Religious Reformers

Washington, DC | October 15, 1924 This occasion cannot but recall to our minds in a most impressive way the sacrifice and devotion that has gone into the making of our country. It is impossible to interpret it as the working out of a plan devised by man. The wisest and most far sighted of them had little conception of the greatness of the structure which ...

According to the testimony of Joseph Smith, on the night of September 21, 1823, Joseph Smith prayed to know God's further will toward him. Steadily a light grew "as though the house was filled with consuming and unquenchable fire." Moroni, a messenger sent from God, stood before him. In mortal life Moroni had been the last of ancient American prophets having authority from God and whose teachings ...

In 1762 at the tender age of sixteen, a slave named Absalom Jones witnessed his mother and six siblings sold away while he was brought by his owner to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from Sussex, Delaware. He was put to work in a shop as a clerk and handyman, but was allowed to work in the evenings and keep the earnings for himself. Understanding the value of an ...

John Lathrop was born December 20, 1584 in Etton, Yorkshire, England. It is said the ancestral home of the Lathrop family is Lowthrope, England. He was baptized in Etton, Yorkshire England December 20, 1584 and died in Barnstable, Mass November 8, 1653. The name was sometimes written Lathrop, other times Lothrop and originated in the town of Lowthrope, England. John Lathrop was born in Yorkshire England. He ...

John Rogers burned to death at a stake at Smithfield, England on this Monday morning, February 4,1555. Among the onlookers who encouraged him were his own children. What monstrous crime had earned him this cruel death? Born about 1500, Rogers was educated at Cambridge. He became a Catholic priest and accepted a position in the church at the time that the Protestant Reformation was in full ...

William Tyndale, 12 years after he left England, was led from prison to the stake where he was strangled, then his body burned. He had time to utter one last cry: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Tyndale had suffered for the cause “poverty, … exile out of my natural country and bitter absence from my friends, … my hunger, my thirst, my cold, the ...

Sometime during October 31, 1517, the day before the Feast of All Saints, the 33-year-old Martin Luther posted theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The door functioned as a bulletin board for various announcements related to academic and church affairs. The theses were written in Latin and printed on a folio sheet by the printer John Gruenenberg, one of the many entrepreneurs ...

Erasmus, with the help of printer John Froben, published a Greek-Latin Parallel New Testament. The Latin part was not the corrupt Vulgate, but his own fresh rendering of the text from the more accurate and reliable Greek, which he had managed to collate from a half-dozen partial old Greek New Testament manuscripts he had acquired. This milestone was the first non-Latin Vulgate text of the scripture ...

Jan Hus, a Bohemian religious reformer, was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake for his belief that Christ alone was the head of the church and that people should be permitted to read the Bible in their own language and in their own homes. Manuscripts of Wycliffe's bible were used as kindling for the fire that burned him at the stake. Ryan M ...

Wycliffe had been born in the hinterlands, on a sheep farm 200 miles from London. He left for Oxford University in 1346, but because of periodic eruptions of the Black Death, he was not able to earn his doctorate until 1372. Nonetheless, by then he was already considered Oxford's leading philosopher and theologian. In 1374 he became rector of the parish in Lutterworth, but a year ...