could be elected to the English House of Commons because members had to swear allegiance to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. In 1828, all Protestants were allowed to be elected, and the following year Roman Catholics were as well. In 1847, a Jew named Baron Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879) was elected but was not allowed to be seated because of the required oath "on the true faith of a Christian." He repeatedly was elected but was not seated because the House of Lords refused to eliminate the oath. Finally, in 1858, Rothschild was seated in the House of Commons, and in 1885, his son became the first practicing Jew to join the House of Lords.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1859 JAPAN REOPENS TO FOREIGN MISSIONARIES In the mid-nineteenth century, for the first time in more than 250 years, missionaries made their way back into Japan. Following a treaty between France and the Japanese government, Japan opened its borders for trade, and in May 1859, the first Protestant missionaries arrived. Despite more than two centuries of severe persecution of Christians in Japan, both Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries found secret groups of Christians who had maintained the faith for generations, without the aid of formal education or clergy.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE PRECOCIOUS YOUNG PASTOR August 16, 1859
Would your church call a nineteen-year-old pastor? Here's one that did.
On a Saturday afternoon in December 1853, a nineteen-year-old lad made his first trip to London from Cambridge on the Eastern Counties Railway. No one observing him would have guessed that this young fellow was about to begin a ministry to the city of London that would last thirty-eight years.
His name was Charles Haddon Spurgeon. His father and grandfather were Congregational pastors. His grandfather had been the pastor of the Independent Church in Essex for fifty-four years, and his father pastored a number of independent churches throughout England. The family had descended from Huguenots who had fled France and settled in Essex.
When Spurgeon was just ten years old he met a pastor friend of his grandfather's, while vacationing at his grandfather's home. The friend was extremely impressed at how well Spurgeon read from the Bible in the Sunday service. Before leaving the next day, the pastor told the family he had a conviction that someday Spurgeon would preach the gospel to thousands.
After being converted at a Primitive Methodist chapel at the age of sixteen, Spurgeon began to study the issue of baptism. He became convinced that the New Testament taught baptism was to be for believers and by immersion. In spite of their belief in infant baptism, his parents encouraged him to follow his own convictions, and so he was baptized. Shortly thereafter, Spurgeon joined a Baptist church in Cambridge.
He soon discovered his gift of preaching, and in spite of his young age he was in much demand. After accepting a brief pastorate near Cambridge, eighteen-year-old Spurgeon was called the following year to the pastorate of the New Park Street Baptist Chapel in London. It was a small church, but within a few weeks of his arrival he was attracting great crowds. The chapel soon proved to be too small, so the church decided to enlarge the building. During construction the church moved to a large hall, but once again the crowds wanting to hear Spurgeon preach surpassed what the hall could accommodate. The decision was finally made to build a tabernacle sufficiently large to seat the crowds coming to hear the twenty-five-year-old preacher. On August 16, 1859, the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Tabernacle was laid. The church was built to hold sixty-five hundred worshipers. Metropolitan Tabernacle opened debt free in May 1861. Spurgeon preached there until shortly before his death in 1892.
The Metropolitan Tabernacle was more than just a preaching station. It was an educational and social center. Spurgeon founded a pastor's college and an orphanage, both of which continue to minister to this day. He also began a literature ministry and provided many services to the nearby slums. Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle was one of the great churches of all time.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1859 DARWIN PUBLISHES THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES In 1831, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) graduated from Christ College in Cambridge, England, intending to become a clergyman. However, he continually vacillated between faith and agnosticism, a tension that brought him psychosomatic pain as well. He became a "naturalist" and began formulating his theory of evolution during a five-year voyage around South America from 1831 to 1836. Upon his return he started studying the transmutation of species. In 1857, a debate at Oxford between T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), Darwin's representative, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873) resulted in firmly pitting evolution and religion against each other. Darwin had hesitated in publishing his theories, apparently due to his own inner conflict. However, after A. R. Wallace (1823-1913) published a theory similar to evolution, Darwin finally published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 THE SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTIST CHURCH IS FOUNDED Ellen Gould White (1827-1915) was a teenager when William Miller (1782-1849) predicted the second coming of Christ in 1843 and again in 1844, resulting in "The Great Disappointment." As one of those who remained committed to the movement, White became the most prominent leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, formally organized in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1860. Over her lifetime, White claimed to have experienced some two thousand visions, one of which was a vision confirming worship on Saturday rather than on Sunday.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 JAMAICA EXPERIENCES REVIVAL As word of the amazing laymen's prayer revival in the United States spread to Jamaica, believers there fervently prayed that revival would also come to them.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
A PEEP OF DAY MEETING September 28, 1860
It all began with people praying.
In 1860, Christians in Jamaica had heard about the prayer revival sweeping the world. Wanting to become part of it, they held "peep of day" (dawn) prayer meetings throughout the island, Most were held in plantations so that people could meet for prayer before they went out to work the fields.
Their prayers for revival were first answered in a Moravian chapel. The Moravians were the spiritual descendants of Jan Hus, the Czech reformer martyred in 1415. They had settled at Herrnhut, Germany, and had become a major missionary-sending movement. Theodor Sonderrnan, a Moravian missionary from Germany, regularly visited the town of Clifton, Jamaica, as part of his ministry.
On September 28, 1860, Sonderman began what he expected to be a typical Moravian service. A hymn was sung, followed by an opening prayer. Then someone else prayed, and another and another. Even children led in prayer. As one boy poured out his soul to God, Sonderman saw tears streaming down everyone's cheeks as they cried to God for mercy. Even notorious sinners groaned to God in prayer. When a young girl prayed, men started to tremble on their knees. So many people were weeping that Sonderman became concerned for maintaining order. The meeting finally broke up after three hours so that Sonderman could deal with those who were in greatest distress.
After four weeks Theodor Sonderman was dealing with over three hundred inquir-ers, and the revival was still continuing. It spilled over into other denominations, including the Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians.
At the Mount Carey Chapel the local justice of the peace presided over the Sunday morning service because there was no pastor. Even so, twelve hundred crowded into the chapel. In three smaller communities, three thousand were awakened to faith in Christ with no pastor preaching.
Among the Methodists of Montego Bay, the chapel of eight hundred members witnessed 547 people come to Christ. The eighty Baptist churches of Jamaica reported twelve thousand conversions during the revival. The Congregational churches grew so much that the missionary board called in its missionaries, leaving the church in able local hands, while the Presbyterian churches of Jamaica saw over three thousand conversions in 1860 and another seventeen hundred the following year.
A Congregational minister summarized the results of the revival: "It closed the rum shop and the gambling houses, reconciled long-separated husbands and wives, restored prodigal children, produced scores of bans to be read for marriage, crowded every place of worship, quickened the zeal of ministers, purified the churches, and brought many sinners to repentance. It also excited the rage of those ungodly people whom it had not humbled."
