p. 239 | Religious Miscellany by Dudley Marvin Canright

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1875

Religious Miscellany.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

FOREIGN.

—Pere Hyacinthe is lecturing at Lausanne, Switzerland, on the Decalogue, and is in feeble health.

ROME, May 15.—The journal La Voce Della Verita has been suspended for publishing the pope's address to the German pilgrims.

—The Russian Government has prohibited all Catholic processions in several provinces of the Empire.

—The investigations preparatory to the canonization of Joan of Arc are being pushed with vigor at Orleans.

—There is an isolated monastery in Turkey inhabited by twenty-three monks, who have not seen a woman since infancy.

—Fifteen years ago the first missionaries began their work in Japan. Now thirteen or fourteen missionary societies are represented at different ports, and about 100 men and women (including upward of forty ordained missionaries) are engaged in gospel labor. But their privileges and liberties are very much circumscribed, and persecution is to be feared any day.

—The Evangelical churches in Jerusalem have about four hundred members, of various nationalities. The native Protestants in Galilee number from five to six hundred.

—The English Presbyterian Church has fifteen missionaries in China, three of whom are medical men.

—A discovery of great interest to Egyptologists and antiquarians generally is reported from Port Said. A learned archaeologist in that place has just found a monumental stone to Thotmes III., under whose reign the exodus of the Israelites is supposed to have taken place. The inscriptions which have already been deciphered contain more than four hundred geographical names, all recognizable, and for the most part belonging to Arabia, Armenia, Nubia, and the coast of the Mediterranean.

—A motion to strike out the so-called "damnatory clauses" from the Athanasian Creed has passed the laity and clergy of the Irish Episcopal Synod, and has been confirmed by the bishops.

—The Roman Catholic bishops of Canada have addressed a letter of congratulation and sympathy to the German prelates, now in conflict with and under the ban of that government.

—A Communistic mob, for what reason does not appear, have burned down a Jesuit College at Buenos Ayres and committed other violent acts. It is likely that public sentiment has been tending, as in Brazil, against the pretensions of the order on account of the avowed supremacy of its authority in matters of religion regardless of the civil power.

—Legal proceedings have been commenced by the Prussian government for the removal of the Prince Bishop of Breslau, for a violation of the ecclesiastical law.

—Moody and Sankey still continue to draw numerous crowds to their revival meetings in London. The aristocrat attend, the feature of one afternoon being the presence of the Princess of Wales.

—Half-way measures, it is evident enough, will not suit Prussia in her fight with the pope. The new bill just introduced into the Lower House of the Diet for the suppression of the religious orders in the Empire is striking deeper than ever. The bill, so far as outlined, makes a clean sweep, though not on the instant. Existing establishments are forbidden to receive new members, and they must be dissolved six months after the bill passes, and of course there is no doubt about its passage.

—In every country and every nation, popery is meeting with adversity and tribulation, except in the United States. This is passing strange.

HOME NEWS.

—There are said to be 400 religious journals in the United States, of which the larger numbers are, Methodist, 47; Catholic, 41; Baptist, 35; Presbyterian, 29; Episcopalian, 21.

—The movement of Bishop Cummins to establish a Reformed Episcopal Church, which is opposed to Ritualism, about holds its own with no apparent increase.

—The Convention of the Young Men's Christian Association at Richmond, Va., is the first one held in the South since the beginning of the war.

—Probably a larger number of the colored people South belong to the Baptist church than to any other. The North and South Baptists are trying to unite in the work there.

—It is stated that twenty thousand Alaska Indians living along the coast, are asking for ministers and teachers; and offer to build churches and school-houses at their own expense.

—Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler has lost only two Sundays, through sickness, in a ministry of twenty-nine years.

—The profits of the Methodist Book Concern go to aid the general work of the denomination, more than a million of dollars having been thus earned by it within the last forty years. At its late anniversary, the agent of the Western Concern said that the latter alone had, within the last six years, sold two and a half million dollars' worth of books.

—Just one hundred years ago the wife and daughters of Daniel Boone came as the first white women in Kentucky, and the first sermon was preached at the Big Spring, in Harrodsburg, Mercer County.

—According to the last official report, there are in Ohio, 650 Baptist churches, 518 Baptist ministers, of whom 464 are ordained, and 54 licentiates. The total membership of the Baptist church is 43,053.

—The Presbyterian Theological College at Princeton, N. J., has five billiard tables in its gymnasium.

—The Chicago Interior suggests that the great revivals now in progress in all parts of the world may be the beginning of the Millennium. If they are all of the class we have witnessed we think the evidence is the other way.

—Hiram Revels, who was the first negro admitted to the United States Senate, is now a doctor of divinity in the Methodist Episcopal Church of Mississippi. He did credit to the State of Mississippi, which he represented in the Senate, by his modesty, ability, and sound judgment.

—Dr. Holland, an Episcopal minister in Missouri, has been preaching against the doctrine of eternal torment. His bishop has mildly rebuked him, and says that the subject seems "purposely to have been left in a certain degree of obscurity."

D. M. C.