News and Notes by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 10, 1890

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 16, No. 10.

News and Notes.

By Editor

RELIGIOUS.

—There are forty-two Congregational Churches in the limits of Chicago.

—The telegraph brings a rumor from New York to the effect that Dr. McGlynn will be re-instated in the Catholic Church.

—At an adjourned meeting of the Philadelphia Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church, the proposition to revise the creed was lost by a vote of 23 to 42.

—The colored Baptists of Missouri have started a denominational school with temporary location at Independence. About 180,000 colored people are in Missouri, with 300 Baptist Churches.

—Some reporters and a detective recently unmasked three persons who were posing as “disembodied spirits” at a seance in Chicago. One of the parties was Mrs. Sawyer, formerly a well-known medium in San Francisco.

—Miss Sharp, the well-known teacher in Africa, has ten students from the Dark Continent who are prepared for a better education than her school proposes. She wants to send them to this country to have them prepared for missionaries in Africa.

—The Christian at Work says: “Baptist progress in Sweden is one of the remarkable religious movements of the present time. Revivals are constant. In twenty years the number of church members has advanced from 7,900 to 32,308. The baptisms in 1888 were 2,390.”

—A second Presbyterian Church in Sitka, Alaska, with eleven members, has recently been organized by Dr. Sheldon Jackson, Rev. John G. Brady, and Elder William A. Kelly. This organization is for white people. The first church, organized in 1884, now numbers nearly three hundred native members.

—Cardinal Gibbons thinks that the best scheme for solving the negro problem in the South is to Christianize. Of course he means make Roman Catholics of them. The theory that this would better their condition is not demonstrated by other countries where the laboring masses are Catholic in faith.

—Father Stephen, of Washington City, a Catholic missionary, has gone to the Indian reservation at Turtle Mountain, North Dakota, at the instance of Miss Drexel, of Philadelphia. The purpose of his mission is to investigate the reports of destitution among the Indians, and, if necessary, to supply them with food and clothing.

—At the opening of a new Roman Catholic Church, in Bedford, England, to the erection of which a number of Protestants had subscribed, Monsignor Capel remarked that it was right for Catholics to receive such contributions, but that they could not in return give to Protestants, because they believed the fundamental principles of Protestantism to be wrong.

—“Sadlier’s Catholic Directory” for 1890, just out, estimates the Catholic population of the United States at 8,277,539. There are 6,332 priests, 7,523 churches, 3,592 chapels, 35 theological seminaries, with 2,132 students, 102 colleges, 655 academies, 653 charitable institutions, 3,194 parochial schools, with 633,238 pupils, 13 archbishops, 73 bishops, 13 archdioceses, 66 dioceses, 5 vicariates apostolic and 1 prefecture apostolic.