RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
—The Roman Catholics, who had scarcely a single parochial school in this country twenty-five years ago, have now, according to Sadlier's Directory, about 1,700, with 200,000 pupils. —To the question, "What have missions done?" Africa sends back a response from 130,000 church members; Asia, 120,000; Europe with Scandinavia and Germany, 53,000; America, 22,000; Polynesia, 25,000; the West Indies 150,000. A grand total of 500,000 gathered out of the darkness of heathenism into the light of the gospel. —The Quakers are decreasing both in this country and England. We have something over 42,000 of them here, distributed about as follows: New England, 4,500; New York, 3,300; Philadelphia, 3,500; North Carolina, 4,200; Indiana, 16,000; Wisconsin, 11,000; Iowa, 8,500; Kansas, 3,420. There are perhaps 20,000 more in other parts of the world, making a total of about 70,000. —Messrs. Moody and Sankey closed their revival services in Chicago on the 17th inst., to begin in Boston, January the 1st. The influence of these meetings has extended to many other places where revival preachers are at work. At Peoria are Messrs. Whittle and Bliss; Mr. Morehouse at Racine; Needham and Stebbins are at Fort Howard, Wis.; Mr. Rockwell and associates have been at Peru. A revival is also in progress at Indianapolis, and Eld. A. P. Graves has begun a series of meetings in Muscatine, Iowa. —The German missionaries, sent to the Kols of India, after toiling five years and seeing no results, became discouraged, and asked permission to abandon such a fruitless field. The answer was sent them, that it was not their business to want to see fruits. They were sent to preach the gospel to the Kols, and they must continue to do so, whether the people would hear or not. At the end of seventeen years, only 522 had been baptized. But at the end of twenty years, there were 2,100; in 1871, 4,700; and in 1875, 7,500. —In a recent address upon the importance of missionary work in Mexico, Rev. Dr. Butler says: "On this great continent of America there are living at this day thirty-one millions of people speaking the Spanish tongue. These people live in Mexico and various Spanish provinces in South America. Mexico contains by far the larger proportion of the thirty millions of souls, and is in many respects the example for other Spanish States. And where Mexico leads they will follow; and if the seeds of a pure Christianity can be firmly rooted in this central ground, they may be expected to spring up with incalculable fruit among all this vast body of Spanish speaking people." —The Catholic Review objects to any intimation that the Church of Rome dared to excommunicate domestic servants who should engage with Protestants in Minorca, and does not dare to do the same in New York. It replies that the excommunication in Minorca is for disobedience of orders, of which the Churchman says: "That involves just the thing we complain of—that the orders of Romish ecclesiastics are allowed to determine right and wrong, and that these same orders are by no means consistent. The Romish church in America, we believe, would like to be what that church is in Spain. It has no other theory of religion than complete intolerance, amounting to extirpation, of every other belief. But in America it does not dare to avow what it practices in Spain; and its defenders are very uneasy whenever this discrepancy is suggested."