News and Notes | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 7, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 39.

News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—The New York Observer says: “The Jesuits can do a great service to any country in which they may have planted themselves, by quitting it entirely. This is the sole service they can render.”

—The Christian at Work is sure that the “conservation of the Sabbath [Sunday] is to be found in making a safety-valve of Saturday.” Of course, one sin can never be persisted in without the commission of another.

—Ritualism has gotten so far on its return road to Rome that a “service” for the repose of the soul of the late vicar of Frome parish church has been held. It was attended by nearly a hundred of the clergy as well as by leading laity. And yet it is the “Reformed” Church of England!

—November 16 to 20 there will be a Premillennial Conference in Chicago. It will be attended by prominent men from the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Reformed Episcopal Churches; as in these churches there are many who believe in the soon coming of Christ.

—Says the Advance: “We see that the interlude by the organ is going into disuse throughout England and many of the older parts of this country. It was always an offense, it was always against good taste. We believe in good music, we believe in a choir; but the question why a whole congregation should be allowed to stand and stare and look silly, while some man fools with the organ, has never been answered.”

—A country clergyman who spent a Sunday in the city, attending some of the fashionable churches, comes to the following common-sense conclusion: “I have returned to my rural parish in a quite contented frame of mind, disposed more than ever to think that the success of the gospel does not depend upon the attractions with which it is surrounded,—that its strength is in itself.” “What is only added to the gospel hinders its advance.”

—It is said that the Pope has taken steps to pay off the debt of $4,000,000 of the late Archbishop Purcell. By courtesy, the Archbishop’s deficiency is called “a debt;” if he had been a bank cashier, it would be called embezzlement; its true name is stealing (and that from the poor), to which the Catholic Church has been a party all these years. The Pope has been forced to take action by the indignation of the poor Catholics who were robbed.