“Men that have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Acts 15:26.
Of all its opponents Rome most hated the Vaudois. To bind one of the primitive Christians to the stake seemed to give strange satisfaction to their modern persecutors. In September, 1560, Pope Pius IV. and his holy college gathered at Rome to witness one of their favorite spectacles. A pile had been raised in the square of St. Angelo, near the bridge over the Tiber. The people assembled in a great throng. The condemned, a pale and feeble young man, was led forth; when suddenly he began to speak with such rare eloquence and force that the people listened; the pope grew angry and troubled, and the Inquisitors ordered the Vaudois to be strangled lest his voice might be heard above the flames. Pius IV. then saw the martyrdom in peace, and directed the ashes of his foe to be thrown into the Tiber.
The martyr was John Louis Paschal, a young pastor of great eloquence, who had been called from Geneva to a congregation of Vaudois in Calabria. The post of danger had a singular charm for the brilliant preacher. He was betrothed to a young girl of Geneva. When he told her of his call to Calabria, “Alas!” she cried, with tears, “so near to Rome, and so far from me!” Yet she did not oppose his generous resolve, and he went to his dangerous station. Here his eloquence soon drew a wide attention. He courted by his boldness the crown of martyrdom. He was shut up in a deep dungeon, was chained with a gang of galley-slaves, was brought to Rome, where Paul had suffered, and was imprisoned in a long confinement. His persecutors strove to induce him to recant; but no bribes nor terrors could move him. He wrote a last fond exhortation to Camilla Guarina, his betrothed; his eloquence was heard for the last time as he was strangled before the stake.
Innumerable martyrdoms now filled the valleys with perpetual horror. It is impossible to describe, it is almost inhuman to remember, the atrocities of the papal persecutors. Neither sex nor age, innocence, beauty, youth, softened their impassive hearts. Mary Romaine was burned alive at Roche-Plat; Madelaine Fontane, at St. John. Michel Gonet, a man nearly a hundred years old, was burned to death at Sarcena. One martyr was hacked to pieces with sabres, and his wounds filled with quick-lime; another died covered with brimstone matches, that had been fastened to his lips, nostrils, and every other part of his body; the mouth of another was filled with gunpowder, the explosion tearing his head to pieces.
The story of a poor Bible-seller from Geneva is less revolting than most of these dreadful scenes. Bartholomew Hector wandered among the peaks of the highest Alps, selling the printed Scriptures to the poor shepherds, who, in the brief summer, when the mountains break forth into a rich growth of leaves, grass, and flowers, lead their flocks to the higher cliffs. They bought the Bibles readily, and the colporter climbed cheerfully from peak to peak. The police seized him and carried him to Pignerol. He was charged with having sold heretical books; he insisted that the Bible could not be called heretical; but the holy office condemned him, June 19, 1556, and he was sentenced to be burned alive; some alleviation of the penalty was afterward made, and the judges permitted the executioner to strangle him before the burning. He was offered his life and liberty if he would recant; he replied by preaching in his prison, with wonderful eloquence, the pure doctrines of the book he had loved to distribute. Amidst the brilliant palaces of Turin, in the public square, the happy martyr died, surrounded by a throng of people who wept over his fate. The priests were unable to suppress that proof of a lingering humanity.
Five Protestants from Geneva were traveling toward the Vaudois valleys. They were warned that the police were watching for them, yet they still pressed on, and were arrested in an unfrequented road where they had hoped to escape pursuit. Two of them, Vernoux and Laborie, were pastors of the valleys. They were all taken before the Inquisitors at Chambery, and convicted as heretics. They were next brought before the civil court to be condemned. The judges, touched by their innocence, strove to prevail upon them to recant. “You need only give us a simple confession of your errors,” said the court, “and this will not prevent you from resuming your faith in the future.” They refused to consent to the deceit, and were sentenced to die. “Anne, my beloved sister and spouse,” wrote Laborie to his young wife, “you know how well we have loved one another. I pray you, therefore, that you be always found such as you have been, and better, if possible, when I am no more.” Calvin, hearing of their danger, wrote them an austere exhortation. In the stern spirit of that age of trial, he urged them to bear a testimony to the faith that should resound afar, where human voices had never reached. The five died full of hope. They were strangled, and their bodies burned.
