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November 4, 1646: The Massachusetts Bay Colony makes it a capital offense to deny that the Bible is the Word of God.
November 4, 1740: English clergyman Augustus Toplady, author of the hymn "Rock of Ages," is born.
November 4, 1958: Angelo Roncalli becomes Pope John XXIII. Though his papacy was expected to be uneventful, his convening of the Second Vatican Council and his changing of the church's attitudes toward non-Catholics were milestones for Roman Catholics.
November 5, 1414: The Council of Constance opens to end the Great Schism. It deposed all three rival popes, but it also executed Bohemian reformers Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague, and anathematized the teachings of John Wycliffe (see issue 68: Jan Hus).
November 6, 1315: Poet Dante Alighieri is sentenced to death, in absentia, by the magistrates of Florence. Dante, who was at the time working on his Comedy in Venice, avoided the penalty by never returning to Florence, from which he had been exiled for political reasons (see issue 70: Dante Alighieri).
November 6, 1935: American revivalist Billy Sunday, a baseball player who became one of America's most famous evangelists before Billy Graham, dies at age 73. More than 100 million people heard him speak at his evangelistic crusades, and about 300,000 of them became Christians.
November 7, 739 (traditional date): Willibrord, a missionary monk who was trained in Ireland and traveled over northwestern Europe, dies. Called the "Apostle of Frisia," he was highly instrumental in the conversions of Germany and Scandinavia (see issue 63: Conversion of the Vikings).
November 7, 1637: Anne Hutchinson is convicted of spreading heresy and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her idea that believers are so united with the Holy Spirit that human categories (like moral law) are irrelevant, and her claim of direct revelation from the Holy Spirit rather than Scripture, caused many of her supporters (including influential minister John Cotton) to back off. Hutchinson was later killed in New York in an American Indian raid (see issue 41: The American Puritans).
November 7, 1837: Presbyterian minister and abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in Alton, Illinois. A newspaper editor whose press was destroyed by vandals three times, he was accused of inciting slaves to revolt when he defended a black man burned at the stake by a mob. When another mob tried to burn down his warehouse, Lovejoy was shot trying to save it. His death helped to galvanize the abolitionist movement (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).
November 7, 1918: Evangelist William ("Billy") Franklin Graham, Jr., is born in Charlotte, North Carolina (see issue 65: The Ten Most Influential Christians of the Twentieth Century).
November 8, 1308: John Duns Scotus, the hard-to-follow Scottish theologian who first posited Mary's immaculate conception (that she herself was born without original sin), dies in Cologne, Germany. Mary's immaculate conception was declared dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854 (see issue 73: Thomas Aquinas).
November 8, 1674: English poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and many other works, dies at age 65.
November 9, 1799: Asa Mahan, Congregational clergyman and first president of Oberlin College, is born in Verona, New York.
November 10, 1483: German reformer Martin Luther is born in Eisleben, Germany. (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).
November 10, 1770: French anti-Christian philosopher Francois Voltaire utters his famous remark, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
November 10, 1871: After seven months of searching, American journalist Henry Stanley finally finds Scottish missionary David Livingstone in Ujiji, Central Africa, and utters his famous introduction, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." The relationship between the two men led to Stanley's conversion and decision to become a missionary (see issue 56: David Livingstone).
November 10, 1908: Ten years after Samuel Hill and John Nicholson met in Boscobel, Wisconsin, to begin what would become Gideons International, the organization places its first Bible in a room at the Superior Hotel in Iron Mountains, Montana (see the bonus article "Who Put the Gideon Bible in Your Hotel Room" in issue 31: The Golden Age of Hymne).
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