325 The closing session of the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council in the history of the church, took place.

1535 Carthusian monks were butchered by Henry VIII at Tyburn. They were among those who rejected Henry’s claim to headship of the English church. Their bishop was butchered June 22 of the same year.

1566 King James I of England (James VI of Scotland) was born (d. 27 March 1625).

1623 Blaise Pascal, mathematician, scientist and religious thinker, was born in Clermont, France (d. 19 August 1662).

1633 Phillipp van Limborch, Dutch Remonstrant theologian, was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands (d. 30 April 1712).

1659 John Ernst Gutwasser, the first Lutheran pastor in America, was sent back to Holland.

1834 Charles H. Spurgeon, noted English Baptist orator and preacher, was born in Essex, England (d. 31 January 1892).

1848 Henry Adeney Redpath, English Old Testament scholar, was born (d. 1908).

1848 Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.

1869 Henry C. Gaertner, professor at Concordia Teachers College (River Forest, Illinois), was born in Ida, Monroe County, Michigan (d. 7 March 1952, Forest Park, Illinois). He graduated from the Missouri Synod teachers seminary at Addison, Illinois, in 1891 and served as a teacher in Detroit, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; and again in Detroit before joining the River Forest faculty in 1921. His primary field was music.

1882 James Allen Brown, professor at Newbury College and Gettysburg Seminary and president of the General Synod, died (b. 19 February 1821, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of Quaker lineage).

1888 Arthur E. Kunzmann was born in Stillwater, Minnesota (d. 29 February 1984, Douglass, Kansas). He graduated from Concordia Seminary (Saint Louis) in 1912 and served as a pastor at Dunksburg and Knob Noster, Missouri; a professor at Immanuel Lutheran College (Greensboro, North Carolina); and a professor at Saint John’s College (Winfield, Kansas) from 1920 to 1958.

1894 Julius Henry Bodensieck was born in Hameln, Germany (d. 28 April 1986).

1902 Lord Acton, English Parliamentarian, Catholic thinker and historian, died (b. 10 January 1834).

1932 Solomon Erb Ochsenford, General Council professor and author, died (b. 8 November 1855 near New Hanover, Douglass Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania).

1953 The Missouri Synod authorized mission work in Korea.

1954 William P. Merrill, American Presbyterian clergyman, author and hymnist, died (b. 10 January 1867, Orange, New Jersey).

1977 Pope Paul VI canonized the 19th-century Redemptorist John Nepomucene Neumann (1811–1860), fourth Bishop of Philadelphia, who was known for his development of the parochial school. Neumann became the first American male to achieve sainthood in the Catholic church.

1979 Oscar J. Naumann, president of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, died in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1982 Oscar E. Feucht died in Saint Louis, Missouri (b. 25 December 1895). He had served as Secretary of Adult Education for the Missouri Synod Board of Parish Education from 1946 until his retirement in 1969. He was the author of  Everyone a Minister (1974).

1987 The U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard struck down a Louisiana law requiring public schools to teach creationism if they taught evolution.