THE REMAINING CONCORDATS.
By Editor
WITH the end of the French Concordat there remain but seven countries that have concordats with Rome; namely, Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, Monaco, Portugal, and Spain, and Ecuador in South America. It is a long stride since Luther, facing Charles V and Rome at Worms, said: "Ich kann nicht anders." But all Europe, except France, maintains union of Church and State, even Protestant England and Prussia, and our States do practically the same thing when they give appropriations to private charities of various denominations. There should be constitutional amendments forbidding these subventions. Even the pope, who refuses to receive the $600,000 a year allowed him by the Law of Guarantees, receives indirectly thousands of dollars from the Italian Government in the form of free transmission of his telegrams and despatches. During the Christmas holidays he received countless telegrams from all over the world, and the number increased by the French troubles, and all these were answered, not always in few words, and all franked. The number was so great that the public service was all upset.—N. Y. Independent. The remarkable career of the pseudo-Elijah the Restorer, John Alexander Dowie, was brought to a close March 9 by the hand of death, at Shiloh House, Zion City. Dowie has been before the great American public since 1890, when he went to Chicago where he first started his work. In 1901, Zion City was founded, and in two years reached a population of 10,000, with factories and other institutions to support the inhabitants. His career was a long series of assumption, deception, arrests, dissensions, final break-down, and deposition. He leaves over twenty million dollars, taken in most part from his dupes or the product of their industry. The prophecy of Habakkuk is a prediction of conditions in the last days, of which his own time was a type. It was a time when ambitious men counted men "as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them," to be used to exploit and profit the few. Against these does the prophet hurl the divine denunciations. "Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood and establisheth a city by iniquity." It may promise well, but the end will be woe and desolation.