March 20: Today in Christian History

March 20, 687

Death of Cuthbert, bishop of Lindisfarne, who had been a vocal supporter of Celtic church practices against Roman practices until the Synod of Whitby opted to adhere to Roman practices.

March 20, 1473

Kneeling in the confessional, Catherine of Genoa experiences an overpowering sense of her faults and of the world’s misery, owing to its sin against the goodness of God, and she nearly swoons. Transported by love for God, she lives the remainder of her life (d.1510) in an unusually heightened spiritual state.

March 20, 1612

Polish forces attack the Blue Jay Lake monastery near Novgorod and kill Euphrosynus, its founder, because he does not have valuables to turn over to them as ransom for his life.

March 20, 1653

[Old Style] Oliver Cromwell’s government creates a court of forty-three commissioners to examine all ministers who are awarded church positions in England to certify their fitness for ministerial service.

March 20, 1661

Death at St. Mary’s College, St. Andrews, Scotland, of famed Presbyterian preacher and author Samuel Rutherford (March 29 and 30 are also sometimes given).

March 20, 1757

Evangelist William Romaine preaches at St. Mary’s, Oxford, on “the Lord our righteousness” and gives such offense to the self-righteous scholars that he is barred from ever preaching there again.

March 20, 1799

Believing himself eternally damned, William Cowper writes his last poem “The Castaway,” in which he compares himself to a man who has fallen off a ship in a storm and has to be abandoned by his shipmates. Cowper is well-known in English literature as a precursor of the Romantic movement and also wrote such hymns as “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” and “O for a Closer Walk with God.”

March 20, 1873

In a letter to an assembly of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, W. H. Miles, their only living bishop, urges them to elect three more because the denomination has grown so large one or two bishops can no longer oversee it.