p. 783 | RELIGIOUS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 16, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 49.

RELIGIOUS.

—The Indiana Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church has resolved not to vote for a man nor a party which sustains liquor license.

—M. Clemenceau, the recently defeated French Radical Statesman, says “the Roman Catholic Church is the greatest political force in existence.” And he ought to know.

—A church at Fostoria, Ohio, has decided to purchase 400 little wine glasses, that each communicant may receive the wine out of a glass which no other person has used, for the purpose of cleanliness and in order to avoid microbes.

—One more minister has gone on record as a practical sympathizer with his congregation in the prevalent hard times. This is Rev. John P. Coyle (Congregationalist), of North Adams, who has informed the trustees of his church that he will accept but half salary until times are better.

—The saying, “Like priest, like people,” is well illustrated in the following confession of Rev. A. W. Momerie, a Protestant clergyman of London: “The clergy are to blame for the bigotry of the laity. We have been bigoted, partly from ignorance and partly from supercilious, priestly pride. We have transferred our bigotry to the laity, and kindled it to a flame.”

—Rev. Madison C. Peters, pastor of the Bloomingdale Reformed Church, of New York City, has inaugurated a system of relief for destitute persons. He has established business relations with a coal and wood company, and is hiring men out of work to saw and split wood. He has a bureau for second-hand clothing, and arrangements for the sale of groceries to the very poor at reduced rates.

—A Topeka, Kan., minister says it looks bad to see those Christians who were loudest in their protestations against the opening of the gates of the Columbian Exposition on Sunday, now being the first to take the Sunday train for that place. Inconsistency always “looks bad,” but how could anyone be expected to act consistently with no higher religious motive than the maintenance of an inconsistent institution.

—On September 13 the corner stone of a new Methodist building was laid in the city of Rome. The building is to occupy the site of a former Catholic Church, which had been built on the ruins of a pagan temple. The structure, when completed, will include a church, offices of the Methodist Episcopal Publishing House, residence of the superintendent of missions of Italy, a theological school, and a boys' school.

—The Living Age (Protestant Episcopal) well says: “When people talk of accepting Christ alone, without the church, they are separating what he himself has joined together. It is a marriage in which there can be no divorce. We shall do well to read and ponder in this connection the latter part of the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians.” But when we are asked to accept the P. E. structure as the only true church, that is another question.

—A New York dispatch of the 6th inst. says that missionaries are in that city endeavoring to spread the faith of Mohammed. Moslem headquarters have been opened at 458 West Twentieth Street, and every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon lectures will be delivered on the doctrines and customs of Islam. Mr. Webb, who is an Englishman converted to Islamism, told his hearers that he did not expect to make converts of them at once. The object of his propaganda at present is simply to educate. He wants Americans to learn something of Mohammed and the doctrines he taught before they make a comparison of Islamism and Christianity and decide which system is the better.

—It is probable that some of the representatives of heathen religions will go home from the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago with the impression that they accomplished a world of good at the great religious show. It is on record that one Catholic bishop felt constrained to thank some of them for their criticism of Christian methods. And they were often applauded by the audiences. Of course these men were deluded by the supposition that everything they saw in “a Christian nation” was Christian,—slaughterhouses, breweries, saloons, and all the forms of dishonesty and revelry. They were even led to suppose that Christianity was represented by the various and conflicting forms of sectarianism, Protestant and Catholic, on outward display at the great contest, and went home with a lower estimate of Christianity than they had when they came. It is a pity, but what else could have been expected. Satan could not have perpetrated a greater deception upon the already blinded heathen than to palm off America’s religious display as Christianity.