Religious News and Notes.
By Editor
—A letter from Poland says 150 Jews have been arrested in Koona for seeking to evade military service. —Dr. Charles Beecher has written a book on spiritual manifestations. We have not yet learned its import. —Joseph Cook, in one of his popular lectures, denominated the large fashionable churches "Sunday club palaces." —A California preacher assured his people that he had procured an alarm clock which would wake up the congregation at the close of the services. —In 43 Methodist churches in Philadelphia there are 283 classes with 11,178 members. Of this number only 5219 attended class meetings last year. —The Christian Instructor has been brought to the confessional. It confesses to the crime of having called the first day of the week Sunday instead of Sabbath. —The Roman Catholics have been steadily losing ground in Holland as to numbers, though they have been gaining in political, mercantile, and scientific influence. —The evangelist Moody is carrying on revival meetings in the different churches in Baltimore, changing his base of operations from one to another in order that all parts of the city may be reached. —The Sunday school lesson in the Independent of Febuary 6, on the first Psalm, gives the following definition of "the law":—"Originally the five books of Moses, and then any other expressions of God's law, in book, voice, or conscience." —Dr. Talmage is at last under a cloud. He endeavored to get two of his trustees to sign $5,000 to induce others to sign largely, with the understanding that all above their first subscription was to be refunded to them. One of them, his nephew, replied that honest frankness was necessary to success, and the whole world seems to approve the saying. —The meeting of Baptist ministers of New York and Brooklyn on Monday, Febuary 3, is regarded as the stormiest session they have ever had. The Examiner says it has "no heart" to print the details. After giving "the essential facts in the case," it confesses that every Baptist who reads the full reports in the daily newspapers "will hang his head from very shame." —"Rev. Fred Bell," known as the Brooklyn evangelist, who tried to mend his character in a court in England, and failed, has been equally unfortunate. In a suit against the Evangelist newspaper, in New York, the Court said the evidence of Bell himself showed that the alleged libels were true and published for the public benefit. The jury found accordingly. —A Unitarian minister in Brooklyn, N. Y., is out with the Bible. He says: "Accept the assumption of the Prophetic Conference that the Bible is the word of God, that it is literally God who says that such and such things will come to pass, and we must accept the conclusion of the Conference also, and from henceforth live in continual expectation of the second coming of Christ, and adjust our lives in every part to such an expectation." We fear many other ministers think nearly as this one says. —The San Francisco Hebrew Observer denies the statement of Rabbi Yigdal, in the New York Sun, to the effect that in China there is "a large population of Jews, who sincerely believe in the Lord's Anointed, and, like all Jews, are looking for the coming of the Saviour." The Observer further says that Mr. Yigdal's query whether persecuted Jews are "to have no resting place in this country because they come from China, borders on insanity, considering that among the 150,000 Chinese living in California there is not one Jew, and we are in doubt if such a curiosity exists."