News and Miscellany

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 12, 1871

News and Miscellany.

“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”

The cholera is rapidly spreading in Constantinople. There were 380 deaths from the epidemic in that city last week, and the number is daily increasing.

A new religious sect has sprung up in Russia. The reformer, now startling the neighborhood of Ekaterinoslaff, and attracting thousands of converts, preaches polygamy, abrogation of all denominational creeds, and utter religious license, and gives himself out for the Saviour.

A Catholic Union has been organized in New York, under the auspices of Archbishop McCloskey. Its object is stated to be, “first, to invite the co-operation of the whole Catholic world to unite in the effort to reinstate the Holy Father, then to devise every available method of controverting the tendency of the age to materialism, and to neutralize the effect of the daily press upon the minds of the people.” Money is promised in abundance to aid its work.—Am. Protestant.

From Mexico we learn that the country is in a state of anarchy. Formidable revolutions are taking place in nearly all the States, and a change in the existing government is expected before the New Year. A detachment of Government cavalry was defeated by the rebels in a fight near Saltillo, on the 4th inst., and driven into the city. It was stated that the rebels had decided to make a general attack on the town on the 9th inst. General Escobedo has placed all the San Luis troops at the disposal of the government; but he wishes to resign the governorship of the State. The Government forces from Tamaulipas, under Cortina, have advanced into Nuevo Leon; and the rebel leader Navarro has fallen back to Monterey. Cortina had, at last advices, reached a point twenty leagues from that city.

The Year of Disasters.—The ancient saying, that “calamities never come single,” scarcely needed the confirmations of this past year; nevertheless it has them. On the heels of the Parisian disasters there came the Persian famine and our Western conflagrations, and now the loss of the whale fleet. It is true that these calamities strike at points wide apart, but they are the clicks of the telegraph from the same office. Some of us well remember that the year 1849 was that of the destroyed shipping of Chicago, and of the visitation of the cholera, by which, out of eighteen thousand people, one thousand went to the grave. That was the year, too, of such a succession of fires as the city has not suffered till the present season. May God shield us from any duplication of our recent disaster.—Interior.

Increase of post-offices in the United States the past year, 1,553.

Number of persons in post-office service, 43,954.

Total number of marine disasters on lakes in 1871, 1,168.

Amount of public land disposed of during the past year, 10,606,792.03, an increase over last year of 2,511,379.03.

President Grant’s message is well received generally, in this country and in Europe.

Pride shuts out good counsel, both from God and man; humility seeks both.