Religious Notes | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 5, 1883

Religious Notes.

-There are 577 different editions of the Bible in the public library of Stuttgart, printed in over 100 languages.

-We learn that in the town of Hull, England, there were last year 1,223 convictions for Sunday trading, and but 1,597 in all the rest of the kingdom.

-Preliminary steps have been taken by the Seventh-day Baptists of the United States toward publishing a Seventh-day Baptist Quarterly. The first number will be issued as soon a sufficient number of names is received to warrant the undertaking.

-A Catholic Chinese Mission has been started in San Francisco, which is under the patronage of Rome itself. It has the special sanction of the pope, and its head is a relative of the Papal Secretary of State. About sixty Chinese pupils are now in attendance. In May, four priests will arrive from Rome, who have been commissioned by the pope to labor among the Indians of California. They will establish their headquarters at Clear Lake.

-"A bill has been introduced into the Connecticut House of Representatives for the purpose of amending the divorce law so that divorces may be granted on the grounds of general misconduct." Why not further amend and grant a divorce whenever a wife shall wear an ill-fitting dress or a husband shall fail to brush his hair before sitting down to a meal? -for that is about what the "misconduct" clause can be stretched to include. -Christian at Work.

-President Merrill E. Gates, in an article in the Independent, well says: "In order to do what is right, we must first know what is right. Dwelling upon thoughts of God and duty renders stronger the power of conscience. We need to study carefully how to apply in our own daily lives the moral law, which the seeing power of conscience reveals to us. In no life does righteousness grow of itself, neglected, or against the choice of the intelligent will."

-Mr. Spurgeon says of the Salvation Army proceedings: "It is time that somebody spoke, now that the attempt is made to make men religious by turning all religion into a game of soldiers. Because they would not hinder anything that promised well, Christian men have borne with much that grieved them, but there is a point beyond which long-suffering charity cannot go. That point is nearly reached; even the most ultra-tolerant must feel that hope has been disappointed, and fear now takes its place."

-Rev. Heber Newton's reason for giving his sermons on the "Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible" is in substance this: Men are losing faith in the Bible; they do not believe concerning it as they used to; there is danger that they will throw it away entirely. To prevent this he tells them that the Bible does not teach what they used to think it did; that they need not cease to believe the Bible, because it really teaches just what they think it ought. This preaching is on the principle, "Tell me what you believe, and I will preach it to you." Such preaching is becoming altogether too common.

-Joseph Cook states that in India, according to an authentic and most recent official statement, there are 21,000,000 widows, fully one-half of whom were never wives. This arises from the fact that child marriage is the rule, a girl often being betrothed in infancy. If the person to whom she is betrothed, and whom she may never have seen, dies, she is considered a widow, and must so remain through life, occupying the most menial position, allowed but one meal a day, considered as merely a thing, a proper subject upon which to practice extreme cruelty. And yet in India the religion flourishes which infidels extol as superior to the Christian religion.

-The Christian Herald says: "There is not a syllable in all the word of God which would indicate that a union of the different denominations is possible, much less desirable and Scriptural." The Herald might have truthfully added that there is not a syllable in the word of God to indicate that the existence of different denominations is desirable or Scriptural. Our Saviour prayed that his disciples, and also all that should believe on him through their word, might be one; and Paul teaches, Eph. 4:13, that we will not arrive at the state of "a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ," until we "come in the unity of the faith."

-A writer in the Occident, near the close of a long article on "Infant Baptism" says: "The baptism of their children is not to be neglected by believers for many reasons, chiefly because it is commanded of the Lord," and yet does not tell us where this commandment may be found. But perhaps he thought it was of no use to try to hunt up the commandment, since he says that the baptism of a child "neither makes him a member of the church on earth, nor gives him any title to the privileges of the church in Heaven." From which we conclude that he himself is not very clear as to the use of infant baptism anyway; and we are sure that a perusal of his article has not enlightened us the least.

-The New York Examiner (Baptist) publishes an article entitled, "Wherein Moses and Jesus Are One," showing that there is no conflict between Moses and Christ—between the Old and the New Testaments. Following the closing paragraph: "The idea of obedience to God is an idea uniquely peculiar to the Bible as a book of revealed religion. It belongs equally to the Old Testament and the New. The Old Testament and the New are thus shown to be, by overwhelming probability, one agreeing system of religious truth. They are certainly thus shown, be they true or be they false, to be at any rate indivisibly one in essence and spirit. You cannot throw away the Old Testament and keep the New. The principle of obedience, conspicuously common to the two, unites them indissolubly, as in character so in destiny."

-"Grace Greenwood," writing to the Independent, from Paris, France, uses the following language, which might well have been written as a comment on Luke 21:25, 26: "But the new year seems thus far to be outdoing its predecessor; almost every day's record being of disaster, loss, suffering, tragedies, and most unnatural horrors. The elements seem to be in a state of anarchy—fires, explosions, and overflows, shipwrecks and land-slides; the subsidence of towns, the moving of mountains, the flooding and firing of mines alternately appall us. From Ireland comes the strange story of an ancient reliable bog taking suddenly to traveling and whelming acres of cultivated land. All that we lack are earthquakes and tidal waves; but the new year may have them also in store for us. Here in France we have been spared physical disasters; but the political ground seems a little shaky. . . . The Government has been and is in a condition of perplexity, to designate it by no stronger term."