1631: English clergyman Roger Williams first arrived in America. He soon began questioning Massachusetts' religious policies which fused church and state matters. Williams was banished to Rhode Island five years later, where at Providence he established the first Baptist church in America.

     1736: The English Wesley brothers, John (32) and Charles (28) first arrived in America at Savannah, GA. They had been invited by Georgia governor James Oglethorpe as missionaries to the American Indians.

     1812: American missionary Adoniram Judson, 23, married schoolteacher Ann Hasseltine, 22. Two weeks later the couple set sail for India under sponsorship of the American [Congregational] Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

     1887: The Chicago Evangelization Society was organized by evangelist D. L. Moody, 50. Two years later, the Society established the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions. Moody died in 1899, and in 1900 the school was renamed Moody Bible Institute.

     1944: German theologian and Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison: 'Much that worries us beforehand can afterwards, quite unexpectedly, have a happy and simple solution... Things really are in a better hand than ours.'