News and Miscellany

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 2, 1868

News and Miscellany.

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

—IN France alone 1,350,000 men, or nearly the whole of the able-bodied male population of the country, may now be said to be under arms. Consequently, trade, commerce, and industry are becoming paralyzed. Each family in Paris is taxed commonly more than £20 on an average!

—LONDON, May 22. The case of Home, the Spiritualist Medium, which has been before the Court of Chancery for a long time, has at length been decided. The Court requires Home to repay Mrs. Lyon the sum of £60,000 and costs, on the ground that undue influence and hallucination induced her course of action.

—LONDON, May 22. A dispatch from Rome states that the Pope has invited the Roman Catholic Bishops of the United States to raise one thousand volunteers for the Papal army, and authorizing them to make such terms with recruits as they may deem necessary and proper.

—OF late years a new and terribly loathsome disease—the fruit of sin—has made its appearance among the Hawaiian people, and is slowly spreading among them. It is a kind of leprosy, is slow in progress, and, though as yet few have actually died, yet many have been maimed and deformed by it. Government has set apart a small district on the Island of Molokai, and thither lepers from Oahu, Maui, and Lanai have been sent, and there is now quite a settlement. Within the last six years the Hawaiian population has decreased by nearly 9,000, leaving but 60,000 of the Hawaiian race.

—A letter from Paris says that the Chassepot rifle, of which so much has been written, is a fragile weapon, and that it will be worn out by the use to which it is put in teaching the French troops how to handle it, while in six months all the German troops will be armed with a new weapon much superior to it.

—The Prussian military chemists have succeeded in precipitating the explosive liquid known as nitroglycerine, and reducing it to a solid. The advantage of this transformation is, that its combustibility is considerably diminished, while its explosive force remains the same, and it is thus rendered more manageable for military purposes. It produces astonishing results.

Masons and Methodists.—THE Methodists of Northern Illinois have a fashion of requesting the Masonic fraternities to lay the corner-stone of their churches. It has been done lately at Kankakee, Genesee, and Pecatonica. At the last place the pastor, in extending the invitation, expressed the hope that “no one will defame the occasion by visiting a saloon, or mar our best hopes for the prosperity of the cause, in the effort to erect a holy temple to the Grand Architect of the Universe.” The address was delivered by Rev. T. M. Eddy, who was one of the candidates for bishop at the Conference in Chicago, and who addressed and lauded his brother Masons as “the ancient and venerable order.”

HE who glories in wounding others, will finally wound himself.