Religious Miscellany

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 9, 1876

Religious Miscellany.

—There are something like fifty thousand Jews in New York city, and most of them are Germans.

—Iowa proposes to restore capital punishment. Eight thousand Quakers in the State have petitioned against the proposition.

—The Rev. Dr. Behrends, who has lately left the Baptist denomination and resigned his pastoral charge in Cleveland, has been called to the Union Church (Congregational) of Providence, Rhode Island. Notification of acceptance has not yet been given by him.

—It is said that the chair in which President Grant sat while listening to Mr. Moody at Philadelphia, brought $25 at auction in that city, on Saturday last. Mr. Moody’s chair brought $55, and Mr. Sankey’s the same. So much for being popular, and in high office!!

—Mr. Godfrey Morse, a member of the Boston School Board, reports that after thorough investigation he finds that the story of a Jewish girl having been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in the Boston Reformatory because she would not attend school on Saturday morning, was absolutely false.

—While correspondents of the press report great reforms in Russia, private reports from Odessa give proof that the country retains something of its old peculiarities. Mr. A. M. Brodsky, one of the richest Jewish merchants, possessor of large estates in Cherson and Podolia, proprietor of one of the greatest flour businesses in Odessa, and for many years active member of the City Council, was suddenly exiled from his home, and without any ceremony sent off to the government of Peru, for remarks expressed in a session of the City Council disagreeable to the government officers.

—A wonderful movement is reported among the French Roman Catholics of Montreal. Two hundred have renounced Romanism since New Year’s Day, and, under Father Chiniquy’s instructions, have received and professed the faith of the Gospel. This makes over 660 converts in less than two months,—and over a thousand within the past twelve months. Such a movement is unprecedented in this Dominion, if not on this continent. Among recent converts is a French nobleman and his family—Le Metayer Masselin de Guichainvill, whose ancestors were Huguenots, one of them, however, renouncing the Reformed faith at the time when Henry the Fourth of France did so, for political ends.

—Lawyers studying the Bible.—The Rev. Dr. Vaughn, one of the most distinguished clergymen of the Church of England, has commenced a course of public readings in the Greek Testament at the Middle Temple Lecture Room at 8 o’clock in the morning. The course is intended specially for the benefit of the lawyers in whose courts the lectures are delivered, and is to be continued every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday during the law term. “If all lawyers were required to have a knowledge of the Scriptures, it might be a benefit to the profession; and would certainly bring about a better recognition of the Bible “as the supreme rule of the nations’ conduct” than any amendment to the constitution possibly can do.