November 15 in Church History

Oswald Chambers is known for a book he never saw. He was a gifted Scottish art student, won to Christ under Spurgeon, who gave up a scholarship to the art centers of Europe to enter a Bible training college at Dunoon. There he heard F. B. Meyer speak on the Holy Spirit and fell into years of misery, later saying that only God’s grace and kind friends had kept him out of an asylum. He found relief in Luke 11:13 and simply claimed its promise. He felt nothing, he said, until he was asked to speak and forty people came forward.

He taught and traveled, and in 1915 he went to Egypt with the YMCA to serve British and Commonwealth troops near Cairo. He died suddenly on November 15, 1917, after an appendix operation, and was buried under a stone bearing Luke 11:13. He was forty-three. His widow Gertrude, who had taken down his talks in shorthand, spent the rest of her life turning them into books. My Utmost for His Highest, published in 1927, has remained one of the most widely read devotional works in English.

Albert the Great, who died on this date in 1280, had a very different mind. A German Dominican, he wrote on astronomy, chemistry, geography and physiology as well as theology, and he taught Thomas Aquinas. He was among the first to show how Aristotle could be used in Christian thought. Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church in 1931, and in 1941 Pius XII made him patron of students of the natural sciences.

Comenius, a Czech exile whose ideas about education were far ahead of their time, died in Amsterdam on this date in 1670.