Cindy
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Born July 17, 1829 in Richmond, Va., he was ordained deacon in l855, and posted to China in l857 by the Episcopal Missionary Society. Ordained priest in China, he was soon posted to Nagasaki. In Japan at this time Christian missionary activity was prohibited, so he opened a private school to teach English and Bible studies in the foreign settlement in Tokyo. Called Rikkoyo school, it was later named a university, called St. Paul's College by the English. Teaching only in English, Williams became very popular. In 1866 he was consecrated Bishop of China and Japan. Beginning in 1878 he united various Anglican missionary efforts into Nippon Holy Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in Japan. He stayed in Kyoto after retirement in l893, and returned in 1908 to Richmond to die in 1910. Bishop Williams taught that true Christianity liberates humans from all forms of bondage and guides them to a place where they can freely pursue the truth. |
St. Hilary, 315 – 367, was a theologian of the early Latin church. Born in Poitiers of pagan wealthy pagan parents, Hilary had a good education in rhetoric and philosophy. He married early, and had a daughter Afra. Reading the scriptures brought him to Christianity. While still a layman he was elected bishop of Poitiers in 353.
In the fourth century there were serious problems with actually defining and describing who Jesus Christ was. Thanks to Hilary, down through the ages many Christians have developed, by his unmovable stance on His divinity, a personal devotion to the sacred divinity and humanity of Jesus. Hilary has been called the Athanasius of the West because of his efforts to combat the Arian heresy, and his contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Exiled to Phrygia for four years by Emperor Constantius II whose Arianism Hilary publicly opposed, the bishop began writing two of the books of his De Trinitate and translating the theology of the Eastern Bishops, expounding on the Nicene Creed into Latin. He finally became such a nuisance he was sent back west, where he was welcomed.
He now cooperated with Martin of Tours in combating Arianism in Gaul. In 364 he went to Milan to combat its Arian bishop Auxentius, who unfortunately convinced Pope Liberius of his orthodoxy. Hilary expressed his own thoughts in a book "Against Auxentius" – Hilary and Athanasius were vindicated at the first Council of Constantinople in 388.
Hilary was gentle and courteous in character, but Hilary's writing can be sharp, and difficult to the point of obscurity. He also composed some of the earliest Latin Christian poems and hymns.
In 369 he cooperated with Martin of Tours in founding a monastery at Liguge south of Poitiers, which today is the home abbey of Benedictine Monks of Soleones. Worn out from trials and struggle, Hilary died in 367. His January 13 feast marks the start of Hilary Term at Oxford and Cambridge.
An English monastic founder, born of a noble Anglo-Saxon family, Benedict Biscop was born 628 in Northumbria, where he spent his youth at the court of King Oswy. At age 25 he made the first of his five pilgrimages to Rome. On returning to England, he introduced, whenever he could, the religious rites as he saw them practiced in Rome.
Soon afterwards he made a second pilgrimage, stopping on his return at Lerins, in 666, to take the religious habit. When two years later, he returned to Rome, Pope Vitalian sent him and the monk Adrian as advisors with Theodore, the newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. After two more years, in 671, he resigned this office and made another pilgrimage to Rome. During this and his two succeeding pilgrimages to the city of the Apostles he collected numerous relics, books, and paintings for the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, the former of which he founded in a674, the latter in 682.
He also engaged Abbot John, Arch-cantor of St. Peter's in Rome, to teach Roman chant at these monasteries. Benedict was the first to introduce into England the building of stone churches and the art of making glass windows.