RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
—At Kioto, Japan, there are eighty-seven students training for the Protestant ministry. —The Episcopalians have erected 37 chapels for the freedmen, and have 57 clergymen and teachers laboring among them. —More than 16,000 natives in the east of Tinnevelly, India, have within seven months placed themselves under the instruction of the Episcopal missionaries for baptism. —There has been an increase of 470 Roman Catholic priests in England and Scotland since 1867, and convents, monasteries and religious orders have multiplied rapidly. —The Philadelphia Annual Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal church, at its session on the 13th of May adopted a resolution strongly condemning the contemplated exodus of the colored people to Africa. —Mrs. Cowgill, an American Friend, visiting the meetings of the Society of Friends in England, sang a Moody and Sankey hymn in a Quaker meeting-house in London. It was the first time singing had been heard there in two hundred years. —The general synod of the German Reformed church of the United States which began its triennial session at Lancaster, Penn., on the 15th of May, comprises 6 district synods, 680 ministers, 1,368 churches, and 146,901 members. —The Governor of New South Wales, Australia, recently, by proclamation, called on the ministers of religion and all other of her majesty's subjects in that colony to observe a day of special thanksgiving to Almighty God for his great mercy in delivering the colony from the suffering and loss attending a long continued drought. —An exchange says: "The Rev. Charles Tamerlane Astley, Vicar of Gillingham, England, whose living is worth $3,400 per annum, besides a free house and fifteen acres of glebe land, has just resigned his incumbency and intimated his intention to withdraw from communion with the church of England because he considers some of its doctrines and practices are drawing many under the influence of Romanism. In his farewell sermon, Mr. Astley specially mentioned the doctrines of baptismal regeneration and priestly absolution as those which he could not seem to tolerate any longer. All honor to every man, whatever may be his opinions, who considers his conscientious convictions first and his worldly prospects afterwards." —Dr. Prime writes for the New York Observer the following on Bible selling in Rome: "When I was in Rome, nearly twenty-five years ago, it was not possible to find a Bible in a bookstore, and its circulation in the Papal States was prohibited. Now it is as freely sold, distributed, and read as in any other country. In my room at the hotel Quirinal, and in each room of this the largest hotel in the city, is a copy of the Bible in the English language—a large, octavo, gilt-edged and handsomely bound Oxford Bible! Such a copy in New York would cost $2.50 or more. An agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society resides in Rome and attends to the distribution of the Scriptures in hotels, institutions, and wherever it will be received. Colporteurs are employed to go about the country and the cities. One of them will be fitted out with a horse and cart, the cart being so constructed as to be converted by night into a bedchamber for the colporteur to sleep in. He goes into a city, gets a license to sell his books in the marketplace, draws a crowd about him, reads the gospel and sells the truth, or gives it away if he thinks it wisest to do so."