And it all began with prayer.
In September 1860, the much-anticipated revival began in a Moravian chapel in the town of Clifton and quickly spread throughout the island, crossing denominational boundaries to the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congrega-tionalists, and Baptists. Individuals of all ages and classes gathered together on plantations and in churches for prayer meetings and services in all parts of the island. Many meetings numbered more than a thousand people. During the last few months of 1860, several thousand Jamaicans professed faith in Christ, drastically changing the culture of this nation of recently liberated slaves.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 WOMEN'S UNION MISSIONARY SOCIETY IS ESTABLISHED The eighteenth century saw a significant increase in foreign missions, including an increase in single women choosing to be missionaries. Among the faith missions established to support missionaries during the last half of the nineteenth century, a variety of influential societies were founded, supported, and managed by women. Established in 1860, the Women's Union Missionary Society was the first missionary society of this kind in the United States. Other societies founded by and for women included the Female Education Society and the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society in Britain. Like other faith missions, the Women's Union Missionary Society developed a comprehensive ministry of evangelism, education, and medical care, attempting to meet the needs of the whole person. Today the society has merged with the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1860 ALLIANCE ISRAELITE UNIVERSELLE IS FOUNDED IN PARIS In 1860, the Alliance Israelite Universelle was established in Paris, focusing on assisting Jews in the Middle East, where France had numerous settlements. In addition to working for the freedom and well-being of Jews in French territories, the alliance sought to improve the status of Jews around the world. Its most significant achievement was the creation of a network of educational institutions through which religious and general education was available to Jews throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The school system, which taught classes in both French and Hebrew, included an agricultural program in Palestine. The alliance, with its Western bias, provided Jewish students an understanding of Western culture and society.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1861 UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR BEGINS On April 12, 1861, the newly seceded Confederate States of America opened fire on the United States at Fort Sumter off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. After thirty-six hours, the fort fell to the Confederacy. The opening shots in the American Civil War had been decades in the making as the Southern states increasingly longed for freedom from the Northern conceptions of union and liberty. Slavery, which eventually became the war's defining issue, was simply one manifestation of the deep philosophical differences between North and South. Christians on both sides defended their positions from the Bible and prayed for an end to America's bloodiest war. Their prayers were answered on April 9, 1865, when the Confederacy surrendered to the sovereignty of the United States of America.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1861-1865 REVIVALS ARE COMMON DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR During the American Civil War, preaching and praying in both the North and South tended to emphasize God's blessing for their side. In the battlefields and among the soldiers, however, preachers usually emphasized the need for personal repentance and faith. Revivals were common among the ranks of both the Confederate and Union armies with thousands of soldiers being converted. Some have suggested that the Confederate troops in particular were the most evangelical army of all time.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1862 MOSES HESS PUBLISHES ROME AND JERUSALEM When Moses Hess (1812-1875) published his work Rome and Jerusalem in Germany in 1862, it became the first Jewish book to present the idea of establishing a Jewish homeland. Hess was not alone in his beliefs, and the following decades saw a growing number who planned to settle in Palestine in hopes of building a nation in the land of Israel.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1863 GENERAL STONEWALL JACKSON'S CAREER CUT SHORT General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (1824-1863) was one of the greatest tactical geniuses of military history. He was converted to Jesus Christ in 1848 while fighting in the Mexican War. Jackson did not support the secession of the southern states, yet his loyalty as a Virginian caused him to accept a commission in the Army of Northern Virginia in 1861. He earned the nickname "Stonewall" in the first battle of Bull Run when his brigade stood firm against attack—like a stone wall. From 1861 to 1863, Jackson demonstrated his tactical genius in multiple campaigns. He prayed passionately before making every decision. During the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, Jackson was wounded by errant fire from his own troops. On May 10, 1863, the great Christian general passed into the peace of God.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
REVIVAL IN THE ARMY August 21, 1863
Reverend J. W. Jones was a Chaplain in the army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War. In his book, Christ in the Camp, he related how God worked among the Confederate Army troops. Jones attributed thousands of conversions directly and indirectly to a day of prayer and fasting that Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, called for on August 21, 1863.
Robert E. Lee issued the following message in response to President Davis' request:
Soldiers! We have sinned against Almighty God. We have forgotten His signal mercies, and have cultivated a revengeful, haughty, and boastful spirit. We have not remembered that the defenders of a just cause should be pure in His eyes; that "our times are in His hands;" and we have relied too much on our own arms for the achievement of our independence. God is our only refuge and our strength. Let us humble ourselves before Him. R.E. Lee, General
A revival of sorts had begun and the soldiers were receptive to a day dedicated to prayer and fasting. The services were well attended, and many miraculous events resulted from the day's observance. The following excerpts are from letters during that period.
Reverend Haley wrote, "There are religious revivals all over the army. Many are turning to God."
Chaplain Tomkies of the Seventh Florida Regiment wrote, "On last evening fifteen were buried with Christ in Baptism. ... Each evening scores of soldiers are inquiring, 'What shall we do to be saved?'"
The chaplain of the Tenth Alabama Regiment wrote, "I believe that 100 anxious souls presented themselves for prayer last night after the sermon."
The Richmond Christian Advocate reported:
Not for years has such a revival prevailed in the Confederate States... The Pentecostal fire lights the camp, and the hosts of armed men sleep beneath the wings of angels rejoicing over the many sinners that have repented. The people at home are beginning to feel the kindling of the same grace in their hearts. It is inspiring to read the correspondence, now, between converts in the camp and friends at home, and to hear parents praise God for tidings from their absent sons who have lately given their hearts to the Lord. "Father is converted," says a bright-faced child of twelve years; "Mamma got a letter to-day, and father says that there is a great revival in his regiment." What glorious news from the army is this!
