RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
—There are 3,381 Baptist lay preachers in England. —St. Paul's Cathedral, London, is to have a new $30,000 peal of bells. —The Southern Presbyterians raised last year $47,225 for foreign missions. —The English revisers of the New Testament are revising for the second time the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. —The English Sunday-school Union makes the following report; 4,253 schools, 103,669 teachers, and 951,063 scholars, of whom nearly 4,000 teachers and 12,104 scholars made profession during the past year. —It is stated that a copy of the famous Mazarine Bible is about to be sold at Hotel Droubt, Paris. This edition dates from the fifteenth century, is printed on parchment, only seven were ever made, and the copy discovered sold for $17,000. —The Old Catholic Synod has, by a vote of 75 to 22, declared in favor of marriage of the clergy. —The Congregationalists furnish in England accommodations in their churches for 1,014,413 people; the Baptists for 913,785; the Wesleyan Methodists for 1,702,724; the church of England for about 12,531,400. There are about three millions for whom no sittings are provided. —In the recent Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal church in Michigan, it was proposed that the clergy and laity of the diocese pledge themselves to do without tobacco three months in order to raise money to educate candidates for the ministry. The proposition was voted down, one of the lay delegates remarking he could not vote to deprive the ministers of any of their little comforts! —K. A. Burnell and his brother have closed their one hundred days of Christian work in India. They have traveled over two thousand miles, visited thirty-two towns, and averaged about three meetings per day. The daily union prayer-meetings of Madras, Allahabad, and Calcutta were direct and natural outgrowths of the services, and have promise of permanent good.