The Edict of Amboise grants a narrow permission for the exercise of the Protestant religion in France - March 19

Following disclosures of a 1980 sexual liaison with church secretary Jessica Hahn, Jim Bakker steps down as head of the PTL ministry. He will later go to prison on charges of financial fraud.

412 - The Roman Emperor declares that children abandoned to the church may not be reclaimed. A bishop’s signature is necessary to witness that the church has taken in the child. 

1563 - The Edict of Amboise grants a narrow permission for the exercise of the Protestant religion in France.

1612 - Sophia Olelkovich Raziwell died, the last descendent of the Olelkovich-Slutsk dynasty. Passionate for Orthodoxy, she had refused to convert to Catholicism and had obtained a law allowing landowners of the region (modern-day Belarus) to remain Orthodox. Because of her efforts, the region around Slutsk will become a bastion of Orthodoxy, and in 1983 she will be canonized by the Orthodox Church.

1656 - Death in Helmstadt, Germany, of Georg Calixtus who had been the most influential perpetuator of Melanchthon’s Lutheran theology in the 17th century.

1730 - Philip Doddridge is ordained as a nonconformist minister in England. His book “The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul” will be influential in converting English statesman William Wilberforce and many others to evangelical Christianity.

1797 - Henry Nott and fellow missionaries conduct the first Christian service ever held in Tahiti. The meeting takes place under cover of some enormous trees with the king of Tahiti and many other Tahitians present.

1875 - American poet William Cullen Bryant writes his Christmas hymn “Look from Thy Sphere of Endless Day” for the fiftieth anniversary of the Church of the Messiah in Boston.

1987 - Following disclosures of a 1980 sexual liaison with church secretary Jessica Hahn, Jim Bakker steps down as head of the PTL ministry. He will later go to prison on charges of financial fraud.

– Source: Christian History Institute