Religious Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 23, 1882

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 8, No. 8.

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Religious Notes.

—There are 247 Congregational Churches in Michigan.

—At Cairo, Egypt, 10,000 students are annually trained in the Koran within a single institution.

—Cincinnati has eighteen Methodist Churches. The highest salary is $2,500, the lowest $385.

—The members of the Old South Church at Boston have voted Rev. Dr. Manning life pay of $4,000 a year.

—The Baptist Weekly shows by statistics that beside the donations for missions of 178 churches and 64 individuals, the contributions of that church average eleven cents per member.

—William Jennings, a noted polygamist, and Superintendent of the Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institute, has been elected Mayor of Salt Lake City. Only the Mormon ticket was in the field.

—An example for American churches is set by the Fort Street Congregational Church in Honolulu, Sandwich Islands. This church has never had a debt, raises its yearly revenue in a single evening, and pays its pastor's salary in advance.

—The question has arisen at St. Thomas, Canada, whether a man who rents a pew at church can use it for a sleeping apartment during the hours of service. The courts decide that a pew is like a berth in a sleeping-car, and a man can sleep in it if he chooses.

—The Bible Banner (Philadelphia), of Feb. 9, utters a strong protest against the course of the World's Crisis (Boston). It says: "While it is open to publish anything that will help forward its plans, even down to appeals to prejudice, there is not space in it for corrections of misstatements, or for statement, of facts that are adverse to the personal or party interests of its managers."

—A man was arrested in Oakland last week for peddling "Paine's Age of Reason," without a license. He claimed exemption from license, on the ground that the "Age of Reason" was a religious work, and was acquitted accordingly. Bob Ingersoll may now come to the front as a religious teacher. He is not much less orthodox than many ministers of high standing in the church.

—Dr. Kendrick, writing from Rome to the Examiner, gives his impression of Romish ceremonies as follows: "At the famous church of Ara Celi I saw the representation of the sacred Bambino exposed in a grotto with a perspective of distant fields and shepherds. This was rather pretty, and well adapted to please children. Indeed this, according to my view, is the conclusion of the whole matter—when the ceremonies of the Romish Church are not revolting, they are of a sort to please—children. I do not wonder that Luther's visit to Rome made him a Protestant. I only wonder how such visits ever work the other way, and end in turning Protestants into Romanists."

—The Rev. Mr. Miln, who succeeded Dr. Collyer as pastor of the Unity Church in Chicago, has been dismissed, on account of some startling statements made by him in a recent sermon. He disavowed all belief in what he termed "speculative Christianity," such as the existence of a personal God, the doctrine of the resurrection, the existence of Heaven or hell, and the immortality of the soul. He declared that he could not believe what he could not understand by unaided human reason. This was too much. Unitarians care very little for orthodox beliefs, but the man who believes nothing that he cannot understand by human reason alone, has too short a creed even for them.

—The Second Baptist Church of St. Louis recently installed a new pastor who had formerly been a Presbyterian. The church accepted his Presbyterian ordination and did not re-ordain him, and nearly all the Baptist papers are condemning the action. The Examiner makes the point that no Baptist Church would think of ordaining a man who had never been baptized, and, on the same principle, ought not to recognize ordinations given by unbaptized Presbyters. It says: "The fact that Pedobaptists believe infants to be fit subjects for baptism, and that sprinkling is baptism, has not the weight of a feather in Baptists' beliefs. We hold these substitutions to be perpetual and enormous evils, and we dare not by word or sign indicate our fellowship for them."