The revival spread at home in Virginia as well.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1864 SAMUEL CROWTHER IS NAMED BISHOP IN WEST AFRICA Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806-1891) was born in Yorubaland (present-day Nigeria). Captured by slave traders at fifteen and then freed by the British navy, he was taken to Sierra Leone. There, he put his faith in Christ and took his English name, Samuel. Excelling in school, he became a teacher for the Church Missionary Society and traveled to London in 1843, for ordination as an Anglican priest. Convinced that Africa's greatest need was native African missionaries, he returned home to preach the gospel. Among his first converts were his long-lost mother and sister. In 1864, Crowther became the first African Anglican bishop when he was made bishop of Western Africa. With an all-African staff energized by his unflagging vision, Crowther strengthened the Anglican Church and evangelized the tribes of the Niger territories.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1864 POPE PIUS IX WRITES THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS Beginning in 1849, a call sounded within the Catholic Church to condemn formally the errors brought by modern liberalism. Bishops began working on the list of errors in 1852, completing it in 1864. On December 8, 1864, Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) issued the Syllabus of Errors, a list of eighty errors and refutations under ten subheadings: 1) Pantheism, Naturalism, and Absolute Rationalism; 2) Moderate Rationalism; 3) Indifferentism and False Tolerance in Religious Matters; 4) Socialism, Communism, Secret Societies, Bible Societies, and Liberal Clerical Associations; 5) the Church and Its Rights; 6) the State and Its Relation to the Church; 7) Natural and Christian Ethics; 8) Christian Marriage; 9) Temporal Power of the Pope; and 10) Modern Liberalism. This document was immediately controversial throughout Europe because it was seen as a formal rejection of modern culture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1865 AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES BREAK FROM WHITE CONTROL During the aftermath of the Civil War, freed slaves began to leave white churches to form their own denominations and churches. In the South, African Americans founded the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and the Colored Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Black Baptists, although slow to organize, eventually formed the National Baptist Convention. Already established Northern denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, increased their influence in the South. In addition to the denominational expansion, many communities of freed slaves formed independent churches. As these groups continued to prosper, the denominations formed colleges and began publishing periodicals. In later years, many African American Baptist churches were instrumental in the expansion of the Holiness movement. These developments produced the black church movement in America, which has had a primary influence on African American culture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1865 HUDSON TAYLOR FOUNDS THE CHINA INLAND MISSION In 1854, James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) became the first foreign missionary to enter inland China. He originally was backed by the Chinese Evangelization Society, but quickly severed his ties with them because of his displeasure with their fund-raising methods. Instead, he worked on his own, depending solely on God for support. When Taylor had to return to England because of illness, his burden for inland China grew stronger, and he tried in vain to find a mission to back his return. Therefore, in 1865, Taylor founded the interdenominational China Inland Mission, which in 1866, fulfilled his dream of sending missionaries to all twelve unreached provinces of inland China. The CIM missionaries, known for wearing Chinese dress and depending on God alone for support, numbered 641 by 1895. By 1914, the China Inland Mission was the largest missionary organization in the world, reaching its peak in 1934 with 1, 368 missionaries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1867 SCRIPTURE UNION IS FOUNDED IN ENGLAND Founded in 1867, as the "Children's Special Service Mission" in England, the Scripture Union became an international, interdenominational, evangelical youth organization promoting Bible reading. Its main thrust is youth work and child evangelism, especially through groups in schools. The union publishes books, Sunday school materials, and training literature for all ages. A distinction of the organization is that it is controlled largely by laypeople.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1870 FIRST VATICAN COUNCIL DECLARES PAPAL INFALLIBILITY The First Vatican Council was convened by Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) and met from December 8, 1869, to July 18, 1870. The pope had come to the papal throne in 1846, and had a very strong influence over this council. He and his supporters felt that the time had come to officially endorse papal absolutism, which had been a controversial issue within the church but had gained ground under powerful popes during the previous centuries. The council consisted of 276 Italian bishops and 265 from the rest of Europe. After months of intense debate, the council endorsed papal primacy and infallibility.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1870 THE GHETTO OF ROME IS ABOLISHED The ghetto in Rome first established in 1555 by Pope Paul IV (1476-1559) was destroyed by Napoleon Bonaparte's (1769-1821) armies and then was reestablished by Pope Pius VII (1742-1823) in 1815. While the official purpose of the ghetto was to separate Jews from non-Jews, the state of life inside its walls was so deplorable that it served to destroy both the wealth and morale of the Jews. The Roman Ghetto was finally abolished in 1870, when the Roman Catholic Church lost much of its secular authority to the Italian nationalists. The new government of the Italian nationalists came to power on October 13, 1870, bringing freedom to the Jewish community.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1871 BISMARCK BEGINS HIS CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE CATHOLIC CHURCH When Prussia defeated France in 1870, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), son of Prussian aristocrats, seized his opportunity to establish a German empire. Fragmented since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a united Germany would be much stronger than the sum of its parts. In 1871, Bismarck arranged for William I (1797-1888) to be crowned emperor of Germany and established an elected governing body. His actions fully united more than two dozen kingdoms, states, and cities into the new Germany. Knowing two-thirds of his German empire was Protestant, Bismarck thought making the Roman Catholic Church the enemy would further unite Germany. He closed Catholic schools, prohibited priests from preaching against the state, and opposed the Vatican at every opportunity. In the end, however, it was Bismarck who was forced to relent, and Germany and the Vatican resumed diplomatic relations in 1882.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1872 BETHEL INSTITUTIONS MEET PRACTICAL NEEDS Friedrich Bodelschwingh (1831-1910), a pietistic Lutheran pastor and social reformer, was born in Westphalia, Germany. In 1872, he was appointed the head of a home for epileptic children in Bielefield, Germany. He named the institution "Bethel," or House of God. As a fruit of the revival in Europe and as part of the German Protestant Innere Mission movement, Bethel embraced the philosophy that the love of Christ is demonstrated by meeting practical human needs. The work rapidly expanded to include the education of lay ministers, seminarians, and secondary students who were involved in ministry to institutionalized people, refugees, paroled convicts, and in missions work in East Africa. Today, under the German Evangelical Church, Bethel Institutions house more than ten thousand individuals, making them one of the most significant social outreach ministries in Europe.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 UNION OF AMERICAN HEBREW CONGREGATIONS IS FOUNDED In the United States, the Reform Judaism movement blossomed in the late nineteenth century, particularly from the efforts of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900). Wise, who served as a rabbi in Albany, New York, before taking a position with a synagogue in Cincinnati, Ohio, devoted his life to unifying Reform Jews throughout the United States. In 1873, Wise established the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and two years later, a Reformed Jewish seminary he called Hebrew Union College. The foundation of these American Jewish institutions was part of Wise's effort to assist Jews in achieving a normal life in the United States. Wise's actions and the movement's ideology were specifically outlined in the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which denounced any effort to establish a national homeland for Jews and dismissed the majority of traditional Jewish rituals.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
BAPTISM OF FIRE October 6, 1871|
You have to be careful what you pray for.
In 1871, Dwight L. Moody was a well-known evangelical leader in Chicago. Seven years before, he had founded the Illinois Street Church, which today is Moody Memorial Church. In the late 1860s, he was president of the Chicago YMCA and built 3,000-seat Farwell Hall, the first YMCA building in America. He preached there on Sunday nights because congregational attendance had outgrown the Illinois Street Church.
