Religious Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 15, 1882

Religious Notes.

By Editor

-China spends $150,000,000 annually in ancestral worship.

-The number of church holidays in Russia is about 160 a year. Knowing this fact, it will not be so difficult to understand why the Russians persecute the Jews. "Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do."

-Quite a sensation has been made by the statement of an Episcopal Clergyman in Washington, D. C., that he repeated mass, recited prayers for the dead, had established auricular confession, and granted absolution.

-Three stations have already been established by the London Missionary Society on Tanganyka, and it is the intention of that organization to send out soon a steel steamer to navigate the lake and assist in maintaining more stations on its shores.

-Mrs. Bainbridge, of Providence R. I., says that going out from one of the mission-houses in Foochow, China, she met a man with a pole across his shoulders, with a basket on each end filled with girl babies, which he was trying to sell at 40 cents each.

-The Sabbath Recorder contains an article on "Lady Ministers." The writer thinks that their natural endowments are such as to make them most efficient ministers, and that the churches should seek for ministers among the devoted young women, and should educate them for that purpose.

-A recent visitor to the Modoc Indians in the Indian Territory found them in the front rank of progress in the temperance movement-the sale of intoxicating liquors entirely prohibited, and the name of every man and woman, and of every child old enough to sign, on the temperance pledge.

-The American Baptist Home Mission Society, in its late meeting in New York, "earnestly deprecated" the passage of the Chinese Bill. The report of the Committee on Chinese Missions said that such a law was not demanded by any actual peril to the American institutions or industries; it was brought about "by an unchristian race prejudice, and the rivalry of political parties ambitious for power, and will be an ineffaceable stain upon our national honor."

-The village of Bertrola, near Turin, in Italy, has renounced the Roman Catholic religion, and accepted the Protestant faith. The archbishop suspended the priest and closed the church against the parishioners. The indignant villagers then invited the evangelical ministers of Turin to come and expound the word of God to them, which they have continued to do since early in January. The village, containing about 2,000 inhabitants, is now thoroughly Protestantized.

-If some ministers nowadays being installed were one-half as certain about what they do know and believe as they are concerning what they don't know and do not believe, there would be much better ecclesiastical timber put into some pulpits than we fear will get there. Your modern agnostic-evangelical of course-is a sort of theological fence-viewer; he cannot make up his mind what field to abide in and so straddles the fence. Easy for the fence, but rather hard for the man.

-Some time since we mentioned the establishment of a school in China, by the M. E. Church. The success of the school, Dr. Allen, the President, writes thus: "We have been forced to accept 400 pupils, and yet there are very many applicants for whom we can find no place. But the truly marvelous part of the whole is the class of boys and young men who apply, and their eagerness to get in, the crowning marvel being that while no tuition, as such, is charged, the subscriptions of the pupils, for every one subscribes, and the friends of the enterprise, already suffice for two years. There never was anything like this ever seen or heard of in China before. I had expected to open two high schools with some 100 boys to each the first year, but in less than four months from the first announcement of our plans, we are compelled to accept 200 each, with full 100 more on the reserve or expectant list."