Religious Notes | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 22, 1883

Religious Notes.

—The Lutheran Church of North America comprises about 800,000 communicants.

—At a Wisconsin Methodist Conference there was present a lay delegate ninety-five years old.

—The collection of "Peter's Pence" for the pope, in New York, on Sunday, the 4th inst., amounted to $15,000.

—The American Archbishops now in Rome recommend the appointment of a papal nuncio for the United States.

—A Chinese mission is being established in Portland, Oregon, where 7,000 Mongolians reside, with Rev. A. J. Hansen as superintendent.

—A church quarrel in a quiet New Jersey village, recently, ran so high that one of the parties turned into a mob and tarred and feathered the organ.

—The project of consolidating the Northern and Southern Provinces of the Moravian Church of America has failed. The matter has been agitated in the church for some years.

—The Advance says the contributions made in one year to benevolent objects by Plymouth Church, Minneapolis, Minn., in addition to carrying on its own work, amounted to $61,557.

—A boy in a San Francisco public school was recently rebuked for reciting the 23d psalm as a declamation. Some have complained of this treatment; but the fact is not at all surprising, as that psalm abounds in cutting rebukes of the wicked, and it may have sensibly hit somebody.

—A secret organization known as the "National League for the Suppression of Mormonism" is the last effort against the "religious liberty" of polygamists. It will no doubt create a sensation as a society in the East, but it will not affect the situation in Utah to a great extent.

—Of 400 Mormon immigrants recently arrived from Denmark and Sweden, an Ogden dispatch says: "Not unlike the vast majority of the converts to Mormonism who have preceded them, they are a miserable, duple set, and evidently the 'ragtag and bobtail' of the overcrowded centers of Europe."

—In her appeal for separation from the Rev. J. H. Boyd at Toronto, Mrs. Boyd stated that he was savage, cruel, violently tempered, and that during family prayers he would crawl across the room on his knees, keeping the prayer going all the time, and box his children's ears for supposed inattention.

—The recent session of the great General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which has been the cause of much comment by the leading religious journals, spent two or three weeks in discussing amendments to the Book of Prayer. If these amendments shall be ratified by the parishes, they will be finally adopted by the next General Convention in 1886.

—In less than thirty years, more than three hundred Baptist churches, comprising twenty thousand baptized believers, have been organized in Sweden. The work originated with Rev. Andreas Wiberg, a native of Sweden, educated at the University of Upsala, and for many years a Lutheran minister. Twenty thousand children have been gathered into Baptist Sunday-schools.

—The report of Rev. J. F. Yates, at the State Convention of Universalists, on the state of the church in New York, showed that from an examination of the registers of the past ten years in the United States and Canada, there had been a loss to the church of fifteen parishes and 3,504 families. In ten years there had been in the United States and in Canada an increase of 10,249 church members.

—In the London Record a "Church warden" makes the assertion that "it is well known that auricular confession is resorted to in some large public schools (professedly Church of England schools), and that the book used for the confessional, called "The Priest in Absolution," is of such an obscene nature that it would be punishable under Lord Campbell's Act to offer it publicly for sale, which alone ought to be sufficient to condemn the system."

—"ROME, November 13.—The American Catholic Archbishops held their first meeting to-day at the College of the Propaganda. All the Cardinals of the Propaganda were present. The principal question discussed was that of addressing a demand to the United States that the relations of church and State be based upon canon law." If the Protestant Religious Amendment folks in the United States are not on the alert, they will soon have to take second place in the movement.

—Monsignor Capel recently told an audience in Brooklyn, N. Y., that "the great want of the Roman Catholic Church is a higher social position." Whereupon the Christian at Work refers to the Methodist and Baptist churches as having achieved their greatest victories while social position was eschewed, and their worst difficulties have been encountered since they became rich and aristocratic. On the other hand, Unitarianism was cradled in wealth by distinguished men; yet in one hundred years it had a less number of churches in the whole country than Methodism had in one State.