RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
—Many priests are leaving Ecuador on account of hostility to the government. —The Book of Common Prayer has been published in the Hong-Chow dialect of China. —The “market-men’s” noonday prayer-meeting, begun last winter, is still kept up in Boston. —The Bible is being printed at the rate of more than a million copies every year, or five copies for every minute of working time. —A bronze statue of Robert Raikes, founder of the Sunday-school system in England, is to be erected in his native city, Gloucester. —An Evangelical Alliance has been formed in Spain, which nearly all the evangelical ministers there, about thirty-one, have joined. It is now proposed to hold a conference of missionaries in Spain, similar to that lately held in China. —The statistics of the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Albany, N. Y., are as follows: Priests, 103; deacons, 14; confirmations during the year, 1,065; communicants, 10,176; current expenses, $137,892; total contributions in the Diocese, $233,278. —The statistics of the Protestant Episcopal church in Connecticut are: Families, 12,539; communicants, 25,686; clergymen, 188; contributions for parochial expenses, $243,381. The total contributions for all purposes is $343,411, which is an average of $18.50 from each communicant. —It is reported that twenty-two persons worshiping at Mr. Ridsdale’s church, Folkestone, have gone over to the Roman Catholic church, and that a number from St. Leonard’s, Wantage, Clewer, St. Mary Magdalen’s, at Paddington, and St. Alban’s, at Holborn, are likely to go the same road. —In a recent massacre of Christians at Eski Saghra by the Bashi-Bazouks, and destruction of their property, over thirty churches and five hundred schools and colleges were burned. The district is one of the richest in that part of Turkey, and contained a large proportion of Christian inhabitants. —The Synod of bishops, priests and lay communicants of New Zealand, known as the church of England, has sent a resolution to the Old Catholics, expressing “its recognition of the earnest labors of the leaders of that movement to bring about a return to the doctrine, discipline and unity of the primitive church.” —The Department of State is informed that the Jewish residents of Smyrna, headed by their grand rabbi, waited upon the United States minister to Turkey during his recent visit to that city, and thanked the Government of the United States for its solicitude for the Jewish people in the Ottoman Empire, as evinced in the recent instructions from the Department of State. —It is stated that “Grace church, Sacramento, Cal., has been sold at auction, and bought by a bank which had a claim for money loaned to erect the building. The rector having resigned, the vestry have made over to him the furniture of the church and chancel, the communion service, etc., to secure to him what they owe him on his salary, and the bank officers have applied to the court for an injunction to annul this action of the vestry, as they want the furniture to satisfy the balance of their claim. So that now, more than twenty-five years after her services were established, the Episcopal church has not a dollar’s worth of property in the capital city of this wealthy State.”