At the time Moody was struggling with what God wanted him to do. He knew that he had to decide between being a social-religious organizer through the YMCA and being an evangelist. His inner conflict began to diminish the power of his preaching. This became especially clear to two women in his church, Sarah Anne Cook and a Mrs. Hawxhurst. They became convinced that Moody needed the baptism of the Holy Ghost and of fire. The women shared their concern with Moody and eventually set up a weekly Friday prayer time with him. Moody's spiritual frustration was so great that as they prayed on October 6, 1871, he rolled on the floor asking God to baptize him with the Holy Spirit and fire.
The next Sunday night Farwell Hall was full as Moody preached on "What then shall I do with Jesus which is called Christ?" He closed by saying, "I wish you would take this text home with you and turn it over in your minds during the week, and next Sabbath we will come to Calvary and the cross, and we will decide what to do with Jesus of Nazareth." Then his song leader, Ira Sankey, sang:
Today the Saviour calls, For refuge fly
The storm of Justice falls, And death is nigh.
Suddenly Ira's voice was drowned out by the sound of fire engines rushing past the hall. It was the Great Chicago Fire and it lasted until Wednesday. Everything that held Moody to Chicago was in ashes. The only chain still binding him there was his own will. Weeks later that last chain snapped, and he surrendered his will to God. Moody went on . to become the leading evangelist in the English-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century. He traveled over one million miles and presented the gospel by voice and written word to over one hundred million people.
On the twenty-second anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, Moody spoke reflectively: "I have never seen that congregation since, and I never will meet those people again until I meet them in another world. But I want to tell you of one lesson I learned that night, which I have never forgotten, and that is, when I preach, to press Christ upon the people then and there, and try to bring them to a decision on the spot.... I have asked God many times to forgive me for telling people that night to take a week to think it over."
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 LOTTIE MOON ARRIVES IN CHINA After earning a master's degree in classics from Albemarle Female Institution, Charlotte "Lottie" Diggs Moon (1840-1912) began teaching in Georgia. Feeling called as a missionary, Moon joined the Southern Baptist Convention, and in 1873, she arrived in Tengzhou, China. After working for twelve years at a girls' school, Moon relocated to P'ing-tu, becoming the first single woman to independently open a Chinese missionary post. Moon employed friendship as the basis of her evangelism. Her church-planting efforts in P'ing-tu led to the establishment of thirty churches. Known for her extreme generosity, Moon died of starvation on Christmas Eve 1912. The Southern Baptist Convention still collects the annual Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions established by Moon and renamed the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering after her death.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1873 MOODY'S BRITISH CAMPAIGN WITNESSES ANSWERS TO PRAYER Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), the American evangelist, traveled to England in 1873 to hold evangelistic meetings. He agreed to preach once for an old friend pastoring a London church. The congregation was cold and unresponsive to his morning sermon, and Moody regretted having committed to the evening service as well. Unknown to him, a bedridden woman from the church had been praying for months for Moody to come and bring revival. When she heard of his unannounced visit, she fasted and prayed all afternoon for the evening service. Much to Moody's surprise, that evening almost the entire congregation answered his altar call. As a result, the church received four hundred new converts. This answer to one woman's prayer opened the door for Moody to preach to 2.5 million people throughout England during the next two years.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1875 REVIVAL IS SPARKED AT THE FIRST KESWICK CONVENTION In 1875, at the end of American evangelist Dwight L. Moody's (1837-1899) two-year evangelistic tour of England, the vicar of Keswick, a town in England's Lake District, invited him to speak there. God used Moody to spark a revival in Keswick that birthed the annual summer Keswick Convention, a nondenomi-national gathering of evangelicals that continues there today. The hallmarks of Keswick are prayer, Bible study, and dependence on the Holy Spirit. Thousands have been called into ministry and missions at the Keswick Convention.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
AN UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL
June 17, 1873
In the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American communications were difficult for everyone. Yet God was in charge then, too.
On June 17, 1873, Dwight L. Moody and his new and inexperienced song leader, Ira Sankey, along with their wives and the Moody children, arrived in Liverpool, England, to hold evangelistic meetings. They had come at the invitation of three Christian men who had promised to pay their travel expenses even though the men had never actually met Moody. Having exhausted all his own funds for the steamship tickets, Moody arrived in England only to learn that two of the men had died and the third had forgotten his promise. No arrangements had been made for any meetings, there was no sponsoring committee and no funds. They were stranded with no money three thousand miles from home.
Moody said to Sankey, "God seems to have closed the doors. We'll not open any ourselves. If He opens the door, we'll go in. If He doesn't, we'll return to America."
At their hotel that night Moody remembered that the one specific invitation he had received from England was from George Bennett, a young chemist in York who was the founder/secretary of the local YMCA. Moody had only vaguely replied to Bennett's invitation when he had first received it. Telling Sankey, "This door is only ajar," Moody had the secretary of the Liverpool YMCA send Bennett a telegram: "Moody here—are you ready for him."
Since he had received no firm reply to his invitation, Bennett had not pursued the idea any further and had told only one person that he had sent the invitation. Thus he was justifiably shocked when he received Moody's telegram. Bennett replied with a telegram to Moody: "Please fix date when you can come to York." Moody replied immediately, "I will be in York tonight ten o'clock—Make no arrangements till I come."
Bennett appeared dazed as he met Moody at the train station that evening. Over supper Moody suggested a course of action. "I propose we make arrangements tomorrow, Saturday, to commence meetings Sunday." As they ate, they came up with a plan to have posters printed and posted on Saturday as soon as Bennett could find a place for him to preach.
Starting that Sunday, Moody began holding services in local churches including one pastored by F. B. Meyer. Initially the meetings were only moderately successful, but the experience of having Moody preach in his church was life changing for Meyer. In the church's small vestry room, Moody and Meyer prayed many hours for England, kneeling together at the leather-covered table in the center of the room. Moody later referred to that little room as "the foundation from which the river of blessing for all England had sprung," for during the next two years, two and a half million people heard Moody preach throughout England. It was the greatest British revival since John Wesley's day.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1875 MARY BAKER EDDY WRITES SCIENCE AND HEALTH
In 1875, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the founder of the Christian Science Church, published Science and Health, With a Key to Scripture. She claimed that God had dictated it to her, although she hired a pastor to correct its bad grammar. Eddy proposed that all sickness was a result of mental error and that the way to cure sickness was not with medicine, but by the practice of a spiritual science that she had rediscovered from Jesus. She banned preaching in her churches, replacing it with readings from selected Bible texts and from her book. Mary Baker Eddy claimed that her teachings guaranteed health; however, she suffered considerably at the end of her life, requiring large doses of morphine to cope with her pain.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 CALVIN COLLEGE IS FOUNDED
On March 15, 1876, G. E. Boer (1832-1904) founded a school to train ministers for the Christian Reformed Church, a denomination composed of immigrants from Holland. During its first session, the school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had only seven students. In 1894, the school began to admit students who did not plan to study for the ministry. The curriculum was expanded in 1900, and the name was changed to John Calvin Junior College. Twenty years later, the college began offering baccalaureate programs and was known simply as Calvin College. The college and seminary, now offering multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees, remain the center of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Christian Reformed Church.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 BIBLE CONFERENCE MOVEMENT BEGINS
In July 1876, a small group of Christian men met in Swampscott, Massachusetts, for fellowship and Bible study. They called their group "Believers' Meeting for Bible Study." This meeting marked the birth of the Bible Conference movement.
