Religious News and Notes.
By Editor
—It costs $30,000 a year to keep St. Peter's at Rome in repair. —It takes $58,000,000 a year to support the State Church in England. —A sermon recently preached by Mr. Spurgeon was his fifteenth hundred. The sermons have all been published. —The difficulty of procuring suitable sites for churches is beginning to be felt in London, land fetching fabulous prices. —A new law has been promulgated in Russia, giving to Baptists liberty to worship in houses set apart by the authorities. —During the last year the Gospel was preached in 1,000 towns and cities in China where it had not been previously heard. —The "Old Catholics" are henceforth to be called "Christ Catholics." To distinguish them, we suppose, from the "Anti-Christ." —A London clergyman advises Dean Stanley, after his recent article on "Baptism," either to join the Baptists or go over to the Quakers. —The Christian at Work thinks that some doctrines would be nicely fitted with the theory that Noah's was not the only ark afloat at that time. —Clergy and others of the Church of England are joining the Romish church in consequence of steps which have been taken to suppress Ritualism. They will find their own place. —Rev. Charles Beecher, twenty-two years pastor in Georgetown, Mass., has resigned. Of his resignation Messiah's Herald says, "Whether his adoption of Spiritualism has led to it or not, we have not learned." —The Boston Journal announces that "Rev. Gershom F. Cox died at his residence in Salem, Nov. 16." Dr. Cox was a co-laborer with William Miller in the early proclamation of the advent near. His writings on the subject were able and influential. —In the Louisville Christian Observer of the 12th inst., is the notice of the death of the widow of the Rev. W. N. Peacock, a Presbyterian clergyman of North Carolina, "who died in obscurity and great destitution." We trust there are few such cases, but one is one too many. —The National Baptist says, "The man who preaches for a church gratuitously does them a harm, fosters in them a spirit of niggardliness, and defrauds the pastor who comes after him. All over the country are churches who have been ruined by cheap or gratuitous preaching. They give nothing; they do nothing." —The statistics of the Protestant Church in Berlin for 1878 reveal some curious facts. Only 69 per centum of the Protestant children born there in the year were baptized; only 35 per centum of the marriages of Protestant couples were solemnized by a minister, and only 4,774 of the 9,535 Protestants who died were buried with religious services. —The Catholic Family Almanac for 1880 says that there are 7,000,000 Roman Catholics in the United States. In 1840, there were but 1,500,000. The rapid increase has been mainly caused by emigration from Ireland, Germany, France, and Italy—the four sources from which the United States has drawn most largely for its population within the periods named. —Fifty-nine students have been graduated from the college at Beyrout, an institution established by American Protestants, during the past ten years. Four of the graduates are now engaged in the college, ten are practicing medicine, two are druggists, eleven are medical students, while eighteen are missionary teachers, preachers, and translators. From the medical department, forty-six students have been graduated, and from the pharmaceutical, five. At the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the College an alumni association was formed. —The San Francisco Pacific Methodist commends to the attention of its readers the Thanksgiving sermon of Rev. Dr. Henderson, the new pastor of St. Paul's M. E. Church, South, in which he calls attention to the political degeneracy of the times, and says: "Vice can now outvote virtue. There never was a greater blasphemy than 'Vox populi, vox Dei.' This would be true if the people were virtuous; but, being vicious (the majority), the true maxim would be, 'Vox populi, vox Diablo.'"