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12 May is International Nurses Day.
It is also the birthday of the most famous and influential nurse, Florence Nightingale.
Few people realise the enormous debt which the whole world owes to Florence Nightingale. This courageous Reformer transformed hospitals and pioneered the modern nursing profession. No other person in history has done more to alleviate suffering and establish so high a standing of health care for the sick. 

The Degraded State
Before Florence Nightingale the condition of hospitals and the nursing profession was in a degraded state. Hospitals were dirty and over-crowded. Antiseptics were unknown. Scarcely any facilities for the training of nurses existed, and their pay was less than that for a common labourer in the field. Nurses were drawn from the “undesirable sections” of society and were commonly regarded as “vulgar”, “uneducated”, “unclean” and were notorious for their drunkenness and immorality. ​​

When Philipp Melanchthon delivered his first lecture at the University of Wittenberg, in 1518, Dr. Martin Luther was impressed. 

​Melanchthon was the new Professor of Greek, and although he stuttered during his presentation, his call for theologians to go “back to the sources, back to the Holy Scriptures” echoed the convictions of Luther's heart.

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​Atheism was the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, Communist authorities vigorously enforced the ideology of Marxism/Leninism and violently persecuted Christianity.
 
The Gulag Archipelago
Over 49,000 churches were destroyed and over 66 million people died in the massacres, man-made famines and in the over 1,800 communist concentration camps, which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as the Gulag Archipelago.
 
Aggressive Atheism
The Soviet Union was committed to the complete annihilation of all religious institutions and ideas. Militant atheism was central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The state established atheism as their only "scientific truth". Any criticism of atheism, or of the state's anti-religious policies, was forbidden and could lead to forced retirement, arrest and imprisonment.

Shortly after Martin Luther was born, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, Grenada, fell, and the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula was complete.  Then Christopher Columbus, sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean, discovered the Americas, the New World.  While South Western Europe was celebrating its freedom after 8 centuries of oppression and occupation under Islam, South Eastern Europe was facing the relentless onslaughts of invasion by the Turks.  Since the fall of the greatest city in the world at that time, Constantinople, to the Turks, in 1453,with the massacre of all the Christians in that city, the Turks had been an ever-present threat to Christendom, as Europe was then known.
 
THE RENAISSANCE
​Threatened from the East by a relentless Islamic Jihad, Europe was suffering from the internal corruption of the Renaissance.  The Renaissance was a time of material advance and spiritual decline.  It led to the rise of absolutism and the loss of the individual rights and representative governments which Christian principles had developed throughout the Middle Ages.  Renaissance rulers, eptomised by Machiavelli, rationalized despotism.  Machiavelli advised rulers to be careful to maintain public relations through patronage of the arts and conspicuous charities, in order to create popularity, and to mask their hold on power. ​

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Bullinger was Zwingli’s successor. For 44 years he pastored Grossmunster in Zurich. Considering the important role he played, and the prodigious quantity of his writings, it is remarkable that Bullinger is one of the least known of the Reformers. 
 
CONVERSION
​Born 18 July 1504, the fifth son of the priest, Henry Bullinger, Heinrich was sent to study at the prestigious Emmerich Seminary on the Rhine, at aged 12.  At 15 years old, he enrolled at the University in Cologne, earning his Bachelor of Arts the next year.  It was at this time that he was converted to the Reformed faith through studying the Latin and Greek fathers of the Church. ​

The Controversial
Luther has been alternatively described as the brilliant scholar who rediscovered the central message of the Bible, a prophet like Elijah and John the Baptist to reform God’s people, the liberator who arose to free his people from the oppression of Rome, the last medieval man, and the first modern man. Zwingli described him as: “the Hercules who defeated the tyranny of Rome.” Pope Leo X called Luther: “A wild boar, ravaging his vineyard.” Emperor Charles V described him as: “A demon in the habit of a monk!”

The Son
Martin Luther was born 10 November 1483 in Eisleben, Saxony. His father, Hans Luder, had worked hard to climb the “social ladder” from his humble peasant origins to become a successful copper mining entrepreneur. Hans married Margaretha Lindemann, the daughter of a prosperous and gifted family that included doctors, lawyers, university professors and politicians. Hans Luder owned several mines and smelters and he became a member of the City Council in Mansfield, where Martin was raised, under the strict discipline typical of that time.