The "Believers" meeting became an annual and growing event. From 1883 to 1897, the group met annually in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, hence becoming known as the Niagara Bible Conferences. The conferences typically began with a Wednesday-night prayer meeting, and then a week followed with two morning, two afternoon, and one evening Bible lesson. The meetings were strongly influenced by the Plymouth Brethren and the teachings of J. N. Darby (1800-1882).
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES PUBLISH THE WATCHTOWER
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, more commonly known as the Jehovah's Witnesses, grew out of a Bible study group started by Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916) in 1870. After years of independent Bible study, Russell began to teach his small group of followers an extreme form of Adventism. In 1876, Russell published the first edition of his magazine, Zion's Watchtower. The magazine, now known simply as The Watchtower, is currently published in 106 languages with a claimed circulation of 64 million. After Russell's death in 1916, his followers took the name Millennial Dawnists, but today they are known as Jehovah's Witnesses. In 2004, they claimed their membership to be 6 million in 230 countries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 JEWS ARE GRANTED CITIZENSHIP IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Because of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire, which extended from Bulgaria to North Africa, and the fear that its collapse would upset the balance of power in Europe, the European nations began to exert pressure on the empire to institute reform. In particular, they pressured its leaders to assure the rights of their subject peoples. The changes had long-term effects on the Jews of the empire. In 1839, the empire granted civil equality to non-Muslims. Then finally in 1876, citizenship was granted to all Ottoman subjects, including the Jews.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1876 MARY SLESSOR SAILS FOR AFRICA
Mary Slessor (1848-1915) was converted to Christ as a teenager in Scotland. While helping young people in Dundee, Scotland, she became interested in the United Presbyterian Church's mission to Nigeria. In 1876, Slessor set sail for Nigeria where she worked among the Ibo tribe. She personally cared for multiple babies in the fight against twin killing. Slessor, affectionately known as "the White Queen," established fifty locally run churches and schools, and when British rule was established in Nigeria she became the first female magistrate in 1892. In addition to encouraging trade between inland regions and the coast, Slessor established the Hope Waddell Institute, where Africans were instructed in medicine and other trades. As a result of her work, the Ibo tribe became one of the most Christian peoples of Africa.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1877 THE PACIFIC GARDEN MISSION IS FOUNDED
On September 15, 1877, in the midst of Chicago's skid row, George Roger Clarke (d. 1892) and his wife, Sarah, opened the doors to Clarke's Mission. The mission outgrew its one-room facility within three years, and the Clarkes procured a new building called the Pacific Beer Garden. At the prompting of Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899), they renamed their mission the Pacific Garden Mission. Among the mission's more famous converts were Billy Sunday (1862-1935), a baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings who went on to become a famous evangelist, and Mel Trotter (1870-1940), a derelict who later founded a similar mission in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The ongoing success and influence of the Pacific Garden Mission makes it a leader among urban rescue ministries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1878 BOOTHS FOUND THE SALVATION ARMY
William Booth (1829-1912) and his wife, Catherine (1829-1890), had been ministering among the unchurched slum dwellers of London for over a decade when, in 1878, they founded the Salvation Army with Booth as its first general. Claiming that "we can't get at the masses in a chapel," the Booths and their army preached in taverns, jails, theaters, factories, and poorhouses, and held open-air meetings with live bands playing loud music. Food centers, night shelters, and employment exchanges were opened. Souls were saved, lives transformed. When Booth died at age eighty-three, he left behind him a committed body of sixteen thousand officers to lead his army of socially conscious and spiritually vibrant believers. The Salvation Army was one of the nineteenth century's most successful revival movements, and the Booths' vision continues to inspire selfless and compassionate social work among the urban needy of the world.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1879 FRANCES WILLARD BECOMES PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION
Frances Willard (1839-1898) was an accomplished educator and diligent activist for suffrage and women's rights. Converted to Christ while attending Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, she became a Methodist. Willard devoted sixteen years to educational administration before becoming involved in the temperance movement. In 1879, she became the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, retaining the office until her death. Prominent in national reform political circles, she helped organize the Prohibition Party in 1882. Willard's unique role lay in combining conservative ideals with a commitment to radical social reform.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1880 ABRAHAM KUYPER FOUNDS THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was brought up in a strict Dutch Reformed home where the value of books and learning was emphasized. After earning a doctorate from the University of Leyden in the Netherlands in 1867, Kuyper became pastor in Beesd. He was then called to a church in Amsterdam in 1870, and his involvement in politics increased. In 1872, Kuyper became the editor of De Standard, a local Christian newspaper. Two years later, Kuyper was elected to the national parliament. During his time in the pastorate and parliament, Kuyper had become increasingly burdened about the need for a university where Christian leaders could receive a specifically Christian education. While in the parliament, he enabled legislation to be enacted that allowed for equal treatment of private religious universities. This laid the foundation for Kuyper to help establish the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, where he became professor of systematic theology.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1880 MOODY LEADS NORTHFIELD CONFERENCES In the summer of 1880, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) launched the first of his annual Northfield Conferences in his hometown of Northfield, Massachusetts. Moody's goal for the conferences was to offer laypeople in-depth Bible training and a time of spiritual renewal. As was the case with most other Bible conferences of the day, the Northfield Conferences promoted dispensational premillennialism. Also, Moody's association with the Keswick movement in England resulted in an emphasis on the Holy Spirit's power in sanctification. The meetings were held in 1880 and 1881, and then were suspended while Moody spent several years in England. When Moody returned in 1885, the conferences were reinstated and held annually until after his death.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 CLARK FOUNDS THE CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR SOCIETY In February 1881, Pastor Francis E. Clark (1851-1927) of Williston Church in Portland, Maine, founded the Christian Endeavor Society. His goal in founding the youth organization was to sustain and build on the results of a week of prayer at his church the previous month. The weekly meetings and monthly consecration meeting were organized and led exclusively by youth. The aim was to evangelize young people and to train them to serve. As the societies multiplied around the country, Clark later became the full-time president of the organization. The organization was the first of many similar nondenominational youth societies that sprung up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 ELIEZER BEN YEHUDA ARRIVES IN PALESTINE The articulation of the desire to establish a Jewish nation, which began with Moses Hess' work Rome and Jerusalem (1862), found a new voice in Eliezer Ben Yehuda's (1858-1922) publications. Ben Yehuda spent his life on efforts to restore what he considered the lost aspects of Judaism, specifically the use of Hebrew as a living language and the settlement of their ancient homeland in Israel. In 1881, he and his wife relocated to Palestine, where Ben Yehuda told her he would talk to her only in Hebrew, the proper language of the Jews. In addition to publishing newspapers in Hebrew, he compiled a seventeen-volume historical dictionary of Hebrew that is still the most comprehensive resource available on the language. When Israel became a nation, Hebrew was declared the official Jewish national language.