Religious Miscellany

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 28, 1875

Religious Miscellany.

—Thirty-one young men of much promise are attending the Methodist Theological Seminary in India.

—Two hundred Mormons have formed a congregation at London P. O., Canada, and are building a church.

—The Universalists are calling for a revival, and are going to work for it in New York by holding a protracted meeting. Why?

—Cardinal McCloskey is on his way home. He will visit Paris, then Cardinal Manning at London, and Cardinal Cullen in Ireland.

—A German nun died recently in Paris, who is said to have spent a large part of her life in doing penance for Martin Luther, from whom she was descended.

—“The Sabbath Question” and “The Reunion of Christendom” are among the first subjects at the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance to begin at Pittsburg on the 26th inst.

COSTLY MUSIC.—The appropriation for music at Trinity church, N. Y., is not far from $15,000, while Miss Thursby receives $1,500 a year for singing in Dr. Chapin’s church.

—Five years ago a Baptist religious meeting was prohibited in Rome. Now there is a church established, with a membership of ninety-two, and the nephew of a Cardinal, once a Catholic priest, will soon be baptized.

—The Spanish government politely bluffs the papal nuncio’s demand for the enforcement of the old concordat. The pope is reminded that the concordat was established under a different regime, and that religious toleration must be maintained.

—Ecclesiastical costumes in the streets being now illegal in the canton of Geneva, Mgr. Mermillod exhorts the priests to avoid variety, vanity, and negligence, and advises them to take as their models the English and American priests, who wear the short cassock and white Roman collar.

—A series of religious meetings in charge of the Executive Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association, has been begun in the Pennsylvania Railroad freight depot of Jersey City. About two hundred and fifty men gathered around the speakers’ stand, and their interest was most encouraging to the leaders of the meeting. It is thought that much interest may be aroused among the railroad employees.

—The New York Tablet is agitating the subject of a Catholic university. Of their great lack in this direction it says: It is a disgrace to American Catholics that, with the exception of one institution, Georgetown College, which, by the bye, is owed at the present day over two hundred thousand dollars from those whom she has fed mentally and bodily during her illustrious career, we have nothing approaching to a University.

—The death of George A. Smith, the predestined successor of Brigham Young, if he had lived, has taken from the Mormon church one of its principal pillars. He crossed the plains with his chief nearly thirty years ago, and has been his very serviceable lieutenant in building up that singular hierarchy. The steady advances of civilization have encroached more and more upon the last retreat of these unsavory saints, and they have been driven to their wits to find some means of saving their system, which depends now on the lives of a dozen or more shrewd, rich, and unscrupulous men.

—The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions held their sixty-third annual meeting last week. About 2,000 delegates were present. The Board closed its year with a debt of $14,000. The total expenditures for the year amounted to $450,238.00. The number of mission stations is 376; number of missionary laborers in the field, 1,432. The number of pupils taught during the year in the schools was 22,523. The additions to the membership of the mission churches for the year was 1,504. Their general statistics show that the Board is accomplishing a vast work. These 22,000 children being educated in pagan lands are worth the whole expenditure of the Board. They will, most of them, become centers of Christian influence.

—The following from the Interior exhibits great zeal for Sunday. We wish it might be exercised in the cause of the true Sabbath:

“Shall the Sabbath be desecrated in the daily management of the Centennial Exposition next year? Shall the display go on without regard to the Sabbath? We have scarcely regarded it possible that so gross an offense to the American people is seriously contemplated. If it is, and the earnest protests which are rising on all sides are disregarded, then we say let a National Sabbath League be organized, and a straight battle be fought on that issue in Philadelphia next year. Let us test the question whether or not the laws of the State of Pennsylvania can be trampled upon with impunity in the face of an on-looking world. The friends of our free institutions cannot afford to stand by and see our nation disgraced in that manner, and more, they will not. There will be no lack of money to support a defense of the right, by resort to every means of legal redress that the law and the courts afford. One of the chief things that good citizens mean shall be on exhibition in Philadelphia, is a well-observed Christian Sabbath.”