In this fatal period the public square of Turin was constantly made the scene of touching martyrdoms and holy trials; the Jesuits and the Franciscans everywhere urged on the zeal of the Inquisitors; no village of the Vaudois valleys but had its martyrs, no rock nor crag but witnessed and was hallowed by some joyous death; the rage of persecution grew in strength until it could no longer be satisfied with less than a perfect extermination of the Vaudois.
Thus around the simple Christians of the valleys seemed to hang everywhere the omens of a dreadful doom. In the general tide of persecution, they could scarcely hope to escape a final destruction. From the towers and cathedrals of Turin the Jesuits looked with envious eyes upon the gentle race who neither plotted nor schemed; to whom cunning was unknown, and deceit the ruin of the soul; who never planned a persecution, fomented religious wars, or guided the assassin’s hand; who read the Scriptures daily, despite the anathemas of Rome, and who found there no trace of the papal supremacy or the legend of St. Peter. The Vaudois, indeed, had never concealed their opinions. For centuries they had said openly that the pope was antichrist; they had condemned each one of the papal innovations as they arose; they denounced the crusades as cruel and unchristian; they gave shelter to the persecuted Albigenses; they smiled with gentle ridicule at the worship of saints and relics; they scoffed at the vicious monks and priests who strove to convert them to the faith of Rome. Yet now they consented to claim the clemency of their sovereign, the Duke of Savoy, and humbly begged for freedom of worship and belief. They were so innocent that they could not understand why one Christian should wish to rob or murder another.—Historical Studies.
Scott's Valley, Cal.
By J. D. Rice
I LEFT this field of labor after a stay of about six months. At the close of the fall camp-meeting, I was advised to go to Siskiyou County to assist Brethren Church and Lamb in finishing up the work in which they had been engaged for a few months. I found the work considerably scattered and unsettled. After laboring for some time at different points where an interest had been awakened, we succeeded in organizing a church, and engaging them in the missionary work.
The work was then opened at Callahan's Ranch and vicinity, where about forty signed the covenant. (Rev. 14:12.) There was much to be done for this people, and I stood by them until April 5, endeavoring by public and private efforts to educate them in the way of the Lord more perfectly. (Acts 18:24–26.) Opposition of various kinds has had to be met, but the truth only shone clearer by the contrast. There has been some sifting; but those in whose hearts the truth had been given lodgment were not shaken out.
While we do not see accomplished all we could desire, yet much has been done, and we are not discouraged. There are now in the valley about fifty professed Sabbath-keepers. Some of these have a name to live, but are dead. Many others seem anxious to do their duty, and if they cherish the light they have received and walk in it faithfully, they may be ready for the coming kingdom.
There are among these some noble souls who may be very useful, and an honor to God's truth and work, if they but consecrate themselves fully to his service. There are other worthy ones, who, like the noble Bereans (Acts 17:11), are still searching the Scriptures daily, to see if these things are so. May God mercifully open their eyes to see the truth, and sanctify them through it.
We have two Sabbath-schools in the valley, and as many missionary societies. These are doing a good work. The societies use two distributers, sixty copies of the SIGNS, twenty of Good Health, twenty of Sabbath Sentinel (back numbers), and have on hand a good supply of tracts and books in their library.
Pledges for the year's work aggregate over $300, which is quite good, considering their limited circumstances.
The truth is now established in Siskiyou County. May the rays of light now emanating from this place grow fuller and brighter, mingling with those from other parts, until the earth shall be lightened with its glory, and a people be made ready for our soon coming King. J. D. RICE.
“Why do you idle stand?
There is something for you to do.
Look forth on the wants of the teeming land—
The sorrow and sin on every hand;
Say, is there no work for you?
There is work in the silent cell;
’Mid the noisiest hum and the busiest feet;
In halls where thronging multitudes meet;
In the hovel where outcasts dwell.”
Report of Upper Columbia Tract and Missionary Society
By Mrs. G. W. Concord
For Quarter Ending March 31, 1885.
