p. 302 | News and Notes

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 14, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 19.

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News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—No less than thirty-three distinct missionary agencies are at work in Africa at the present time.

—There are upwards of 10,000 Protestant children attending Catholic educational institutions in the United States.

—The pastor of a Congregationalist Church in Schenectady has engaged a brass band to play at his Sunday services.

—The church in London of which Newman Hall is pastor has nineteen Sunday-schools, which number in all 5,600 children.

—Mr. Ronayne, the well-known anti-Masonic lecturer and writer, has embraced the faith of the Bible sabbath and connected himself with the Seventh-day Baptists.

—Bishop McQuaid (Roman Catholic) of Rochester, N. Y., has ordered that hereafter, in his diocese, none but Roman Catholics and actual communicants shall sing in the choirs.

—An exchange says: “The lawyer who knows as little about Blackstone and the Supreme Court reports as the average Christian does about the Bible, would never have but one case. The sheriff would be his next client.”

—In the University of Berlin a scholarship has been established, open to all theological students, only on condition that they go as missionaries to the East Indies, or to accept a professorship at the European missionary school in Calcutta or Madras.

—A Christian merchant of Philadelphia, in conversation with Dr. Arthur Mitchell of New York, declared that, while interest in foreign missions is increasing among women, it is not among men, because of the increasing conviction that the heathen can and will be saved without the gospel. Perhaps this accounts for the large indebtedness of the various foreign missionary societies.

—The following from an Eastern pastor is a good answer to the argument that skating rinks should be approved because they draw people away from the saloons: “Graduates from the liquor saloons are not suitable companions for our children. Men are not regenerated nor reformed by the rinks. These are not schools for teaching morality. A leper is a leper still, though perched on skates.”

—The American Baptist Missionary Union enters on the current year with a debt of $50,615.76. The friends feel much relieved, as they apprehended a much larger deficit. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions is behind about $80,000. This does not give a very hopeful outlook for the millennium, when we remember what giant strides the nations are taking in the art of war. Missionary and war operations are both carried on, it seems, with borrowed capital, but the latter enterprise has less difficulty to get it.

—The New York Observer, in its notice of the efforts of the railroad commissioners to secure the discontinuance of Sunday trains, says, approvingly: “They hold that Sunday rest is a law of nature, and that the best results of labor will be attained by laying off one day out of seven.” The last statement may be granted, but the statement that nature demands rest on Sunday must be taken with several grains of salt. The Jews are noted for their health and longevity, yet their weekly rest is on Saturday and not on Sunday. The Sunday cause is so weak and flimsy, it would seem, that arguments of great strength are not required for its support.

—Dr. H. Stebbins (Unitarian) preached in his church in San Francisco last week from the text: “Nation shall arise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” His idea was that this state of things is according to the divine plan; that “Christianity adopts nature, and takes the world as it finds it.” Therefore since it is in man’s nature to fight, Christianity approves fighting! Again, he claimed that war is right, “because it is the Almighty’s fiat that the map of the world must from time to time be changed; there must be fresh grouping of the people;” and this can be accomplished only by war. He would put war on an equal footing with peace, for he says: “Though war is often called criminal, peace is seldom innocent.” From these observations he concludes that war “is one of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, and has its natural place in the moral order of nations.” All of which shows that when a professed preacher of the gospel, swings loose from the word there are no limits to the wild theories he may advance.

—Dr. Coxe, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, is reported as saying: “By a solemn act of the Diocesan Council, every clergyman who receives less than $1,000 and a house to live in, is recognized as a contributor to his parish of the difference between his actual receipts and that sum, which is fixed as the lowest salary which should be offered.”

—The clergy of Portland, Maine, have united in an earnest request to the local press of that city to suppress the details of the criminal reports. There is no doubt but the editors would be inclined to do so, but they well know that their patronage would fall off very rapidly if they should. Newspapers publish sensational news because the majority of people want it.