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1881 MASS MIGRATION OF JEWS FROM EASTERN EUROPE TO THE UNITED STATES BEGINS While the Russian persecution of Jews in 1881 coincided with the beginning of mass migration to the United States from Eastern Europe, violence was not the primary reason for the emigration. In fact, a large number of Eastern European Jews fled from areas where they had been relatively safe. Instead, the main force driving them to seek refuge in America was to flee poverty. The New World offered agricultural and business opportunities in addition to religious freedom. Unfortunately, many of the Jewish immigrants ended up in the slums of American cities. Many Russian Jews found work in New York City in the garment industry, where their skill excelled. The mass immigration, one of the most pronounced movements in Jewish history, forever altered the fabric of Jewish life in the United States.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 LEON PINSKER PUBLISHES AUTOEMANCIPATION Although the book Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess (1812-1875), published in 1862, advocated the establishment of a Jewish state, relatively little action was taken to achieve this goal. In 1882, Russian Jew Leon Pinsker (1821-1891) wrote Autoemancipation, carrying the message to a new generation of Jews. Pinsker's articulation of the hope for a Jewish nation was particularly meaningful, and a movement began among his fellow Eastern European Jews following the terrible Russian persecutions of 1881. Feeling that all hope of normal relations with Gentiles was gone, the Jews of Russia were the first to press for the formation of a Jewish state.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 FIRST ALIYAH BEGINS TO PALESTINE In 1882, a year after Eastern European Jews started their mass migration to the United States, Jews began a slow immigration to Palestine, their ancient homeland. The immigration to Palestine, which was ruled by the Turks at the time, is typically divided into six waves. The term used for these migrations was aliyah, the Hebrew word for "going up." The first aliyah lasted for just over twenty years and consisted of approximately twenty-five thousand Jews moving to Palestine. In contrast, during the same period more than a million Jews immigrated to the United States. The first aliyah would be the smallest wave in terms of numbers.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1882 BILU MOVEMENT IS ORGANIZED Toward the end of the nineteenth century a number of Jewish organizations, generally identified as the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement, arose in eastern Europe. The common desire of these groups was to establish a Jewish nation. The first to immigrate to Palestine was the Bilu movement organized in 1882, whose name is an acronym for "House of Jacob, go, let us go!" In Palestine, the Bilu settled among Jews who had been living there since the Ottoman conquest in the fifteenth century. They attempted to set up agricultural colonies. While they did not possess the skills required for farming, they survived with the financial assistance of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a wealthy French Jewish philanthropist.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1883 BOYS' BRIGADE IS ESTABLISHED In 1883, Sir William A. Smith (1854-1914) established the first chapter of the Boys' Brigade in Scotland. The brigade's aim was "the advancement of Christ's Kingdom among boys and the promotion of habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self-respect and all that tends toward a true Christian manliness." The organization became a model for subsequent uniformed groups for boys and girls, such as the Boy Scouts. In 1971, the organization's executive committee ruled that it was necessary for each chapter to remain church based so that the boys would acquire genuine Christian faith. With more than 140,000 boys aged eight to nineteen in the United Kingdom and eighty thousand boys in other countries enrolled, the brigade remains one of the largest organizations of its type.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1884 PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES ARE INTRODUCED TO KOREA In the 1880s, Western nations established treaties with Korea that called for freedom of religion. As a result, beginning in 1884, Protestant missionaries— primarily Presbyterians and Methodists—from the United States, entered Korea for the first time. Protestant Christianity had been introduced a year earlier by Korean native Suh Sang-yum (1849-1926), who was converted to Christ in Manchuria. Through Sang-yum's witness and the work of missionaries, it is estimated that by 1910, there were 167,000 Protestants in Korea. A number of medical and educational institutions were established as well. By 2000, the evangelical churches of Korea had grown to more than 7 million members. Ten of the world's eleven largest churches are in Seoul, Korea.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1886-1893 ANDOVER CONTROVERSY ENDS IN SMYTH'S REMOVAL Between 1886 and 1893, a theological debate took place among the faculty members of Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, involving "future probation." The seminary originally was founded by New England Congregationalists in response to the Unitarian theology that Harvard began to embrace. The issue of "future probation" was brought to the forefront as the faculty developed a theology of missions. Egbert C. Smyth (1829-1904) and other faculty members argued in the Andover Review for future probation, stating that those who die without hearing the gospel will have an opportunity in their future life to accept or reject the gospel before experiencing final judgment. Smyth eventually was removed from his position at Andover Seminary, but in 1891, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts overturned his removal.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1886 THE STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT BEGINS In 1882, Robert Wilder (1863-1938), the son of a former missionary to India, enrolled at Princeton University. During his time at Princeton, Wilder helped start the Princeton Foreign Mission Society. During his senior year, Wilder and his friends began boldly praying for one thousand missionaries to be sent out from American colleges. In the summer of 1886, Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) allowed Robert Wilder and nine other students to speak at a Northfield Bible conference. During the conference, one hundred students pledged themselves as foreign missionaries. In 1891, these missionary candidates met for the first Student Volunteer Conference. During the next seventy-six years, the Student Volunteer Movement met every four years. By 1948, more than twenty thousand foreign missionaries had been sent out as a direct result of the movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1887 B.B. WARFIELD BECOMES PROFESSOR AT PRINCETON SEMINARY Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield (1851-1921) was the greatest theologian of his time. After graduating from Princeton University he went to Europe to pursue graduate studies in math and science. However, he decided in 1872 to enter the ministry instead. Warfield returned to the United States and entered Princeton Theological Seminary, graduating in 1876. He was professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary from 1879 to 1887. In 1887, he became professor of theology at Princeton Seminary, where he taught until his death in 1921, just hours after teaching his last class. While at Princeton, Warfield became his generation's leading exponent of Calvinistic theology in general and the authority of Scripture in particular. He was an outspoken critic of the liberal scholarship of his day and a prolific author. His collected works fill ten volumes.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1889 MOODY BIBLE INSTITUTE IS FOUNDED The Chicago Evangelization Society of Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) founded the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in 1889. The school, which was renamed Moody Bible Institute in 1900 after Moody's death, was established to counter the growing influence of the liberal theology being taught in seminaries at the time. Support for the school came from financially successful Chicago businessmen who were evangelical Christians. Moody Bible Institute was a groundbreaking institution in the early twentieth century, and its curriculum became a model for many other Bible institutes. The institute went on to become the world's greatest missionary training school.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1891 JEWS ARE EXPELLED FROM MOSCOW AND ST. PETERSBURG
