RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
By Editor
-There are 176 churches in St. Louis. -The Universalist ministers have recommended entire abstinence from the use of tobacco. -There are three American missions in Athens, Greece—Congregational, Episcopalian and Baptist. -The number of Sunday-schools in the State of New York is 5,820; officers and teachers, 99,524; scholars, 803,875. Total 903,399. -The Methodist church now own in Mexico $78,590 worth of property. They have there 22 missionaries, beside ten native preachers. -The corner-stone of an institution where the daughters of missionaries may be educated has just been laid in London. The building will cost $75,000. -Since the first of May, six hundred thousand portions of the Bible, in twenty-two languages, have been issued from the Bible stand of the French Exposition. -A new religious paper is soon to be begun in Scotland, called the Scottish Patriot, to combat the papal aggressor. It “will seek to unite all Protestants against the common foe.” -The colored Baptist churches in South Carolina set apart the last Sunday in September as a season for special prayer and missionary collections in behalf of the heathen in Africa. -Minnesota, with a population of 750,000, has only 40,000, or less than one in eighteen, who are “evangelical” Christians. The Catholic population is 114,000, and the Lutheran 92,000. -The ecclesiastical statistics of Spain show a steady decline in the number of priestly and monastic orders within the last two years, while the population has at the same time steadily risen. -It is stated that the translation of the Bible into Turkish is finished, and is ready for the press. The New Testament is printed, and it is expected that the Old Testament, in the Arabic and Armenian characters, will be printed in September. -In London and its suburbs there are 864 Anglican churches, an increase in ten years of 224. The number having daily communion and using eucharistic vestments has increased threefold since 1869. Fourteen churches use incense, 58 altar lights, and in 179 the eastward position is taken. -The prospectus of a new paper about to be started in London, boldly avows its mission to be revolutionary, and the overthrow of wages, inheritance and usury, and declares itself an enemy to that “monstrous metaphysical creation”—God. It will be printed in French and Italian, and called La Guerre Sociale. -The Methodist Episcopal church returns 127,326 colored members in the South, the Presbyterian Board, 10,257, and the American Missionary Association, 4,048. The Protestant Episcopal church has opened 37 chapels for colored members, and the Reformed Episcopal church has built up several flourishing colored churches in South Carolina. -Peter's Pence is coming in so meagerly at the Vatican, compared with the times of Pius, as to cause no little concern at Rome. -The Friends are declining in numbers both in this country and in Europe. In England they received only one hundred and sixty-three new members last year.