News and Notes | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 4, 1889

News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—Denmark has only 4,000 Roman Catholics.

—The Methodist Book Concern will be a century old this year.

—A new church building, calculated to seat 2,000 persons, for the special use of the soldiers in garrison, is to be erected in Strasburg, Germany. It is to cost $350,000.

—It is seventy-five years since the first Sunday-school was opened in Boston. There are now 30,000 scholars in that city, under the care of 1,200 helpers, as they are called, of both sexes.

—In Germany the entire number of Sunday-school children amounts to about 230,000, with 11,000 teachers. Many of the German clergy still regard the Sunday-school as an unnecessary institution.

—The chaplain of the Evangelical Hospital in St. Petersburg was arrested recently for receiving into fellowship and administering the communion to the sexton of the hospital, who was a member of the Greek Church.

—Of the 650,000 colored people in Virginia, only 500 are Catholics, and that church is planning to win them to its communion, as in that way only, says the Catholic Review, can they be raised to the "Christian standard of virtue and morality."

—Two hundred Norwegian sea-captains have formed the "Brotherhood of the Sea," pledging themselves to have regular services on board, and to conduct everything on board and on shore in the fear of God. They are all of the Lutheran faith.

—The Moniteur denies that the Pope has admonished the American bishops on account of the progress of socialism among Catholics. On the contrary, the paper says, the Pope has eulogized the religious zeal and activity displayed by Catholics in America.

—The Methodists have already established homes in Chicago and Cincinnati for the members of their new order of Deaconesses. Homes will soon be established in other cities also. The order resembles somewhat that of the Sisters of Charity, and its work will be similar.

—It is proposed to liquidate the total debt on English Methodist property, by forming a sort of syndicate of the leading Methodist laymen, who shall issue bonds for one million sterling at three per cent., thus effecting, at once, a saving to the connexion of the sum of £8,000 annually, in the shape of interest.

—Alessandro Gavazzi, the great anti-Popery lecturer, died recently in the eightieth year of his age. Father Gavazzi, as he was familiarly known, having been formerly a Catholic priest, left that communion many years ago and spent the greater part of his life in exposing the monstrous corruptions and the blasphemous assumptions of the Papacy.

—A resolution was recently passed by the convention of the Reformed Church of Hungary, to the effect that all members of the lower order of clergy who have married, shall henceforth be ineligible for appointment to any living. The plain and unvarnished meaning of this action is, the celibacy of the clergy, which is a long step Romeward. The Reformed Churches are Calvinistic.

—A Presbyterian paper asks, "Are the days of short sermons passing?" and says: "It begins to look as if the turn of the tide was in this direction among our English and Scotch brethren. Principal Cairns adds to expressions already heard condemning undue brevity in sermons, and says that he would utterly despair of the pulpit, if sermons are to be compressed into less than half an hour.