Religious News and Notes.
By Editor
—Opposition to the English in Afghanistan is being advocated on religious grounds, thus intensifying the war spirit. —A "Conditional Immortality Association" has been formed in England. A meeting was recently held in London. —The Grand Jury has indicted Charles Demond for embezzling $229,000, the property of the Massachusetts Home Missionary Society. —Dean Stanley clearly shows that "missionary religions" flourish, while non-missionary religions do not. A hint to Christians and churches. —Dr. Talmage has returned from England to the United States. Some of the English religious papers praise him, while others criticize him severely. —The floor of a synagogue at Szolnok, Hungary, gave way on Sunday, Sept. 28, from overcrowding, and eighteen women were killed, and eight seriously injured. —The Rev. I. M. Kalloch has been invited, and has accepted the position, to become Associate Pastor with his father, the Mayor-elect of San Francisco, of the Metropolitan Temple. —The Catholic religion is gradually losing its hold in Honduras. The Government has taken control of collegiate education, and taxes of one-tenth are no longer levied for the support of the Church. —The largest church in the United States is the First African Baptist Church of Richmond, Va. It has 3,300 members. On one Sunday its pastor baptized 598 persons, and added nearly 900 to the church. —The Congregationalist says that nine ministers came to Boston one Saturday to "supply" on Sunday, and this is a common practice, though they seldom find employ. Let them go to Nevada—plenty to do there. —One Christian paper numbers up those who have favored its complaint against long sermons, and another with the same "given name" says:—"At least fifty discreet laymen might forcibly censure the 20-minute sermons which are delivered in some quarters." —The Independent says:—"The ministers who are always preaching at infidelity, and virtually assuming that their audiences are for the most part made up of infidels, when the fact is exactly the reverse, waste a large amount of ammunition to but little effect," which we fully endorse. —The Lutherans estimate that they will gain this year, in Nebraska, not less than 1800 communicants by Scandinavian immigration into that State. The immigration into Minnesota is also very large. In one month 1170 Scandinavians passed through St. Paul. A wide field is opening among that people. —Zion’s Herald, speaking of a "lively camp-meeting" at Des Plaines, Ill., says:—"We have no idea that religion, or the Holy Spirit, was responsible for all that was said, or all that was done, during the exercises of the meeting." And we have no idea that the cause of Christ is benefited by camp-meetings which call for such remarks. —The Christian at Work concedes the correctness of the position of the New York Evening Post, that those who choose to spend Sunday in recreation have the same legal right to do so that others have to spend it in religious exercises, so long as they do not interfere with the equal rights of others, and says:—"While it is assuredly neither practical nor desirable to force the religious duties and observances of the Christian Sabbath upon the whole public, neither is it permitted those having no sympathy with the religious observance of the day to interfere with it." The right to keep and also not to keep Sunday religiously must be respected. —Dr. Prime, editor of the N. Y. Observer, in the Presbyterian General Assembly, on the question of recognizing the Church of Rome as a Christian church, spoke as follows:—"I have seen Rome and Romanism as it is, was, and will always be while its power lasts; a gigantic one-man despotism, an organized conspiracy against the liberties and rights of the human race. Her agents have been expelled by the governments of Europe, because no people are safe where the Romish religion rules. I have stood at the foot of precipices down which she has cast the loveliest women in the world; and by the pits, still yawning, into which unsuspesting Christians stepped from the presence of inquisitors. . . . Is this all past and gone? Are these tales to frighten children out of fable-books of old? No! Give it civil power, and the same spectacle would appear in New York and Philadelphia as delighted the priests and people in the balconies of Spain when the saints of God were burnt to make a Roman Catholic holiday."