News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 22, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 28.

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—In one year Dr. Landsell, the English missionary, has distributed no less than 56,000 Bibles among the exiles in Siberia.

—The native churches of Samoa, besides supporting their own pastors, have contributed, on the average, $6,000 per year for the last twenty-five years to the funds of the London Missionary Society. Yet when the missionaries began their work, the people were dangerous savages.

—The Lever says: "The day is forever past when the intelligent Christian sentiment of this country will approve the tobacco habit in a minister of the gospel." Good; we hope so. But if Christian sentiment will not tolerate tobacco-using in a minister, why should it in a layman? Who can tell?

—A Mohammedan professor for twenty years at the Daoul-Islam of Mecca, a man of wide learning and a rare linguist, who accidentally came upon a chapter of a volume that treated of the Bible, left his post and went to India to inquire into the truth of Christianity. He has now for some months been zealously studying the Scriptures, and has accepted the truth of Christ.

—A correspondent of the New York Journal of Commerce, who is himself a Christian, has been traveling through New Hampshire, and writes as follows: "Be the cause what it may, this is sober truth, that there is as much need of missionary work, by all the orthodox churches, in New England as in China or the Lebanon country. Orthodox Congregationalists may rest assured that the priests of the Maronites, Greeks, Greek Catholics, and other sects in the Mount Lebanon country, preach and teach as sound doctrine and pure faith as are taught and preached in a large number of so-called orthodox churches in New England. Here, rather than across the sea, is your place for mission work."