The report table lists the following headings: Duplicates; No. of Members; No. of Reports Returned; No. of Numbers Added; New Subscribers Obtained; Literature; Good Health; Instruction; Other Periodicals; Missionary Visits; No. of Letters Written; No. Signs Taken in Clubs; Pages, Tracts and Pamphlets Distributed; Perpetual Districts; Membership and Donation; Cash Received: Sales, Periodicals, and T. M. & Reserve Fund; Total.
Mrs. G. W. Concord, Sec.
A Thirst for More.
By Isaac Herr
MANY a young farmer's wife has gone with rosy cheek and light heart into the small, uncarpeted cabin of a rented farm, contented and happy because it was the best her husband could give, and she was confident that his strong arm and willing heart would be able, in the golden years to come, to win a comfortable and pretty home for her. Together they have toiled and waited for the slow returns of harvest after harvest, hopeful and satisfied because they saw the prosperity of thrift and industry steadily settling upon them. By and by they had a farm of their own; but still the young wife had ample cause to regret the scantiness of home comforts. If she hinted now and then of the old promises of betterment in this respect, she was silenced with the assurance that when the mortgage should be paid off and the farm cleared of debt she should have no stint of comfortable and elegant things. But, alas! when the mortgage was paid off there was something else. The old barn was but a poor, tumble-down affair, and a new one was an indispensable necessity. The thrifty young farmer was proud of his fine cattle and horses, and could not bear to have them exposed to the keen winter winds. So the old house, small and rickety, was made to do yet a little while; the ample barn was built, and the poor wife waited.
The time came when they were no longer young. Lines of care and trouble marked the wife's face, and children played about her knee. But she was waiting still. There were so many avenues for money-making, open to him, that the enterprising farmer could not see that his home was scant and lacking. If he was rich in lands and cattle, how could he be poor in any other respect? To him who was out early and late, buying and selling, sowing, tending, and gathering, home was not what it was to her who seldom crossed its threshold into the busy world beyond. Yet he meant to be kind to his wife. He loved her as much as he had time and thought to love. Was she not as rich as he, the joint and equal owner in all he possessed? He worked, and bargained, and schemed less for himself than for his wife and children.
So he thought, but he was mistaken. He worked, in truth, from an insane thirst for more—more cattle, more horses, more lands. He was mad with the mania for possession. His farm was never broad enough, his rolling acres never stretched far enough away. His love of ownership had almost choked out that other and better love, which filled his breast at the marriage altar, and followed him with his young wife into the rude cottage where, after all, their best and truest wedded life had been spent. What wonder that the weary wife sighed as she recalled those days when the golden bow of promise bent lovingly over them. Of course she was proud of her husband's success, of his good name, his influence among men, and the honorable position he occupied. But with all this there was something wanting, there was a scantiness of home love and enjoyment. Then, too, the mother saw her sons and daughters growing up into manhood and womanhood and lacking something which she vaguely but vainly longed to supply,—something more of grace and culture, which her mother's heart told her would be better for them than lands and cattle.
It is not the farmer alone, nor he, perhaps, more than men in other vocations, who allows the thirst for possession to choke down the finer feelings and rarer enjoyments of refinement and beauty. The lawyer does it; the merchant, the business man. It is a sad mistake to become thus absorbed in mere money-getting. It is well to work, but it is neither wise nor well to slave. What is the good of possession if the things possessed are not enjoyed?
It is commendable for the young to look forward to and strive for a competency which301shall open to them avenues of enjoyment now closed by comparative poverty; but let them beware of the money-getting mania. If now and then some new comfort or beauty is not cheerfully added to the home to increase its attractiveness; if all the promises made to the young wife are easily forgotten or more easily broken; if each succeeding year serves but to increase the hoard in the strong box,—then let the man stop and seriously ask himself whether, for a few more acres or a few more dollars, he ought to have foregone all those mental and spiritual delicacies of life which form so large a part of our happiness, and to have left his children only wealth, without that culture of mind and heart which are essential to the right use and enjoyment of it.—Isaac Herr, in Christian Union.
Discontented Girls.
