News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 25, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 33.

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—The English Church Missionary Society purposes, during the coming winter, to send to India a body of carefully selected evangelists.

—It is said that the Sunday-schools of the Presbyterian Church, on Children's Day, 1887, contributed to the Sunday-school mission work $20,423, which is nearly sufficient to clear off the debt resting on that board.

—A new religious sect has been discovered in China, called Kam-tah or Golden Elizir. The members of this religion profess to select and combine whatever is good in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

—Pope Leo XIII. has published a letter in the organ of the Vatican at Rome, in which he says that his mission has been that of reconciling the Papacy with the governments of civilized States. He has succeeded admirably.

—An invitation has been issued to all German-American Catholics to meet at Chicago September 6. The object is to demonstrate the strength of the German Catholics. It is claimed that there are about two million of them in the United States.

—The New Testament, which was translated into Hebrew by the late Isaac Salkinson, has been reprinted at Vienna in a second edition of 120,000 copies. Copies to the amount of 100,000 are being distributed free among the Hebrew-reading Jews all over the continent.

—Judging by the number of new societies, etc., that are now springing up, it would seem that professed Christians of to-day, like the Athenians of old, spend their time "in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing." One of the latest of these societies is called "The Christian Kingdom Society," and its object is to unite its members in an "endeavor in all things to render faithful and loyal obedience to the Spirit of Christ." Well, such a society is badly needed.

—The Advance says that "Sunday-school missionaries need tact as well as wisdom and grace." It then gives the following, illustrating the kind of tact required to organize a Sunday-school: "Superintendent Ewing, of North Dakota, entering a new town one day, and finding little response to invitations to a religious service, secured the services of a colored man with a banjo and a white man with a violin, and with this orchestra gathered nearly the whole town into an evening audience, to whom he preached; and at the close of service secured the organization of a Sunday-school."