News and Notes | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 3, 1885

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 34

News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—The Belgian Christians were refused the right to sell or distribute Bibles or Christian books at the Antwerp Exhibition.

—Ninety-three Congregationalist Churches in Connecticut last year received no additions by profession, and lost 185 by death.

—It is said that the first camp-meeting in the United States was held by the Presbyterians, in the year 1800, at a place called Cone Ridge, in Kentucky.

—The World’s Crisis, in a note concerning a certain minister, says that “he is inaugerating a model church.” That means, we suppose, that he is boring them to death. Too bad.

—A devout Catholic in Montreal has just been fined for irreverence, because, having the rheumatism, he kneeled only on one knee instead of both. So says the Congregationalist.

—A clergyman has been making calculations, and announces that all the salaries of religious teachers in the country do not amount to so much as the sum spent annually in supporting dogs.

—The Protestant denominations have sent to the stations in Asia, during the last fifteen years, forty-four lady physicians, whose medical skill has opened the way for effective preaching of the gospel.

—In nearly all the cantons of Switzerland, the meetings of the Salvation Army have been prohibited. It has been decided by the authorities that the Salvation Army is not a religious association, but a wandering troop of performers, and that as such they cannot hold meetings without proper authorization.

—It is announced that the pope has made a cardinal of the archbishop of Boston. It has been expected that the cardinal’s hat would be bestowed on Archbishop Gibbons, of Baltimore, and the Churchman thinks that the slight is due to the resentment which the pope feels because Gibbons was instrumental in securing the appointment of Mr. Kelley, a good Catholic, as minister to the hated court of King Humbert. Leo XIII. is as jealous of his infallible dignity as was Gregory VII.

—The vicar of St. James’s church, Stratford-on-Avon, recently held “special services” in honor of the patron saint. The services began with a “choral celebration of the holy communion,” and after a cricket match between the clergy and choir, and the congregation, the distribution of various prizes, among which was one for “the heaviest baby under two years of age, baptized in the church,” closed with a “grinning match,” in which the man who could make the ugliest face received a prize. That vicar has solved the problem of “how to reach the masses.”

—The Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, in opening a church bazaar, recently, spoke strongly in recommendation of bazaars, and declared himself in favor of raffles, which he said were not incentives to gambling. He said that he himself had invested in more than 500 raffles, and had never secured a prize. This in itself, he considered a sufficient deterrent from gambling. Uniform losses do not seem to have deterred the archbishop from raffling, but we now have a new definition for gambling. If you win, you are gambling; if you lose, you are not gambling. Church fairs are, after all, conservators of morals, for the victim, whatever the game, is always sure to be fleeced.