By Margaret E. Sangster
Not every girl is discontented, nor are any wretched all the time. If they were, our homes would lose much sunshine. Certainly no class in the community is so constantly written about, talked at, and preached to as our girls. And still there always seems to be room left for one word more. I am persuaded that the leaven of discontent pervades girls of the several social ranks, from the fair daughter of a cultured home to her who has grown up in a crowded tenement, her highest ambition to dress like the young ladies she sees on the fashionable avenues. City girls and country girls alike know the meaning of this discontent, which sometimes amounts to morbidness, and again only to nervous irritability.
I once knew and marveled at a young person who spent her languid existence idly lounging in a rocking-chair, eating candy, and reading novels, while her mother bustled about, provoking by her activity an occasional remonstrance from her indolent daughter. “Do, ma, keep still,” she would say, with amiable wonder at ma’s notable ways. This incarnation of sweet selfishness was hateful in my eyes, and I have often queried, in the twenty years which have passed since I saw her, what sort of woman she made. As a girl she was vexatious, though no ripple of annoyance crossed the white brow, no frown obscured it, and no flurry of impatience ever tossed the yellow curls. She had no aspirations which candy and a rocking-chair could not gratify. It is not so with girls of a larger mind and greater vitality—the girls, for instance, in our own neighborhood, whom we have known since they were babies. Many of them feel very much dissatisfied with life, and do not hesitate to say so; and, strangely enough, the accident of a collegiate or common-school education makes little difference in their conclusions.
“To what end,” says the former, “have I studied hard, and widened my resources? I might have been a society girl, and had a good time, and been married and settled sometime, without going just far enough to find out what pleasure there is in study, and then stopping short.”
I am quoting from what girls have said to me—girls who have been graduated with distinction, and whose parents preferred that they should neither teach, nor paint, nor enter upon a profession, nor engage in any paid work. Polished after the similitude of a palace, what should the daughters do except stay at home to cheer father and mother, play and sing in the twilight, read, shop, sew, visit, receive their friends, and be young women of elegant leisure? If love, and love’s climax, the wedding march, follow soon upon a girl’s leaving school, she is taken out of the ranks of girlhood, and in accepting woman’s highest vocation, queenship in the kingdom of home, foregoes the ease of her girlish life and its perils of ennui and unhappiness together. This, however, is the fate of the minority, and while young people continue, as thousands do, to dread beginning home life upon small means, it must so remain.
Education is not a fetich, though some who ought to know better regard it in that superstitious light. No amount of school training, dissevered from religious culture and from that development of the heart and of the conscience without which intellectual wealth is poverty, will lift anybody, make anybody happier or better, or fit anybody for blithe living in this shadowy world. I have no doubt that there are numbers of girls whose education, having made them objects of deep respect to their simple fathers and mothers, has also gone far to make the old home intolerable, the home ways distasteful, and the old people, alas! subjects of secret, deprecating scorn. A girl has, indeed, eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when her eyes are opened in such wise that she is ashamed of her plain, honorable, old-fashioned parents; or, if not ashamed, is still willing to let them retire to the background while she shines in the front.
I did not write this article for the purpose of saying what I hold to be the bounden duty of every father and mother in the land, viz., to educate the daughter as they educate the son, to some practical, bread-winning pursuit. That should be the rule, and not the exception. A girl should be trained so that with either head or hands, as artist or artisan, in some way or other, she will be able to go into the world’s market with something for which the world, being shrewd and knowing what it wants, will pay in cash. Rich or poor, the American father who fails to give his daughter this special training is a short-sighted and cruel man.
My thought was rather of the girls themselves. Some of them will read this. So will some of their mothers. Mothers and daughters often, not invariably, are so truly en rapport that their mutual comprehension is without a flaw. There are homes in which, with the profoundest regard and the truest tenderness on both sides, they do not understand each other. The mother either sees the daughter’s discontent, recognizes and resents it, or fails to see it, would laugh at its possibility, and pity the sentimentalist who imagined it. And there are dear, blooming, merry-hearted, clear-eyed young women, who are as gay and as elastic as bird on bough or flower in field.
