Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address (above) today in 1863, during the American Civil War. He delivered his short speech of just 10 sentences on a battlefield of the war with phrasing that shows how deeply versed he was in the style and language of the King James Bible.
‘We here highly resolve that these men shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’ Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
This is the feast of Mechtild, the Saxon saint who died today in 1298. Known as ‘God’s nightingale’ because of her musical gifts and beautiful singing, she was also a mystic whose rapturous revelations from God were widely distributed after her death in a manuscript known as The Book of Special Grace. Her vision of a mountain with seven stairs and seven fountains is a possible inspiration for Dante’s Purgatory.
‘After this, the Beloved, with his beloved, went up to the mountain top, where there was a multitude of angels in the likeness of birds, having golden bells, and giving forth sweet sounds.’ Mechtild of Hackeborn, ‘On the Mountain with Seven Steps’
Today is the feast day of St Raphael Kalinowski. He was a Polish friar, born in 1835, who was sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian labour camp for taking part in a Polish insurrection against Russian rule. Kalinowski was a childhood hero of Karol Wojtyła, who became Pope St John Paul II, and who made Kalinowski a saint in 1991.
John Wilkins, the Anglican bishop and natural philosopher, died today in 1672. He was a survivor of the Fire of London in 1666, although he lost his vicarge and his library to the flames. He wrote books on cryptography, preaching, and a proposition for a new universal language to replace Latin. His book, A Discovery of a New World, digested some of the consequences of the Copernican revolution by examining the Moon, arguing that it was a world like ours, with mountains, valleys, seas, an atmosphere, and possibly some inhabitants, which Wilkins calls the Selenites. ‘Their world is our Moon,’ he says, ‘and our world is their Moon.’
‘This whole globe of earth and water, though it seem to us to be of a large extent, yet it bears not so great a proportion unto the whole frame of nature, as a small sand doth unto it; and what can such little creatures as we discern, who are tied to this point of Earth? Or what can they in the Moon know of us?’ A Discovery of a New World, 1638
The golden age of bearded Popes began today in 1523 when Pope Clement VII began his reign. He was as clean-shaved as a boiled egg until the fourth year of his pontificate, when he was imprisoned during the Sack of Rome, escaped after six months dressed as a peddler, and grew a beard as a sign of mourning. Beards had been banned semi-officially for Catholic clergy since the early 6th century, when a local synod pronounced clericus nec comam nutriat nec barbam (‘the clerk will not grow long hair or beard’). Clement kept his beard, and the next 24 Popes were also hairy men, right down to Innocent XII who died in 1700.
Image: Library of Congress