p. 558 | News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 10, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 35.

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—The American Bible Society expends $150,000 a year in translating, publishing, and distributing the Bible in foreign lands.

—The English high-church guide-book gives a list of 2,858 churches in which the high-church notions appear in ritual practices.

—A nephew of the Zulu chief, Cetewayo, has been studying in Stockholm, and has recently returned to his native country as a missionary.

—Most of the Icelanders in this country, of whom there are nearly 8,000, are Lutherans, that denomination having fourteen congregations among them, six in Dakota alone.

—During the past 14 years about 700 Protestant churches, all free of debt, have been built in Madagascar. There are 1,200 churches and 80,000 Protestant communicants.

—A Swedish missionary, who has been laboring for many years in equatorial Africa, has recently translated the gospel of John into the Congo language, and has had it printed for the use of the natives. Sweden thus gains the honor of printing the first book in Congo.

—The religious journals are exultingly publishing the statement that nine-tenths of the lawyers of Philadelphia are church-members. That is a very good showing, but we would much rather learn that nine-tenths of them will not resort to any species of trickery to evade justice. If this were made the standard of church-membership, we fear that the Philadelphia churches would lose a large per cent. of their lawyers.

—According to General Booth the colors of the Salvation Army are now flying in seventeen countries, upheld by 1,050 corps of soldiers and 2,650 paid officers. Twenty-two newspapers are published by the Army, reaching half a million readers every week. It is announced that a "Salvation" caravan is soon to be put upon the public roads in England, whose musical attractions are expected to empty the public houses and awaken the country to spiritual things.

—A Chicago paper states that of the company of Mexican editors who recently visited this country, the most are pronounced agnostics, and that in Mexico the churches are frequented only by women and Indians. We have it on the authority of one who was a teacher in one of the largest Catholic institutions in this country, that Catholic education invariably tends toward infidelity, and that very few of those who are educated by the Jesuits do not become infidels.