Religious News and Notes.
By Editor
—Another minister has refused the “D. D.” —Atonement day with the Jews, the tenth day of the seventh month, falls on the 28th day of September this year. —The Scandinavian Baptist churches in the Northwest have held their first General convention at Village Creek, Iowa. —Religious papers all take to serials, but the Lutheran, of Philadelphia, has the greatest novelty in this line. It is running a theological dictionary through its editorial columns. —Excitement has been created among the members of the Grand Army of the Republic by the refusal of Bishop Wood to permit members to enter the Catholic cemetery at Philadelphia, on the occasion of the burial of a comrade. —The Christian Register says:—In the thoughtful inner circles of orthodoxy there seems to be a powerful recoil from the doctrine of endless punishment, and many are finding relief in the possible annihilation of the incorrigibly wicked. —In July last 208 Russian Mennonites left Toronto for Manitoba, making a total of 1,325 families, and 7,383 persons who have gone to that region. Of the 1,325 families, 23 went to Northern Dakota; but most of them moved back to Manitoba and several families settled in Kansas. —An eastern religious paper has this item:—At a camp-meeting in Bucyrus, Ohio, a minister prayed fervently that one member of every anti-Christian family in the country might be struck dead, so as to awaken the survivors. The survivors were sufficiently awakened to make it necessary for that minister to close his labors. —The Advocate of Holiness says a young preacher traveled six hundred miles to a camp-meeting in order to get “fully saved.” To which the Cal. Christian Advocate replies that “one better instructed, with clearer views of gospel conditions and Christ’s willingness to save,” would not need to take so long a pilgrimage to find salvation. —The Christian at Work utters the following words of wisdom to an over-working sister: “There may be even religious worship which becomes exciting and dissipating to the real worship of the soul, and fatal to communion with God. Is it not better, by prudence and care, not to get into a place where the doctor must come, with his imperative prohibitions and his compulsory injunctions as to the darkened room.” —The Boston Journal, reporting the (first day) Adventist Camp-meeting at Alton Bay, N. H., speaks of the last Sunday meeting as follows: “The impression obtained would likely be that a great secular jubilee was taking place; and we don’t know, as a matter of fact, as he would be far out of the way. At high noon it did look more like Fourth of July day than as the Sabbath at an Advent Camp-meeting should look.” —The Roman Catholic Bishops of Belgium, in regard to the new education law, have resolved that absolution is to be refused to all teachers and pupils at the public normal schools; that, teaching in all public schools being schismatical, all teachers employed in them are excommunicated. If “the church” would show its consistency, and forbid Catholics to teach in the public schools in the United States, no complaint would be made. —The Moravians are much less numerous than many other churches. Outside of their mission work they have but 122 congregations, with an aggregate of 16,000 members. Yet this little Church sustains 350 missionaries in the foreign field, that is one to every fifty members, and five to every two congregations, while independently of what they recieve from other sources their own members contribute on an average six dollars each per annum. —Dr. Talmage writes, concerning church prayers for fair weather: One minister in North Wales, a few Sabbaths ago, got the wrong place in the Prayer Book, and, to the horror of his congregation, prayed for more rain, not finding out his mistake till it was too late to correct it. But it is a consolation to believe that such a prayer as that will have no effect on the weather. If a man is not enough in earnest to know what he is praying about, his petition is harmless to every one but himself.” —The New York Independent is sharply severe on the “holiness camp-meetings” held by Mr. Inskip, who charges an admittance fee on Sunday. It says: “If the Sabbath is to be a day of recreation and travel for the man—a day for circuses, theatres, and buffoons, to make money—then Sunday, the 17th of August, was well observed at Urbana, O. But to call this Bible holiness, and to set up this mercenary, canting religion as something above the attainments of ordinary Christians, is a piece of indecent assumption.” —Hard times and scarcity of money is the general complaint in England. But Mr. Henry Irving, the tragedian, states that during the past seven months of this year no less than thirty-thousand pounds ($174,600) have been received for admission to his dramatic performances at the Lyceum Theatre. Also twenty thousand pounds ($97,000) have been received from the Comedie Francaise dramatic company at the Gaiety Theatre of which Sara Bernhardt was the tour, during their visit of three months to London. The plays performed by the French company were considered to be of immoral tendency, like most French plays.