After the assassination of Czar Alexander II (1818-1881) of Russia in 1881, his son, Czar Alexander III (1845-1894), launched pograms against the Jews that included mass murder, rape, and looting. The anti-Semitic "May Laws" of 1882 also had a terribly negative impact on the Jewish businessmen living in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite the limits of the Pale of Settlement—a region Catherine the Great (1729-1796) established to keep Jews in a contained area—Jewish professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs, had been given permission to live in Russia's largest cities. In 1891, all the Jews of Moscow and St. Petersburg were ejected and forced to move back to the Pale, in most cases losing all of their assets.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1891 BARON MAURICE DE HIRSCH ESTABLISHES THE JEWISH COLONIZATION ASSOCIATION
Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896) was a wealthy Jewish financier and philanthropist living in England. In 1891, he founded the Jewish Colonization Association to coordinate agricultural settlements in the New World. During the association's first year, Hirsch purchased land in Argentina to support the settlement efforts of fifty Jewish families who had emigrated from Russia to South America. Not only did Hirsch proceed to purchase more than 1.5 million additional acres in Argentina through the association, but he also assisted groups of Jewish settlers to establish villages. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were twenty Jewish villages on land provided by Hirsch, and at its height, the Jewish population of the region was about thirty thousand.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1893 SUDAN INTERIOR MISSION BEGINS
In 1893, two Canadians named Roland Bingham (1872-1942) and Walter Gowans (1868-1894), and an American named Thomas Kent arrived in Sudan (present-day Nigeria) to spread the gospel. Bingham, the only one of the three to survive the first year, set up the first missionary station on the Niger River, thus establishing the Sudan Interior Mission. In the 1980s, the Sudan Interior Mission united with the Ceylon and India General Mission, the Puna India Village Mission, and the Bolivia Indian Mission and changed their name to simply SIM. In 2001, the mission had 1, 693 missionaries from twenty-six countries on fifty-four mission fields.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1894 THE DREYFUS AFFAIR BEGINS
On October 15, 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935) of the French army was arrested on charges of treason. The accusations were based on forged documents that purported to prove that Dreyfus, a Jew, was a spy for the German government. Because of the strong anti-Jewish feelings of many French leaders, when the documents were discovered to be in error, the army attempted to cover up the entire affair. After spending five years on Devil's Island, an island for criminals, Dreyfus was released, though he was not acquitted until 1906.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1894 COHN'S ORGANIZATION IS THE FORERUNNER OF CHOSEN PEOPLE MINISTRIES
Leopold Cohn (d. 1937), a Jew from Hungary, immigrated to the United States in 1892. Not long after his arrival in New York City, Cohn became a Christian. In 1894, he founded the Williamsburg Mission and began printing a newsletter called "Chosen People." In 1924, the organization's name was changed to the American Board of Missions to the Jews, and at Cohn's death in 1937, his son Joseph assumed the leadership of the mission. In 1986, the nearly one-hundred-year-old organization, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, changed its name to Chosen People Ministries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 BILLY SUNDAY BEGINS HIS EVANGELISTIC MINISTRY
William "Billy" Sunday (1862-1935), was a professional baseball player with the Chicago White Stockings. In 1886, he was converted to Christ at Chicago's Pacific Garden Mission. Five years later he ended his baseball career to work for the YMCA. After two years he became an advance man for evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman (1859-1918). In 1895, when Chapman ended his evangelistic ministry, he invited Billy Sunday to take his place. Over the next ten years, Sunday acquired his own informal preaching style, which appealed to the masses. He preached to more than 100 million people during his lifetime, and it is estimated that as many as one million people were converted to Christ in his evangelistic meetings.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 THE AFRICA INLAND MISSION IS FOUNDED
Peter Cameron Scott (1876-1896) established the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) in 1895. A Scottish missionary to Kenya, Scott greatly desired to impede the spread of Islam into southern Africa. Although he died only a year after founding AIM, his vision was carried on by the missionary board. By 2000, the society had more than eight hundred missionaries in fourteen African countries.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 FREUD PUBLISHES HIS FIRST WORK ON PSYCHOANALYSIS
In 1895, the Jewish-Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published his first extended work on psychoanalysis, which he titled Studies on Hysteria. Psychoanalytic theory was a significant step in the evolution of Rationalism, in which man's reason replaced God as the source of determination and truth. In Freudian theory, man's unconscious governed his reasoning, and therefore his behavior. Psychotherapy had two goals: to raise unconscious thought to conscious levels through techniques such as hypnosis and free association, and through analysis, to lessen its effects on behavior. Freud believed the unconscious consisted of suppressed emotional energy. Therapists who disagreed with Freud's emphasis on repressed sexuality founded variant schools of psychoanalysis. These schools, with Freudian theory at their root, have profoundly influenced the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, including many forms of Christian counseling.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
CHRISTIANS
Beginning in 1895, Turkish forces commenced a terrible massacre of the Armenian Christians living in Turkey, killing at least three hundred thousand. The genocide, which lasted until 1897, was the first of two large Armenian massacres to take place in Turkey within a twenty-year period, the second occurring in 1915. Both campaigns sought to annihilate the Armenians, a people with Christian roots since ancient times.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1895 WORLD STUDENT CHRISTIAN FEDERATION IS FOUNDED The World Student Christian Federation was founded in Sweden in 1895, combining forty autonomous Christian student groups from around the world. Led by John R. Mott (1865-1955), then student secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA, this group actively pursued the cause of Christ in world missions. Unfortunately the organization gradually moved away from its evangelical beginnings, shifting its emphasis from missions to the ecumenical movement.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1896 HERZL PUBLISHES THE JEWISH STATE
After reporting on the Dreyfus Affair (1893), Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Hungarian reporter who covered Paris news, was overwhelmed at the hatred for Jews that the French leadership displayed. The racism he witnessed caused Herzl to spend the rest of his life seeking a solution to anti-Semitism. A Western European of Jewish descent, Herzl initially knew very little about his faith. When he published The Jewish State in 1896, Herzl argued for the establishment of a Jewish state. Although he found little support from the Jews of Western Europe, the Jews of Eastern Europe hailed him as a hero.
