p. 56 | News and Miscellany

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 29, 1873

News and Miscellany.

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

Foreign.

In the British House of Lords, yesterday evening, Lord Cranmore and Browne read the Archbishop’s reply to the Church Association, showing a tendency in the Church of England toward Catholicism, and moved that a committee be appointed to consider what legislation is needed to check the evil.

He supported the motion in a long speech, in the course of which he read passages from the petition of 483 clergymen of the Established Church, asking for the appointment of confessors, and the restoration of other popish practices which the Reformation abolished. He wanted to know by what casuistry English clergymen holding such doctrines retained their positions in the church.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said it was no wonder that public feeling was waking up on this subject. There was good cause for alarm. The power of the Bishops to remedy abuses should be increased.

Horrible Murder and Robbery in Iowa.

On the night of July 21, an express train on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad was thrown from the track, about sixty miles west of Des Moines, by the removal of a rail. The rail had previously been loosened and a rope fastened to it so that parties out of sight could displace it when the train was too near to stop. The engineer saw it move, and applied the air brake and reversed his engine; but as he was doing this, a number of shots were fired at him. The speed of the train was so far slackened as to prevent the destruction of coaches, but the engine ran off and tipped over, as well as two baggage cars. The engineer was instantly killed.

Six men masked in “Ku Klux style,” ran up to the express car and firing into it drove out the messenger and others, and some proceeded to rob the car while others watched the train, threatening, with horrible curses, to shoot any one that dared to show himself outside. The passengers were thrown from their seats by the sudden stopping of the train, and terribly frightened at the danger of their position. A more desperate and murderous proceeding has never occurred in the country.

An idea of the fearful ravages of cholera may be learned from the following:—

EVANSVILLE, Ind., July 18.—Advices from Mt. Vernon, Indiana, report that the cholera is abating in that place. It has almost depopulated the town. All persons who could get away, have left, and the banks and business houses are all closed, and the town seems without population. Resin, pine tar, and coal, have been burned in the streets, and in every house, disinfectants have been placed. People who cannot leave are removing to the healthiest parts of the city. Families are living in ware houses, etc. Every person in the place has had the cholera, and of some large families, only two members are left. There seems to be no apparent cause for the ravages of the epidemic.

The Chicago Journal (evening), of July 26, brings accounts of heavy fires in Portland, Baltimore, and Norfolk, Va., the latter burning at last advices. Smaller fires are “too numerous to mention,” of the fire in Baltimore, a dispatch says: “The fire in several portions of the burned district swept rapidly through the roofs and left the lower portions of whole rows scarcely damaged. This seemed to be caused by the large number of shingle roofs which are so exceedingly dry as to burn like grass. In this way, the fire actually crossed over streets in which the engines continued to work, and left a portion of the fire brigade working in the center of the burning block.”