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Christian History

Today in Christian History

March 14

March 14, 1872: Journalist Henry Stanley and explorer-missionary David Livingstone part company, having spent the last five months in Africa together. Stanley returned to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer (see issue 56: David Livingstone).

March 14, 1937: Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical against the Nazi "cult": "Race, nation, state . . . all have an essential and honorable place within the secular order," he wrote. "To abstract them, however, from the earthly scale of values and make them the supreme norm of all values, including religious ones, and divinize them with an idolatrous cult, is to be guilty of perverting and falsifying the order of things created and commanded by God" (see issue 32: Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

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April 27, 1667: Blind, bitter, and poor, Puritan poet John Milton sells for ten pounds the copyright for Paradise Lost—a book that would influence English thought and language nearly as much as the King James Version and the plays of Shakespeare. The theme of the epic appears in its opening lines: "Of man's disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden.

April 27, 1775: Moravian minister ...

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