Joy Horn helps us to remember our Christian heritage
JANUARY
24. John Mason Neale, who is chiefly remembered for his hymns, was born in 1818 in Bloomsbury, London. A linguist, familiar with some 20 languages, and a poet, of High Anglican convictions, he revived many old carols and translated others from Greek and Latin. O come, o come, Emmanuel and Christ is made the sure foundation are two of the best known – and, of course, Good King Wenceslas.
FEBRUARY
14. The Bible scholar E. J. Young died in 1968, aged 61. He was Old Testament Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at a time when Bible-believing academics were rare, and he published influential works on the books of Isaiah and Daniel, and on the authority of the Old Testament. His book Thy Word is Truth: Some thoughts on the biblical doctrine of inspiration is still available from the Banner of Truth.
MARCH
In 1968 The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer was published, his first book.
1. Illness suddenly closed the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel in 1968, with the 372nd and last exposition of Romans. It was a 30-year ministry which formed the model for many ministers and clergy.
APRIL
Some time in April 1818 Cecil Frances Humphries, was born in Eccles Street, Dublin – better known by her married name of Alexander. Her husband, William, became Bishop of Derry (Londonderry). Cecil Frances – known as ‘Fanny’ – had a gift for verse from childhood, and eventually wrote over 200 hymns. Some of them illustrated phrases in the Apostles’ Creed: All things bright and beautiful clarified ‘God … maker of heaven and earth’; Once in royal David’s city was based on ‘Jesus Christ … born of the Virgin Mary’; and There is a green hill referred to the phrase ‘crucified, dead and buried’.
4. Martin Luther King, Jr, an American Baptist minister and Civil Rights activist, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. He advocated non-violent protest against racial inequality. His famous ‘I have a dream’ speech was delivered at the March on Washington in 1963, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Just days after his death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting racial discrimination in housing. Martin Luther King became a national icon.
4. The Scot, William Chalmers Burns, died in China, aged 53, in 1868. He had been involved in revivals at Kilsyth and Dundee, then went to Hong Kong and, through the example of Hudson Taylor, adopted Chinese dress to work in the Chinese interior.
10. Part of Johannes Brahms’s A German Requiem was first performed in Bremen in 1868. Unlike the traditional Roman Catholic Requiem Mass in Latin, Brahms set to music texts from the German Bible of Martin Luther.
20. David Brainerd was born at Haddam, Connecticut in 1718. He became a devoted missionary to the Native Americans of New Jersey, and died of TB at the age of 29. His diary had a great effect on later missionaries such as Henry Martyn, William Carey and Jim Elliot.
20. Joshua Marshman, another missionary, was born in 1768 at Westbury Leigh, Wiltshire. With his wife and two children he settled at Serampore, a Danish settlement near Calcutta. There, with William Carey, he translated the Bible into many Indian languages, and founded Serampore College.
MAY
2. Zachary Macaulay, abolitionist, was born in 1768. He became governor of Sierra Leone, the British colony for freed slaves, then settled in Clapham and became one of the Clapham Sect. With William Wilberforce, he worked tirelessly in Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade, and then of slavery itself, by his organising skills and meticulous attention to detail.
24. Joseph Hart, who died in 1768 and is buried in Bunhill Fields, became a Christian at the age of 45, and then wrote a number of hymns. How good is the God we adore is the most widely sung.
25. Billy Bray, the unconventional Cornish tin miner and evangelist, died at the age of 73 in 1868, and was buried at Baldhu, one of three chapels that he built. He was noted for his constant joy. ‘If they were to put me in a barrel, I would shout “Glory” out through the bung hole.’
29. The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund – better known as Tear Fund – was founded by George Hoffman in 1968, initially to channel gifts for famine relief. Soon it began to invest in longer-term development in poor countries, in conjunction with local churches, and its Disaster Fund did valuable service in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
JULY
Francis Schaeffer’s book Escape From Reason was published in 1968, and had a huge impact on many students.
14. James Alexander Haldane, posthumous son of the owner of Airthrey Castle, Stirlingshire, was born in Dundee in 1768. He resigned as a captain of an East India Company ship to tour Scotland with Charles Simeon of Cambridge, distributing tracts. As an itinerant evangelist, often preaching in the open air, he established 85 churches.
AUGUST
Selina, Countess of 24. In 1768, Huntingdon, established a theological seminary at Trevecca (Trefeca), the home of Hywel Harris, near Talgarth in Powys. This was prompted by the expulsion of six students from St Edmund Hall, Oxford, for Methodism. The college produced a steady stream of pastors and teachers.
26. Josiah Spiers, on holiday in Llandudno in 1868, found himself entertaining children on the beach by creating a Bible text with pebbles and telling a Bible story. The following Sunday he held a ‘children’s special service’. From this spontaneous beginning, the Children’s Special Service Mission (CSSM) and Scripture Union developed.
SEPTEMBER
12. George Duffield, born on this day in 1818 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, is remembered chiefly for writing the hymn Stand up, stand up for Jesus’. Duffield wrote it after the sad death of an anti-slavery gospel preacher, who became trapped in the mechanism of a corn-thresher. ‘Stand up for Jesus’ was a characteristic phrase of his.
OCTOBER
25. Donald Wiseman was born in Emsworth, Hampshire, in 1918. In the RAF during the Second World War, he became the Senior Intelligence Officer of the Mediterranean Allied Tactical Air Forces, and was awarded an OBE and a Bronze Star. He then became an archaeologist, academic and writer on Old Testament topics. As Professor of Assyriology at the University of London he was a steadfast supporter of Christian Unions in universities, the Crusaders (Cliff Richard was in his Bible class in Finchley) and the Scripture Gift Mission.
NOVEMBER
7. Billy Graham was born in 1918 and brought up on his family’s dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. He became the best-known evangelist of the 20th century, and it is estimated that he preached to 215 million people in 185 countries, plus hundreds of millions more via television, films and webcasts.
11. The Armistice in 1918 marked the end of fighting in World War I or, as it was known at the time, The Great War. The duty staff officer at General Headquarters who drafted the ceasefire signal, was a Christian colonel who in later years was to become the President of SASRA (The Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Scripture Readers’ Association), Lieutenant-General Sir William Dobbie.
17. The Puritan Joseph Alleine died in 1668, aged 34, worn out by imprisonment and persecution. Evidently a delightful personality, he is remembered for his influential An Alarm to the Unconverted (1672).
18. The Synod of Dort (Dordrecht) assembled in Holland in 1618 to settle the controversy over the views of Jacob Arminius. It ended on 9 May 1619, after 154 sessions, by asserting the five main doctrines of Calvinism.
DECEMBER
12. John Cennick was born at Reading, Berks., in 1718. From living a careless life as a young man, he became a Christian through contact with John & Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, and eventually became an evangelist and hymn-writer himself. His table-grace, Be present at our table, Lord, is still sung.
24. The carol, Silent night was first performed in the little church of St Nicholas in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, Austria in 1818. The story goes that the organ had broken down, and these words were written by the young parish priest, Joseph Mohr, and set to music during this day by his friend Franz Grüber, the schoolmaster and organist. The hastily-rehearsed girls’ choir sang the melody, to the accompaniment of Grüber’s guitar. The carol has been translated into innumerable languages, and UNESCO declared it an ‘intangible cultural heritage’ in 2011.
29. Roland Allen was born in Bristol in 1868. After a period of missionary work with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in China, he wrote his influential book, Missionary Methods: St Paul’s or Ours? (1912). He argued that churches founded by missionaries should be self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing, and adapted to local conditions.