To discontented girls I would say, there is for you one panacea,—work; and there is one refuge,—Christ. Have you been told this before? Do you say you can find no work worth doing? Believe me, if not in your own home, you need go no further than your own set, your own street, your own town, to discover it waiting for you. No one else can do it so well. Perhaps no one else can do it at all. The girl cannot be unhappy who, without reserve and with full surrender, consecrates herself to Christ.—Margaret E. Sangster, in Christian Union.
The Dome Circle.
TWO ROOMS.
A BEAUTIFUL room with tinted walls,
A bust, where the colored sunshine falls,
A lace-hung bed, with a satin fold,
A lovely room, all blue and gold,
And ennui.
A quaint old room with rafters bare,
A small white bed, a rocking-chair,
A book, a stalk where a flower had been,
An open door, and all within,
Content.
—Good Housekeeping.
The Wire Age.
In history, says an exchange, we have the golden age, the iron age, the age of brass, and other periods similarly marked. Future annalists may well describe the present period of our history as the wire age. In no part of the economy of our daily lives are we divorced from wire. It is our slave, and yet an ever-present master. Sleeping, we repose on wire mattresses. Eating, we see foods which have passed through sieves, and which are sheltered from insect appetite by wire covers. Calling, we pull wires to ring curled-wire gongs. Traveling, we are conveyed by cable or electric railways, hoisted by elevators hung on wires, and hurried over wire bridges. We announce our coming by telegraph or telephone wires, and we thread our way by night through streets lighted by means of electric cables. Across our fields are strung millions of miles of barbed wire. Our clocks are set by wires, our watches are run by wires, our books are stitched with wires, our pictures hung by wires, and our politics managed by “wires.”
Remorse After the Duel: Lives Haunted by Dueling
Remorse.
AN American writer lately endeavored to trace the after-history of noted men, who, in accordance with the code of honor of our grandfathers, had met and “killed their man” in a duel. Fifty years ago, no gentleman was expected to find life endurable after he had received an insult, until he had tried to kill the man who had offended him.
Some of the anecdotes recently collected show how powerful was the social pressure which drove men to the field, and how terrible, in some cases at least, was the remorse that followed. S. S. Prentiss wrote to a friend that his convictions and moral teachings were all so much opposed to dueling that before going out to meet his antagonist he “did nothing but read the Bible and pray.” Yet so strong was the force of public opinion that he fought several duels. “The horror,” he said, “haunts me so that I cannot sleep, and I totter around in the daytime like an old man.”
O’Connell, it is stated, never recovered from the shock of the death of D’Esterre, whom he killed. He never went to church afterwards without wrapping up the “murderous hand,” declaring that he “could not approach his Saviour with the stain in sight.”
Paull, who killed Sir Francis Burdette, suffered so much that he became insane, and finally committed suicide.
Mr. Graves, who killed Cilley in the famous duel, was an altered man ever after, and with his dying breath protested against the folly and crime of the murderous practice.
Now that dueling has fallen into disuse, and is condemned by society, its folly and crime are very apparent to us, and we are apt to be severe in our condemnation of it. Young men wonder at the incredible weakness and wickedness of their grandfathers, that they could be driven to commit deliberate murder merely from the fear of the censure of the fashionable world.
Yet how much stronger than they is the lad who goes to the gaming-table or the bar, and slowly murders soul and body because he is afraid to offend the prejudices of society? Or he who, to keep its favor by maintaining a false show of wealth, degrades his conscience, and murders his good name, by gentlemanly theft? —Youth’s Companion.
MEN do things which their fathers would have deprecated, and then draw about themselves a flimsy cordon of sophistry, and talk about the advance of humanity and liberal thought, when it is nothing, after all, but a preference for individual license.—Rev. John Hall.
ALAS! this time is never the time for self-denial; it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence.—Macdonald.
THOUGHTLESSNESS is never an excuse for wrong-doing. Our hasty actions disclose, as nothing else does, our habitual feelings.
Health and Temperance.
By Joseph Cook
The Tobacco Plague.
“WHAT are said to be the causes of General Grant’s present illness?”
