p. 167 | Religious Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Apr 6, 1882

Religious Notes.

The Market Square Presbyterian Church, of Germantown, Penn., has recently celebrated its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary.

Joseph Cook is lecturing his way to the far East, and is going to give two months of lectures to the educated natives in the principal cities of India.

Trinity Church, New York, proposes to build a Sanitarium at Islip, L. I., at a cost of $50,000. It will be a wise investment of a portion of its wealth.

Rev. Dr. Wm. M. Taylor's salary has been increased to $16,000. In his ten years' pastorate of the Broadway Tabernacle, 948 members, nearly a hundred a year, have been added to the church.

P. M. Morrison, formerly an Episcopal pastor at Eau Claire, Wis., has preferred charges to the Bishop against Joel Clarke, the present pastor, for using a magic lantern in the church, Sunday evenings, to illustrate his sermons.

Deacon J. S. Dimock, of Rocky Hill, Conn., is certainly entitled to the palm for punctuality in church attendance. On a recent Sunday he was kept from church by a snow-blockade, and that was the first-time he had been absent for forty-two years.

In Munich, South Germany, the Chambers have carried a motion by 81 to 60 votes for the abolition of undenominational schools. One of the speakers said these schools were supported by all atheists and champions of modern revolution and hot-beds of unbelief.

The following item from the Advance is certainly not over stated: "We think that the present low state of piety in the churches can be easily traced back to an incoming prosperity in which the law of sacrifice has not kept pace with the measure of getting." If this is not the sole cause, it is an important factor in the result.

Prof. Samuel Hopkins says that the number of Presbyterian ministers who advocate the use of some form of prayer is large and is constantly increasing. These ministers constantly use the Episcopal burial and marriage services, and there is quite an exodus of cultivated people from the Presbyterian to the Episcopal Church.

The Congregationalist objects to the appointment of Dr. Newman Smith to the Chair of Theology at Andover, on the ground that in his published works he "has expressed himself with too much vagueness on the subject of future punishment." The popular view on that subject is losing its hold on the minds of students of the Bible.

A writer in the Pacific Methodist protests against the opposition to fermented communion wine, claiming that there is no danger to be apprehended from its use. In the same article, however, he characterizes the sale of fermented liquor as the "work of death." Perhaps he thinks that the blessing pronounced on the wine at the communion renders it harmless.

The Congregational Church of San Francisco, of which Dr. Barrows, is pastor, has recently materially modified its creed. It now disclaims belief in the trinity, the divinity of Christ, the atonement, eternal punishment of sinners, and rejects baptism as of binding obligation. This, as the pastor says, is in order to be in harmony with the actual advance of theology.

The Christian at Work says that a wealthy gentleman of Forest City, Iowa, being skeptical as to the kind and amount of labor which a minister would be willing to do, offered to pay to such clergymen as would saw wood for him, one dollar an hour for their services. Nearly all the ministers in town came forward, with saw and buck, to accept his terms. Some of them worked steadily four to six hours per day, as long as the wood lasted. We know ministers who have sawed wood for nothing, and they were not doing it for fun either.

Rev. Dr. Parker, in an article in the Advance, concerning the "Significance of Mr. Miln's Apostasy," uses the following language: "In short, then, a 'new infidelity' is on hand, gathering strength, pervading society, weakening the bonds of Christian communion, withdrawing people from Christian activities, fostering selfish and sensuous forms of life, and, by as much as it has power, reducing Christianity to ceremonialism, and discrediting alike the facts and doctrines which underlie it, and the spirit that alone gives it life and power. I fear that this 'new skepticism,' so far from having spent or developed its force, has yet its race to run and its ravages to commit; and that in the years immediately before us, the contest between it and the truth as it is in Jesus will be sharp and serious in its consequences."

The Moravians, who number at home but 20,000, have been the means of Christianizing 73,000 heathen. What a record is that! In Labrador and Greenland their work has been so successful that nearly all of the Esquimaux have embraced Christianity. In the West Indies so great progress has been made among the negroes that it is hoped the missionaries can be withdrawn from the field in ten years. They have four mission stations among our American Indians, and have labored for many years at Surinam, in Dutch Guiana. Recently they have begun mission work at Demarara, in British Guiana. On the Mosquito Coast they have six stations, and flourishing missions in South Africa, in Australia among the aborigines, and even in a high valley of the Himalayas among a Mongolian race of Buddhists.