Religious Notes | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 17, 1883

Religious Notes.

—A church is being erected by the Baptists of Salt Lake City.

—Mr. Spurgeon says: "If men get a firm hold of Bible truth nowadays they are called bigots."

—The Pope has given his sanction to the project of starting a Catholic university in the United States.

—The Sunday Law was successfully enforced at Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 22, for the first time in six years.

—It is estimated that there are 1,200 towns west of the Mississippi River without churches or regular preaching of any kind.

—Doctor Cuyler truly says: "It is not every faith that saves the soul. There may be a faith in a falsehood which leads only to delusion and ends in destruction."

—The Congregationalist says: "The Church of Christ is on every side yielding to the pressure of a Christless world. It is adopting the customs and habits of a thoroughly worldly society.

—The pastor of a church in the West is said to have refused an addition of $100 to his salary, for the reason that the hardest part of his labors had been to collect his salary, and it would kill him to try to collect $100 more.

—The Christian at Work says: "The grapes are purple for the vintage of the world." On reading the statement we involuntarily turned and read Rev. 14: 15–20. The C. at W. came nearer the truth than it was aware of.

—The Bishop of Gibraltar, in a letter to the London Times, states that "the moral condition of Monte Carlo, containing as it does the very scum of all Europe, is so bad" that he declines to give his sanction to a scheme for the erection of an English church there.

—The Mormons have recently obtained toleration for their sect in Norway. A council of bishops decided that they were not Christians, and hence not entitled to toleration, and thereupon an Act was passed by the Norwegian Parliament, liberalizing the laws sufficiently to include the Mormons.

—In a religious journal of California we find a column and a half devoted to a stale, fictitious story puffing a quack medicine, and on the opposite page a half-column article on "The Higher Life." It is a paper that believes that men go to Heaven at death, so perhaps there is a fitness in it after all. With few exceptions the publishers of religious papers print that for which they are paid the most.

—We lately read of a "Holiness Band" in the East, whose members were so excessively "holy" that they refused to repeat the prayer, "And forgive us our trespasses," etc., because that would imply that they had sins which needed to be forgiven. We cannot vouch for the truth of this, but we are inclined to believe it, for we have seen persons just as self-righteous as that. Besides we read in Luke 18: 11, 12, the account of a "holiness" man of old which is exactly parallel. The Pharisees as a class are by no means extinct.

—The New York Examiner (Baptist) says: "There can be no doubt that there is a serious decline of religious and moral sentiment among the people of New England. Church membership has become too much a thing of conforming to respectability, and too little a thing of deep, inward experience. The religious life has been first reduced to a round of outward observances, and these have been gradually dispensed with. In short, what is needed is Christianity." The Examiner says that it is not comparing New England with any other part of the country, but with itself of a generation ago.

—A Boston minister, writing of the death of his wife, says that she has "ceased to draw that breath on earth, which mortals ignorantly call life." Why "ignorantly"? The Bible calls it "the breath of life," and that ought to be authority in such matters. Such expressions, which are by no means uncommon, show that the Bible is no longer relied upon, even by its professed expositors, as a sure guide. There is a drawing away from the Bible, and a longing after some revelation or testimony that the Bible does not afford. We can assure our readers that the devil will not leave such longings unsatisfied.

—Rev. Hugh McKay, a missionary of the Presbyterian Church of Canada among the Indians at Manitoulin Island, says that when he and other missionaries arrived, not long since, at an Indian settlement, they found fifty Indians waiting in the house to hear the word. At the close of the service an old Indian spoke in feeling terms of the change God had wrought in their midst. "Thirty years ago, we were sounding our war-cry, and fiendishly counting the scalps of our enemies; but now we are sitting at the feet of the Prince of Peace, and doing all we can to make known his name. Three years ago there was not a single person in this settlement who professed to love Jesus; to-day there is worship in every family."