News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 18, 1886

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—It is announced that hereafter diplomatic relations will be sustained between the Vatican and the Chinese court.

—A bill to incorporate a new college, to be called the American College of the Roman Catholic Church of the United States, is before the Maryland Legislature.

—New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Nebraska have each passed a law prohibiting the selling or giving away of tobacco to minors. The Massachusetts Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is petitioning the Legislature for a similar law in that State.

—Joseph E. Keller, who for two years has served as assistant to the General of the Jesuit order for all the English-speaking countries, died at Rome, February 5. He was born in Bavaria, but removed to this country when a child, and was educated in St. Louis.

—A painting of the “holy family” in which the artist has represented the brothers and sisters of our Lord, has been exhibited in Vienna. The Catholic Church has “made a great scandal” out of this picture, and masses have been celebrated at Vienna in reparation of the blasphemy.

—The Sunday movement is still onward. In Connecticut there is a bill before the Legislature forbidding the running of any but mail trains on Sunday, except such as the Commissioners shall authorize as necessary, and the handling, loading, or unloading of freight, except in cases of necessity or mercy.

—The Sunday Schools at Work, the organ of the New York Sunday-school Association, says that there are in that State more than 740,000 children and youth who are not under any religious instruction, either Protestant or Catholic. If those children were in Africa, they would be called heathen. Possibly their parents would be also.

—David Whitmer, the last of the three witnesses who saw the original plates of the Book of Mormon, died recently in Missouri. Mr. Whitmer had in his possession a manuscript copy of the book, written by himself as it was “translated” from the plates by Joseph Smith. The Mormons at Salt Lake City have long been anxious to get possession of this manuscript.

—In 1822, the Methodists opened a mission in the Friendly Islands, which, with the usual amount of hard work, has accomplished the usual transformation in the people. Polygamy and idolatry were abandoned, and the king and the majority of his subjects accepted Christianity. Heathen chiefs, aided by Roman Catholic missionaries, instigated a rebellion against the king; and in 1852, in order to secure his throne, he was obliged to protect the French residents and tolerate the Roman Catholic Church. Now the report comes that the Methodists are the victims of persecution; and a leading religious journal thinks that when the particulars are known, it will be quite likely to appear that the persecution is the “result of the intrigues of Roman Catholic missionaries, and is another illustration of their peculiar views of freedom of worship.”

—President Eliot, of Harvard, recently read an essay before the Unitarian Club of Boston, entitled, “The Secularization of Education not a Rational End.” Mr. Eliot says: “The public schools cannot do for Eastern Massachusetts what they ought to do if the Roman Catholic children are withdrawn from them. They will not be the consolidating, fusing, Americanized force that they should be.” This is good so far; but Mr. Eliot proposes a unique method of supplying religious instruction. He would have the children taught by Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish teachers, according to the faith of the parents; and he would have those teachers paid from the public funds. The Illustrated Christian Weekly denounces Mr. Eliot’s “method,” and asserts that “we are entirely justified in maintaining the Bible in the schools; for it is not a sectarian book, but the religious standard for all mankind.” It believes that the real reason that the Roman Catholics object to the public schools is because they are a “consolidating, fusing, Americanized force.” The hierarchy aim to segregate Roman Catholic children from “other children, that they may be more easily managed in the imperium in imperio which the latest encyclical virtually calls for.”