News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 16, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 16.

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News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—New Orleans has over 10,000 colored Baptists.

—A Conditional Immortality Association was organized March 10, in Brooklyn, N. Y.

—Berlin, Germany, has but one church to 50,000 of its population, but it has 11,000 drinking saloons in the city.

—The Albany County Bible Society of New York celebrated its seventy-fourth anniversary March 10. It circulated during the year 2,349 Bibles.

—A new schooner is to be built for the Gaboon and Corisco Missions, West Africa, which is to be paid for and supported by the children in America.

—Nearly all the Esquimaux of Greenland are adherents to the Lutheran faith, having been converted through the missionary enterprise of the Danish church.

—Of twenty-one missionaries of the London Missionary Society sent to Central Africa since 1876, fully one-third have died, and several have been compelled by illness to go to other fields.

—There are more than thirty Jewish synagogues in New York, some of which are among the most imposing structures in the city. The Jewish population of New York is said to be nearly 100,000.

—The Mennonite Church of Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, at its late session of conference passed a resolution advising and entreating its members to adopt the system of tithe-paying, as a means of supporting their work.

—The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, of which Rev. Dr. John Hall is pastor, last year contributed $146,671, of which $91,007 were for benevolent and miscellaneous causes, and $36,564 for congregational purposes.

—The Boston Watchman says that through the distribution of Swedenborgian literature "there are in all denominations, ministers and laymen who are essentially Swedenborgian in their interpretations of Scripture; a fact the significance of which it is not easy to estimate."

—The number of Methodist Churches in the United States is now 19,065, an increase of 324 during the last year. The number of lay members in full connection with the Methodist Church, not counting the 182,000 on probation, is 1,604,402, an increase of 4,992 during the last year.

—A new sect in Russia, calls its members Jerusalemites. Each member pledges himself to make at least one pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The patriarch at Jerusalem gives to each one who visits him, a card on which is a printed dispensation, which is worn by the possessor as a distinctive sign of his standing. Their meetings are all held in the night in an unlighted place.

—Arrangements have at last been completed for holding the long-talked-of Church Congress. The first meeting is to be held in Hartford, Conn., in May, and invitations have been extended to all Christian denominations to send delegates. One object of the gathering is to promote "good feeling," and unity of action in religious labor. Good feeling is the essential thing with many religionists nowadays.