Religious News and Notes.
By Editor
-The Pope has issued an order forbidding the sale of relics. -The Southern Methodist Publishing House in debt $300,000. -The Bishop of Manchester has written a letter strongly denouncing smoking by juveniles. -Rev. Dr. Gäns, of the Reformed German Church, of Baltimore, has gone over to the Catholics. -A Boston church refused membership to an editor because he did work on a Monday morning's paper! -Five lawyers and two clergymen are to examine Archbishop Purcell's financial operations in Cincinnati. -The United States sends 460 missionaries to foreign fields, Germany more than 500, and Great Britain 1,000. -A Catholic paper says the Pope is living in "noble poverty." He is no doubt reduced to sumptuous fasting! -The N. Y. Tablet says the Catholic church is "the sole depositary of religious truth, of justice, and of piety." -The first lady student of theology in the Methodist school at Evanston, Ill., will graduate the coming Spring. -The Roman Catholic Bishop of Montreal has prohibited female singers in the choirs of his diocese after June 1. -A Baptist preacher in North Carolina has read the Bible through fifteen times in the last fifteen years by torchlight. -The Presbyterian Board of Relief for disabled ministers has distributed more than $1,000,000 in the last twenty-six years. -The clergy cost the United States $21,000,000 annually; the criminals, $40,000,000; the lawyers, $70,000,000; and rum $200,000,000. -In ten years, ending in 1871, the Roman Catholics of New South Wales, Australia, increased from 99,193, to 145,932, being a larger percentage than any other denomination could exhibit. -It is said that of the hundreds of "perverts" who are going over to the Romish church in England, they are all from the established church with only one exception—a Methodist. -The Christian at Work says, "Although some churches in this city pay their ministers good salaries, all the way from $5,000, to $15,000, the average pay is $500 per annum—about the pay of a stage driver." -A Congregational church in Illinois has rejected a candidate for its pulpit on the sole ground that he used tobacco. The ground is sufficient. It is a shame to any church to accept a minister who uses tobacco. -During the last year there has been considerable agitation in Sweden, to obtain for the congregations the privilege of having some voice in the appointment of their ministers. It meets with strong opposition from the clergy. -Prof. Williams, of Yale, who has spent more than forty-eight years in China and Japan, says there are more than 800 Christian publications in the Chinese language, and that tract distribution is practiced in the interest of false religion. -Another Mormon Bishop, Burton, is on trial for murder. The proof is clear that he shot Morris, "an enemy of the church" authorities, and also coolly shot a woman who upbraided him for the act. Has not our national government suffered this outrageous system of crime long enough? -No less a person than M. Marat, "an Italian bishop, private chamberlain of the Pope, apostolical missionary, honorary canon of the dioceses of Agen, Bordeaux, and Contauces, etc., has been arrested at Versailles, for assaulting a girl in the sacristy. The police had to protect him from the populace. -There are now in Japan 106 Protestant missionaries and 44 organized churches. The congregations, 12 are wholly self-supporting and 26 partly so. The number of native church-members is 1,617, who contributed last year $3,552. There are 3 theological schools, with 100 students, and 9 native ordained preachers, with 93 assistants. -A writer in the Christian at Work, under the head of "Signs of Promise," undertakes to prove the error of advent believers, and one item is that "we have seen bigotry dying by the roadside." And leading men of the leading denominations advise to discipline those ministers who do not believe the Bible teaches that the world will be converted! If bigotry is dead, what is this? -Talmage does not investigate in vain. He says he has discovered that some of the most notorious counterfeiters and defrauders in all the land have believed in the Heidelburg and Westminster catechisms, or sat down at the Methodist love-feasts, or gone clean under the wave at the baptisteries." All of which causes a profession of Christianity to be held at a discount by observing people. -The California Christian Advocate, speaking of the Workingmen's party, which is now properly Denis Kearney's party, says, "in this reform movement the men at the front are without character, intelligence, or property; and in the ranks will be found broken-down politicians, ambitious aspirants for office, with all the vagrants, tramps, and bummers in the country,—all shouting for reform."