News and Miscellany

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 10, 1868

News and Miscellany.

Can ye not discern the Signs of the Times? Matt. xvi, 3.

“FOUND DROWNED” is oftener seen on the police records as we plunge deeper into this dismal Winter of retrenchment. The Examiner and Chronicle says that mothers make way with their offsprings rather than see them starve. Drowning is, they say, an easier death than wasting away of hunger and cold; and when once the idea gets possession of them, it works in the brain until it drives them mad, and in this delirium they fling their little pinched and crying babies into the broad, deep river. No more hungering after that. Babe and mother are both relieved, the one of suffering, the other of a burden.” The Sunday Times on this self-same subject, says that children are flung away in the streets of New York like cigar-stumps.

—At Lexington, Pa., the other day, a man was engaged in building a bridge. A clergyman happening along, he remarked to him that he was going to see the bridge up. “Yes,” replied the minister, interrupting, “if Providence permits.” His reply was “Damn Providence,” and at that instant a rope broke, and down came a stone that was being lifted to its place, and crushed the man to death instantly.

The Pope still for War.—The Pope is the only sovereign who still cries war in the midst of this concert of pacific pauses. Whether it is that he has no confidence in the bucolic future of his neighbor, the excommunicated Victor Emanuel, or that he fears the sudden abandonment of his ally, Napoleon the Third, once excommunicated, but now brought back to the fold, the pontiff of peace still cries “to arms” with all the force of his evangelical lungs. Every mandate, every Papal reunion, every allocution, every sermon or article from any one of the members of the sacred phalanx, contains, under some form, an appeal to arms. His Cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, and even his Sisters, poor women, who are unwillingly drawn into this struggle, ask for alms, arms, and above all, for soldiers for the Father of the Faithful. To listen to them, the whole world has but one thing to save itself from the impending cataclysm of battles, and that is to send the Pope all their temporal possessions, and thus earn those eternal riches which are alone worth having.