News and Notes | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 11, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 23.

News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—Over 100,000 copies of the Revised Old Testament were sold in New York City the day of its first issue.

—The Independent says: “The ‘Westminster Confession’ teaches us plainly as words could declare it, that some infants are left to perdition.”

—In the Revised Old Testament, the psalms are divided into five books, the last four beginning respectively with the 42d, 73d, 90th, and 107th.

—The churches in Toronto have once a year an Inter-denominational Exchange Day, when Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians exchange pulpits.

—The American Tract Society issued 68,862,904 pages of publications last year. The receipts amounted to $353,818.29, and expenditures $352,141.76.

—Three new Quaker missionaries are reported to have arrived safely at the capital of Madagascar, and a second doctor has been appointed to assist Dr. Fox in the medical mission there.

—No less than 33 distinct missionary agencies are at work in Africa at the present time. In South Africa there are 450 Protestant missionaries, 95 native ministers, 40,000 communicants, 250,000 under instruction, and probably 1,000,000, more or less, under the influence of Christianity.

—Rev. A. J. Gordon, D. D., Rev. H. L. Hastings, and others, were arrested and fined ten dollars each for conducting religious services on Boston Common on Sunday, May 17, without a license. Upon which one of the secretaries of the American Missionary Board remarked that there is not a heathen city on the globe where such preaching would not be allowed. But then, Boston is “cultured,” you know. Yes, it is.

—The Christian at Work says: “The conviction is deepening that there will have to be a revision of the New Testament Revision, unless the work is to be limited to students and scholars. Its use has been discontinued in many pulpits which first adopted it; and it certainly is making very slow headway into popular favor, its stiff literalism and unidiomatic English militating against its adaptability to popular use.”

—The Index argued lately that Washington was a deist. The Congregationalist answered by quotations of Washington’s words and acts in respect to Christ and his religion. The Index rejoined, that, as, in our day, professors at Andover subscribe to creeds which they can accept, only by an interpretation of the language never designed by those who wrote the creeds, so Washington “in times less enlightened than these,” may have said what he did about “the divine Author of our blessed religion” without meaning anything in particular by it. To this the Congregationalist replies: “But, then, Washington seems to have had an exceptionally high standard of honor and right.” That is all right so far as Washington is concerned, but it sets the Andover Professors in not a very enviable light as regards “honor and right.”