Christian Classics Ethereal Library

From the Writer's Almanac (TWA) comes word that today is the birthday of novelist and priest Charles Kingsley, born in Holne, England (1819). They say that he is best remembered for his children's book The Water-Babies (1863), an allegorical story written to teach Christian values.

TWA added that the Water-Babies was extremely popular when it was published, and they quote Kingsley writing this: "I am not fond, you know, of going into churches to pray. We must go up into the chase in the evenings, and pray there with nothing but God's cloud temple between us and His heaven! And His choir of small birds and night crickets and booming beetles, and all happy things who praise Him all night long! And in the still summer noon, too, with the lazy-paced clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bee humming in the beds of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all still — hushed — awe-bound, as the great thunderclouds slide up from the far south! Then, there to praise God!"

From the Writer's Almanac (and see our entries on Luther here, https://ccel.org/home3/search?text=Martin+Luther&genreID=&orderBy=Relevance)

It was on this day in 1521 that German priest and theologian Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and his writings were banned by the Edict of Worms. The edict made Luther more of a hero than he already was and it’s a big reason that Protestantism caught on so quickly.

Luther decided to become a priest after getting caught out in a thunderstorm one night. He swore to God that if he survived he would enter the religious life. He did survive and he went on to study theology, become ordained, and get a job as a professor in Wittenberg. As he became more and more involved in the church he began to grow disgusted with some of its practices. He was especially angry about the church’s sales of indulgences, which were said to decrease the time a person had to spend in purgatory.

On the eve of All Saints’ Day in 1517, Luther nailed to the door of his church 95 theses attacking the sale of indulgences and other excesses of the church. They were originally written in Latin, but they became so popular that people demanded they be translated into German, and so they were. Hundreds of copies were printed up on a printing press, which was still a fairly recent invention, and Luther’s message spread throughout Germany and Europe.

Religious leaders and politicians began to realize how dangerous he was becoming to the traditional church, and in April of 1521, a group of Roman princes pressured Emperor Charles V into forming an assembly in the city of Worms to try to get Luther to reject his writings.

On his trip to Worms, Luther was celebrated as a hero at most of the towns he passed through. He refused to recant and went back to Wittenberg to start the reformation.

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Happy birthday to St. Teresa of Avila.

Author info: St. Teresa of Avila - Christian Classics Ethereal Library Born in Avila, Spain, on March 28, 1515, St. Teresa was the daughter of a Toledo merchant and his second wife, who died when Teresa was 15, one of ten children. Shortly after this event, Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns. After reading the letters of St. Jerome, Teresa resolve...

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From the Writer's Almanac daily email this morning comes this inspirational account of Thomas Merton.

Today is the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France (1915). His mother was an American and his father was from New Zealand. They were both artists and they met at an art school in Paris. Merton’s mother died of stomach cancer when he was six years old; ten years later his father died of a brain tumor.

Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938 while he was a student at Columbia University. He taught English for a while at St. Bonaventure College, but he continued studying Catholicism and the spiritualism of William Blake. On December 10, 1941, he quit his job and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky to begin his life as a Trappist monk. He continued studying and kept journals full of his questions and musings. His superior at the monastery, Father Abbot Dom Frederic Dunne, noticed his talent for writing and encouraged him to continue. He began by translating religious texts and writing biographies of the saints.

In 1961 Merton wrote, “It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt that I have to live with), but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will most probably die as one.” Over the course of his life Merton wrote more than 70 books, 2,000 poems, and numerous essays and lectures. He’s perhaps best known for his spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). It’s been compared to the Confessions of St. Augustine. He ends the book with the line Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: “Here ends the book, but not the searching.”

From The Seven Storey Mountain:

“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.”