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Famous books

John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women was published in 1558. This splendid title was an attack on the ‘unnatural rule of women’, namely Mary I of England and Mary of Lorraine, the dowager queen of Scotland.

Richard Baxter’s A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live … from the Living God was published in 1658.

Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testaments was published in 1708. For at least 250 years this was one of the first books to be consulted by preachers and writers of Bible commentaries.

John Stott’s Basic Christianity was published in 1958, based on his university missions of the 1950s. It ‘became the definitive evangelistic paperback for at least a generation’, and was translated into more than 50 languages.

James Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God was published in March 1958 — the author’s first book. Although it was occasioned by the ‘Fundamentalism’ controversy of the time, it was a thorough exploration of the inspiration and authority of Scripture.

The Banner of Truth Trust began republishing Puritan and Reformed works in 1958, with George Burrowes on the Song of Solomon, Thomas Watson’s Body of Divinity, Select Sermons of George Whitefield, and Princeton Sermons of Charles Hodge as its first titles.

Events

William Perkins, Puritan preacher and writer, was born at Marton, Warwickshire, in 1558. As rector of St. Andrew’s Church, Cambridge, 1585-1602, he had a profound influence on a whole generation of students.

Thomas Brooks, a Puritan preacher of nonconformist principles, was born in 1608. Ejected from his benefice at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, he continued to work secretly in London, and wrote books such as Precious Remedies against Satan’s Devices (still available today).

Operation Mobilisation was founded in 1958, with the aim of spreading the gospel through literature.

January

2 Daniel Wilson, bishop of Calcutta, died in 1858. He changed the way the Church of England viewed the Hindu caste system, maintaining that the gospel recognised no such distinctions.

31 Henry Pickering, Brethren publisher and author (Pickering & Inglis) was born in 1858.

February

9 The Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University) was founded in 1908 to train ordinary people to use the Bible in direct Christian evangelism in Los Angeles at a time of explosive urban growth.

March

10 Pierre du Moulin, French Protestant pastor, died in 1658. He had been saved as a child from the St. Bartholomew massacre of Protestants, and lived through a period of precarious toleration, being forced to spend much of his life as a minister at Sedan, then outside France.

22 Jonathan Edwards, called ‘the greatest philosopher-theologian yet to grace the American scene’, died at Princeton in 1758, aged 54. The ‘Great Awakening’ of 1734-5 and 1740-1 began under his preaching at Northampton, Massachusetts.

April

23 Pandita Ramabai, Indian Christian reformer, was born in 1858. Converted in 1891 from Hinduism, she rescued hundreds of girls and women from famine and set up the Mukti (‘Salvation’) Mission.

28 Walter Miln, the last Protestant martyr in Scotland, was burned in Edinburgh in 1558, at the age of 82. He declared: ‘I will not recant the truth. I am corn not chaff. I will not be blown away with the wind or burst by the flail. I will survive both.’

June

16 Jabez Bunting, Wesleyan Methodist leader, died in 1858. An authoritarian personality, he was responsible for reorganising and centralising Methodism.

August

13 Ira D. Sankey, American singer and evangelist, died in 1908. He assisted D.L. Moody in his evangelistic campaigns in the USA and Britain, and is remembered for the hymnbook, Sacred Songs and Solos (known as ‘Sankey’s’), and for songs such as ‘There were ninety and nine’.

September

3 William Grimshaw, ‘the apostle of the North’, was born in 1708. Converted in 1742 through reading the Bible (and independently of Whitefield and Wesley), he transformed the whole area around his parish of Haworth, Yorkshire, by his preaching. He is alleged to have set the congregation to sing a long psalm and then to have gone into the village to round up shirkers with his riding crop.

3 Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, died in 1658. His servant, John Maidstone, wrote of him: ‘A larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay.’

12 Frederick Stanley Arnot, Brethren missionary, was born in Glasgow in 1858. Acquainted with the family of David Livingstone, he wished to follow his example and pioneered Brethren missions in Central Africa from 1881 to his death in 1914.

29 James Norman Dalrymple Anderson, missionary, soldier, legal scholar and apologist for Christianity, was born in 1908.

October

The Savoy Declaration of Independent doctrine and church practice was issued in October 1658 by Congregationalists meeting at the Savoy Palace, London, with the theologian John Owen taking a leading part.

24 Howard W.K. Mowll, Archbishop of Sydney for 25 years, and responsible for establishing the distinctively evangelical character of Sydney archdiocese, died in 1958.

26 Philipp Nicolai, Lutheran pastor and hymnwriter, died in 1608. He wrote both the words and the tunes of his hymns, but his two best known hymns, ‘Wake, O wake, for night is flying’ and ‘How brightly beams the morning star’, were memorably arranged by J.S. Bach.

November

5 Hans Egede, Norwegian missionary to Greenland, died in 1758. In 1721 he went to Greenland, learned the difficult language, contended with witch doctors and evangelised the people, recognising the church’s responsibility to bring the gospel to pagans.

17 Mary I of England died in 1558, and Elizabeth I became queen. Mary had tried to restore Roman Catholicism and undo the English Reformation, and her death led to the return from exile of many English Protestants.

22 Thomas Cook, an active Christian whose travel business developed out of a temperance excursion that he organised from Leicester to Loughborough, was born in 1808.

December

9 John Milton was born in 1608. His epic poem, Paradise Lost, sought ‘to justify the ways of God to man’ in its treatment of the Fall, while Areopagitica was a plea for the freedom of the press. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, has an exhibition devoted to him which runs until April 26 2008, and there will doubtless be many others in 2008.

19 Horatius Bonar, Scottish Presbyterian minister and hymnwriter, was born in 1808. Before 1872, only psalms were sung in the Free Church, but Bonar wrote hymns to make Christian teaching and experience more accessible, among them ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’.

28 William Graham Scroggie, Baptist minister and Bible expositor, died in 1958. He was minister of Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, for 20 years, and of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, from 1938 to 1944.

Some anniversaries in 2008