p. 797 | News and Notes

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 30, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 50.

News and Notes.

RELIGIOUS.

—Rev. Wm. Kincaid, a well-known Baptist minister of the Pacific Coast, who recently resigned the pastorate of the First Baptist Church, San Francisco, has received a call to a Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis.

—Dr. Howard Crosby strongly urges the consecration of "Christian capital" for the founding of "good secular newspapers," which shall treat all social and political matters "from a high moral and religious standpoint."

—Referring to the organization of the lower House of Congress, the New York World correspondent says: "For no office was there a keener contest than for the chaplaincy, there being a dozen eager candidates. The $900 prize was captured by Charles B. Ransdell, a young Presbyterian clergyman of Washington."

—There was a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Herald of Truth, at the First Baptist Church, San Francisco, on the 17th inst. In other words, it was a kind of decennial commemoration of denominational deliverance from Kallochism on the Pacific Coast, for which good purpose the Herald was instituted.

—At one of the sessions of the Evangelical Alliance recently held in Boston, Dr. Green, rector of St. Bartholomew's Church, New York, read a paper on "Christianity and the State." He claimed that, one theory of the State being that it is based on a social compact, neither the Christian religion nor any other religion can have any organic connection with it.

—Rev. C. C. Bateman, a Baptist minister, writing "Oregon Odds and Ends" to a Baptist paper, has this to say about Astoria: "Poor Astoria; founded in 1811, and has never been able to keep a pastor of a Baptist Church, with one exception, for a single year at a time! The city has the reputation of being the 'wickedest' place on the Pacific Coast. There are a few Baptists, but the rest are Methodists, Presbyterians, and 'tough citizens' generally."

—Rev. A. J. Gordon, of Boston, in a recent address before the Evangelical Alliance, expressed himself in sympathy with the old view that the divisions of Christendom were an advantage to the cause of Christ, both at home and in the mission field, although he acknowledged that a divided church was not an ideal church, nor the church founded and prayed for by its divine Master. This sentiment is one of the strange anomalies of the modern church.