News and Notes by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 27, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 42.

News and Notes.

By Editor

FOR THE WEEK ENDING AUGUST 20.

RELIGIOUS.

—A daughter of U. S. Senator Martin, of Kansas, has entered a Roman Catholic academy at Leavenworth, with the intention of becoming a nun. She is a recent convert.

—The superintendent of public instruction of the State of New York urgently recommends that reverence for God be made a feature of the education of children during their first two years at school.

—P. P. Bliss, the once noted singing evangelist, together with his wife, was killed in 1876 in a railroad disaster at Ashtabula, Ohio. Since that time his children have received $50,000 income from his interest in "Gospel Hymns."

—A Washington dispatch says that Satolli has decided to remain silent regarding the recent statement that the pope will make the ablegate's authority absolute in this country. Newspaper men are now refused admittance to his residence, and his actions are kept from the public as far as possible.

—The Catholic Mirror represents that while Protestant missionaries in China have fears for their safety if the war with Japan continues, the Catholic missionaries "enjoy perfect security." It would be well for the Mirror to note the words of Paul to Timothy, "All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution."

—Priest Noonan, of Wilmington, Ill., is charged by a brother priest, O'Gara, with the ecclesiastical crime of appearing on the same platform with Protestant ministers, which he did at a temperance meeting. A quite bitter quarrel is the result, and other charges and countercharges have followed. Noonan has been suspended from active work, and has appealed to the pope.

—Spiritualists represent the "spirit land" as a higher sphere than the present life; but everything that purports to come from there indicates a woful degeneracy. Notable men, whose mundane speeches and writings were wise and scholarly, send back to us (through the mediums) the most absurd nonsense, couched in language that would have caused ridicule if uttered "in the flesh," and the pictures that are represented as coming from there are wretched beyond comparison. The Bible says, "The dead know not anything," and all the efforts of the mediums to show that they do know something have so far miserably failed. It would be to the credit of the dead if the mediums would allow them to "sleep."

—While the W. C. T. U. leaders are waxing ecstatic over the temperance agitation of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union, a leading Catholic journal, organ of Cardinal Gibbons, modifies the situation by saying that "whatever is accomplished for temperance in the Catholic Church in this country must be done by moderation. It is said that the saloon must go; but certainly it must go by degrees, and cannot be done away with at a stroke." To this it adds that "the Catholic Church is never likely to declare that the use of wine is a sin, because, among a great number of other reasons, it is used daily in the mass." The W. C. T. U. will find out that Catholics are not going to take any position that will have the appearance of being led by Protestants. Rome is cunning enough to see that professed Protestantism is coming over to her, and she will let them come. Whatever of popular reform she adopts she will adopt independently, and appropriate the honor to herself.