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1897 HERZL COORDINATES THE FIRST ZIONIST CONGRESS Following the publication of his work The Jewish State in 1896, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) coordinated the First Zionist Congress in 1897. Held in Basel, Switzerland, the gathering defined the purpose of Zionism as a movement aimed at obtaining "a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, guaranteed by public law." After the Congress adjourned, Herzl began negotiating with England, hoping to start a Jewish settlement in Uganda. But Palestine remained the focus of most Zionists, and when England showed little interest in Herzl's Ugandan proposal, he turned his attention back to creating a Jewish nation in Palestine.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1897 CHRISTIAN AND MISSIONARY ALLIANCE IS FOUNDED
In 1897, two missionary societies that had been formed by A. B. Simpson (1843-1919), a former Presbyterian minister, combined their resources and efforts to form the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) denomination. The new denomination continued to carry Simpson's focus on mission work that the Christian Alliance, founded for home missions, and the International Missionary Alliance, established for foreign missions, had begun a decade earlier. In addition to missions, one of the central beliefs of Simpson and the CMA is called the Fourfold Gospel, which describes Jesus as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. By the twenty-first century, the denomination included more than fifteen hundred churches. Continuing their original missionary focus, the CMA has more than twelve hundred missionaries in more than fifty nations worldwide.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
DETOUR TO LIFE
January 19, 1897
He had walked in their shoes—until the night he sold them.
The son of a saloonkeeper, Mel Trotter learned bartending from his father. But as a young man, Trotter resolved to escape the saloon and left home to take up barbering. He was such a successful barber that, unfortunately, he had enough income to gamble and drink.
Trying to escape big-city temptations, Mel Trotter moved to Iowa around 1890 and managed to stay sober long enough to marry. But his wife soon discovered that she was married to an alcoholic. He repeatedly vowed to stop drinking, once staying sober for eleven months. But even the birth of a beloved son could not keep him from drinking. After one ten-day binge, Trotter returned home to find his wife weeping over the dead body of their two-year-old son.
Trotter left his son's funeral for a saloon. Then he hopped a train to Chicago, running from the certainty that he couldn't conquer his addiction. He knew his life was running out, so he resolved to end it in anonymity.
On the night of January 19, 1897, homeless, hatless, and coatless, Mel Trotter sold his shoes for one last drink before committing suicide. The alcohol barely warmed him as he trudged barefoot through a Chicago blizzard, trying to find Lake Michigan so he could drown his sorrows forever. Passing the darkened businesses on Van Buren Street, Trotter stumbled. A young man stepped out of the doorway of the only lit building, helped Trotter up, and invited him inside. Trotter followed, too numb to read the sigh over the door: Pacific Garden Mission.
The man sat Trotter down in a warm room full of derelict men. The mission's superintendent, Harry Monroe, was in the middle of his evening message but stopped when he saw Trotter. Monroe felt compelled to pray aloud, "Oh, God, save that poor, poor boy." Monroe then shared the story of his own troubled life before he met Christ. "Jesus loves you," he concluded, "and so do I. He wants to save you tonight. Put up your hand for prayer. Let God know you want to make room in your heart for Him." Barely understanding what he was doing, Trotter raised his hand. Something inside him rose up and accepted the invitation in simple faith. And in that moment, the shackles of alcoholism and despair fell away.
Trotter spent the next forty-three years ministering to men and women he met on the streets, as lost and hopeless as he had been. His message was simple: "God loves you in the midst of the deepest failure and despair, and his love has the power to change even the most ruined life." For forty years he served as the supervisor of a rescue mission in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alumni of his mission founded sixty-eight other rescue missions across the United States.
Mel Trotter's life didn't end that dark night in Chicago—it began!
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
THE BOXERS
August 3, 1900
This was not a boxing match; it was a struggle of life and death.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century China had opened itself to foreign missions because of Western pressure. The results, however, were not all positive. Disease accompanied the missionaries, and life expectancy dropped to forty years. Rebellions were frequent.
By 1898, the young emperor of China, Kuang-hsu, determined that the only hope for his nation was Christian moral and social reforms. He invited an influential Baptist missionary to the palace to help him draw up his reforms. The very day the missionary arrived at the palace the emperor was overthrown by a secret Chinese society that feared he would sell out to foreigners.
The secret society called itself Righteous and Harmonious Fists, but Westerners nicknamed them the "Boxers." The Boxers were desperate to hold on to the old pagan Chinese religions and had formed secret cells across China. They performed black-magic rituals that even included human sacrifices to temple idols.
Following the coup, the Boxers installed the emperor's mentally ill aunt as empress. At their urging, the new empress sent a secret decree to officials in the provinces calling on them to kill all foreigners and to exterminate Christianity. The messengers to southern China altered one Chinese character in the decree to make it read "protect" instead of "kill" foreigners. So the bloodletting was confined to the north. When the disobedience of the messengers was discovered, their bodies were cut in half.
Most local Chinese officials sought to protect the missionaries. The magistrate at Fenchow in north Shandi province was particularly friendly to them, so a missionary couple living there invited five missionaries from other areas to stay with them in July when the mob violence was at its peak. However, no sooner had the missionaries arrived than the vindictive provincial governor appointed a new magistrate for Fenchow. The new official ordered the missionaries out of Fenchow and gave them armed guards supposedly for their protection.
The missionaries apparently could read the handwriting on the wall. On August 3, 1900, Lizzie Atwater, an American missionary wife and mother wrote to her family:
Dear ones, I long for a sight of your dear faces, but I fear we shall not meet on earth. They beheaded thirty-three of us last week in Taiwan. I am preparing for the end very quietly and calmly. The Lord is wonderfully near, and He will not fail me. I was being restless and excited while there seemed to be a chance of life, but God has taken away that feeling, and now I just pray for grace to meet the terrible end bravely. The pain will soon be over, and oh the sweetness of the welcome above!
Twelve days later the guards assigned to them by the magistrate murdered the seven missionaries and their children.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The
1899 BUSINESSMEN FOUND THE GIDEONS
In 1898, two businessmen named Samuel E. Hill (1867-1936) and John H. Nicholson (1859-1946) met in the Central Hotel of Boscobel, Wisconsin, and discovered they both were Christians. They met again on July 1, 1899, along with William J. Knights (1853-1940), and formed the Gideons, now known as Gideons International. Currently, with 263,000 members in 179 countries, the Gideons aim is to win people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ through service, personal testimony, and the distribution of free Bibles "in the traffic lanes of everyday life." In 1908, the Gideons began placing Bibles in hotels, hospitals, prisons, rescue missions, schools, and through police and military chaplains. The organization is the oldest Christian business and professional men's association in the United States. In 2002, the Gideons distributed nearly 60 million free copies of Scripture.
—Complete Book of When and Where, The