July 28, 1727: Moody, stiff young preacher Jonathan Edwards marries Sarah Pierrepont, a lively 17-year-old. The union proved happy and produced 11 children, six of whom were born on Sundays. This caused a bit of a scandal, because people then believed children were born the same weekday they were conceived.
July 29, 1794: In a converted blacksmith's shop in Philadelphia, former slave Richard Allen assembles a group of black Christians who had faced discrimination in the local Methodist Episcopal Church. They formed the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the mother church of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, now known throughout the world.
July 29, 1833: English abolitionist William Wilberforce dies a mere three days after England abolishes slavery.
July 30, 1775: The U.S. Army founds its chaplaincy, making it the Army's oldest division after the infantry.
July 31, 1966: John Lennon proclaims the Beatles to be "more popular than Jesus".
August 1, 1714: The "Schism Bill," which was intended to reestablish Catholicism in England, dies with its chief supporter, Queen Anne. For years, Dissenters regarded the date as a day of deliverance, the "Protestant Passover."
August 1, 1779: Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a devout Episcopalian who helped establish the American Sunday School Union, is born.
August 1, 1897: Pope Leo XIII issues the encyclical Militantis Ecclesiae, which describes Protestantism as the "Lutheran rebellion, whose evil virus goes wandering about in almost all nations."
August 2, 1100: William the Conqueror's son and successor Rufus, a wicked king who delighted in torture, seizing church property, and blasphemy, is mysteriously killed while hunting by an arrow that flew out of nowhere. No one mourned, and England took his eternal damnation for granted.