News and Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 3, 1884

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—One of the Baptist Churches at Bristol, England, will pay for the outfit and passage of fourteen missionaries to China.

—Advices from Rome state that several new cardinals will be appointed in March, and America will probably get one of them.

—Parlor Sunday-schools are the latest means used for reaching those of the upper classes of London society who are not regular church attendants.

—It is said by those who claim to know, that the State of New York has 770,000 persons of school age who are not under any religious instruction whatever, either Protestant or Catholic.

—The Reformed Episcopal Church has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. It has seventy-three church buildings, and eighty-five congregations. Its Sunday-school scholars number 11,000, teachers 1,000. It has $1,000,000 invested in real estate, and its income last year for missionary purposes was $184,500.

—We heartily indorse the following sentiment from the San Francisco Christian Advocate: 'While we earnestly believe in the doctrine of justification by faith, we know of no way to save men who will not obey God. 'Obedience is better than sacrifice.''

—The German missionaries of Ranchi, India, held a grand demonstration in honor of Martin Luther, on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, in which thirty-five thousand native Christians took part. The Christian at Work notes this fact as 'a striking comment on the far-reaching influence of a single life.'

—Rev. Mr. Maturin, of Halifax, a clergyman of the Church of England, in a recent sermon, took strong ground in favor of confession and absolution, claiming that the only divinely instituted means whereby men could have the assurance of absolution was through the apostolic priesthood. He declared that the priests of the Church of England were given power to forgive sins, and that it was right and proper that confession should be made to them. His views, which are held by another clergyman of the same place, are causing considerable excitement.

—The N. Y. Examiner's Boston correspondent says: 'The Thanksgiving sermons of some of our Congregational ministers indicated a desire for a return to the good old Puritan times, when Church and State were one, and religion was a formal element in civil life. Some of them asserted that a State is atheistic which does not recognize God in its constitution and proclaim its law to be the rule of its public life. Baptists have an idea that a State is religious when its citizens lead Christian lives, and that it is far more effective to put the law of Christ into individual hearts than into public statutes.'

—A Catholic paper, referring to the marriage of a Protestant clergyman's daughter, remarks that 'it is only Lutheran bishops, and those of other sects, who can so ably discharge those double duties and reconcile them. The Catholic Church sides with St. Paul, and by the celibacy of her clergy, insures all their devotion and attention to the people. They have no wives, and consequently have no daughters to provide with husbands.' Whereupon the Independent makes the following brief comment: 'Henry, Bishop of Liege, a good Catholic prelate of the time of Gregory X., publicly boasted that he had fourteen children born to him in twenty-two months. He was not tried, nor suspended, nor condemned.'

—Matthew Arnold, the English exponent of cultured infidelity, says in a recent work: 'Our popular religion at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ, as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle,—and miracles do not happen.' Indeed they do not happen, and least of all the miracle of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. That was part of the purpose of God from the foundation of the world. Miracles are not the work of chance, but are always performed for a purpose. We may not always be able to discern the purpose, but that does not alter the fact. The world has moved ever since its creation, in spite of the fact that the greater portion of mankind have not been able to comprehend it, and have disbelieved it.

—The Independent says: 'The Lord Mayor of London is called a Sabbatarian, and he does not resent the designation. Indeed he adopts it in a published letter, in which he announces himself as opposed to removing the restrictions on Sunday trading, and to the opening of museums on Sunday.' All we have to say on the subject is that the Lord Mayor of London, and those who call him a Sabbatarian, would do well to consult a standard dictionary. A Sabbatarian, according to Worcester, is 'one who observes the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath, instead of the first, as the Jews, the Seventh-day Baptists, &c.; one who observes the Sabbath with great strictness.' 'The seventh day is the Sabbath,' and however strictly a man may observe Sunday, he is in no sense a Sabbatarian. To give him such a title is as inconsistent as it would be to call a man a Christian because he worships Mohammed.