News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 8, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 14.

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—Speaking of cigarettes, an exchange says: "The empyreumatic oil of the paper is a deadly poison, and it is this that is making idiots and weak-minded creatures of those who otherwise might have developed into men of brain and power and influence."

—Webster & Co., publishers of General Grant's memoirs, are soon to publish the autobiography of Pope Leo XIII. The arrangements between the publishers and the pope have been made, and the book will appear in all the leading languages of the world.

—It is claimed that Mr. Edison is a Spiritualist medium, and that his invention of the quadruplex telegraph was revealed to him in a trance. The Religio-Philosophical Journal quotes a New York Congregationalist minister in proof of the statement.

—The Christian at Work has repeatedly declared its belief that the seventh day of the week, and that alone, is the Sabbath. Its advocacy of the Saturday half-holiday, however, is not a move in favor of at least partial Sabbath observance, but is on the principle that the Sabbath must be devoted to pleasure so that Sunday may be devoted to worship.

—The Indian Witness, in noting the death of the Rev. Cephas Bennett, the veteran missionary of Burmah, says that as the resources of the Baptist mission press at Rangoon developed, he added one language to another till he had printed the gospel message in five different tongues, not one of which ever had a word set up in type before.

—The Saturday half-holiday movement is assuming large proportions. A large meeting in its favor was recently held in Chickering Hall, New York, in which resolutions requesting proprietors of all places of business to close at one o'clock Saturday afternoon, and to take some other day for pay-day, were adopted unanimously and with great enthusiasm. A committee of one hundred was appointed to urge the general adoption of these measures. On this committee are such men as Mayor Grace, Judge Noah Davis, William E. Dodge, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Jacob Astor, Henry Ivison, Dr. Frank Hamilton, William A. Dorsheimer, and the principal clergymen of the city.

—Mr. A. H. Siegfried, Eastern manager of the Chicago Daily News, has a long article in the Christian Union on "The Attitude of the Secular Press towards Religion." His opinion is that the secular press of the United States is on the whole favorable to practical religion, and that "the newspaper can and does go where religion cannot without smirching her garments, and so becomes her willing, strong, and sometimes indispensable ally." Concerning the Sunday newspaper, he says: "It will stay; it will grow; you cannot down it, or even ignore it. What is religion going to do for it and with it? Shall it be a Sunday newspaper, or a paper for and of the Sabbath?" It will doubtless be a Sunday newspaper until the church gets hold of it, when it will be a paper of and for the Sunday.