RELIGIOUS NEWS AND NOTES.
By Editor
—Italy contains 39,480 Protestants, and 3,994,000 Roman Catholics. —There are now 960 missionaries, including catechists, laboring in India. —The First Congregational church in Chicago has a membership of 1,185. —There are twenty thousand Jews in California; San Francisco alone has ten thousand. —Fourteen United Greek churches are reported to have been closed in Poland within two months. —Rev. Jacob Vonbrunn, the only missionary of the Baptist Missionary Union in Africa, is dead. —The Lutheran churches in the United States have 1,300 Sunday-schools, with 120,000 scholars. —Six missionaries, of the several Boards working in Northern China, have recently died of typhus fever. —In the past five years, the addition to the churches of the American Board constitute an advance of thirty per cent. —The corner-stone of the Gilfield Baptist church, Petersburg, Va., colored, was recently laid. This church was organized in 1803, and its membership is now 2,268, being the largest church in the South, with the exception of the First church in Richmond. The building is Romanesque in style, and will cost $17,000, contributed by the colored people, who have also manufactured the bricks, and dug the foundation for the structure. —An exchange says: "The free distribution of the gospel among Frenchmen and others from near and distant countries is carried on with unabated vigor at the Kiosk at the Paris Exposition. Already 600,000 portions of the word of God, in twenty-two languages, have been issued since May 1. Everything indicates that never were Frenchmen of all classes so disposed to receive the truth as at present, and so highly do the authorities esteem the movement, that the Prefecture have granted a special permit to employ colporteurs at the different entrances outside the Exhibition."