RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
—Twenty-two churches in the city of New York are now without pastors. —A Chinese hymn-book, in the Mandarin character, has been published at Hangchow. —The Christian population of the province of Janina are fleeing to escape the Turks. —There are in the United States 177 Indian churches, with 27,215 Indian church members. —There are four Protestant Sunday-schools in the intensely Catholic city, Lisbon, Portugal. —Six hundred missionaries are said to have died in India, and the present number there is six hundred. —In Persia, where there is less restraint than in the Turkish Empire, unusual interest in the gospel is now shown by the Moslems. —The International Conference of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of all lands will probably be held next year in Paris. Brussels was first thought of, but the Association there thinks it inadvisable, on account of the strong Catholic element in Belgium. —Three new Sunday-schools have been organized in Saxony. As the result of seven years’ work, there are in that kingdom thirty-seven schools, with 358 teachers and 6,463 scholars. These Sunday-schools are now becoming more important than ever, as religion and Bible lessons are no more to be taught in public schools. —The Irish Presbyterian church has a mission in India which during the last three years has numbered about 400 conversions, or as many as during the thirty previous years. Its field embraces six principal and six branch stations, at which ten European missionaries are laboring. There are more than 1,700 scholars in the mission schools. —The right reverend abbot of the community of Trappists at Gethsemane, Ky., has extended to President and Mrs. Hayes an invitation to visit the monastery under his charge during their proposed visit to Louisville. By the rules of this rigorous order no woman is allowed within the walls of their monasteries, unless she be “the wife of the ruler of an empire, kingdom, or republic;” and should Mrs. Hayes accept the invitation, it is said that she will be the first American woman who has ever seen the inside of such an establishment. —Dr. Sloane of Allegany, at the Pan Presbyterian Assembly, presents a horrid catalogue of inebrious details. The doctor says: “It was estimated that there were 160,000 shops for the sale of intoxicating liquor in the United States, $500,000,000 spent in drink annually, 500,000 habitual drunkards, and at least 50,000 annually going down to drunkards’ graves and the drunkard’s doom. The evil was a terrible one, and the church in the United States had come to realize its importance, for three-fourths of the Presbyterian ministers there had become total abstainers. The church, he submitted, must utter her protest against the drinking usages of society.”