This question you will excuse, because it has been forced upon me. The nation has unmeasured attachment to that great hero, whose dangerous illness it now mourns. We know that he was an instrument of Providence in securing the overthrow of slavery. It is acutely distressing to us to contemplate any spot on the sun of his civic and military and personal career. I, personally, believe General Grant to be a man of lofty moral nature, and of intense ethical convictions. But I have been urged not to evade this question, because the solemnity of the facts which have been stated by medical men of great eminence is such that they ought to be noticed.
We are told by his physicians that General Grant’s present illness was largely caused by excessive smoking. I am not a fanatic, I hope, on the topic of tobacco, opium, or chloral, any more than on that of intoxicating liquors; but as we are now in several commonwealths requiring compulsory scientific instruction of the youth of the land as to the mischiefs of both strong drinks and narcotics, and as it is useless so to instruct youth while the leaders of society set an evil example, I excuse myself, and hope you will excuse me for directing public attention to the testimony of these physicians.
I sit in the railway coaches and at hotel tables, and hear the example of some foremost preacher in London, or of a foremost preacher in one American city or another, quoted in defense of the abundant and habitual use of tobacco. I suppose that physicians will grant that there are a few, perhaps five out of 1,000, who can use tobacco with impunity for a long period of years. But they tell us, also, that the most serious dangers are connected with an excessive use of it, and I think we are all ready to admit that with the young the habit is extremely dangerous.
Germany, in several of her provinces, is arresting on her streets the children who smoke. We know what our own schools for military training and for the education of seamen have been doing of late in this matter. We know what strong resolutions have been passed in some of the great religious gatherings, especially in the vast and aggressive Methodist Church, which may Heaven bless for its crusade against the filthy weed! There is a rising sentiment on the right side of this topic, and why should we not listen to the voice of Providence when it calls our attention pointedly to a great mischief?
When a man in the pulpit, however, sets the example of the use of tobacco to the young in his congregation, must we not lament the fact? Is it not time to lament it in public? Is it not time to ask the revered men who set a bad example in this particular in high places in God’s church, to look at what Providence is doing in this country? A great historic character is likely to be cut off twenty years before the time at which he might otherwise have gone from us, simply because of excess in a habit which, to all who have not learned to like it, is loathsome. One of his staff has had a cancer taken out of his lip, and it originated from a similar cause. The records of the medical profession detail scores of such cases. Emily Faithful says that Americans are very courteous to ladies; but she hints delicately that an American who will take off his hat in an elevator, for fear of being discourteous to a lady, will often, in the same elevator, expectorate or smoke tobacco in her presence. We tolerate in men, habits that we would not in dogs.—Joseph Cook, in the Independent.
Resolutions of Sympathy for General Grant's Affliction
Some of the kind-hearted people of the churches, or Grand Army posts and other associations, have said in their resolutions of sympathy for the illustrious “old commander,” “Whereas, it has pleased God to afflict General Grant,” etc. The expression is a mistake. General Grant’s affliction can hardly be due to the direct interposition of Divine Providence. So far as the physical causes of it can be ascertained, it is supposed to be due to the excessive use of tobacco, and though this should not be dinned in his ears, yet as a warning against smoking, it is proper to make it generally known.—Oregonian.
Difficulty in Convicting Rum-Sellers Near Schools
It is a difficult matter to secure the conviction of a rum-seller, no matter how direct and strong the evidence may be against him. In order to convict certain rum-sellers lately, it was necessary to prove that a school-house, less than 400 feet away from certain saloons, was a school-house, and although the city clerk, the superintendent of instruction, the principal of the school, and the janitor of the building, testified that it was used for school purposes, the evidence was not sufficient to convict.
Prevention of Cholera.
By California State Board of Health
WHAT can be done in the way of prevention locally? Much may be done if the officers of health, or the properly constituted authorities do their duty. Cholera, as was said before, is a preventable disease; its habitat is among a crowd; it revels in filth and decomposing organisms, but failing to find suitable conditions for its growth and maintenance, it dies out. Consequently, the very first thing to be done is for each individual to see that his house, outhouse, and yard is put into a good sanitary condition. Do not wait for any health officer, see to it yourself. Have your drains cleaned out and flushed with water; your privy or cesspool emptied and disinfected immediately. See that your cellar is cleared of all decaying substances, have it thoroughly whitewashed, and all filth, rags, etc., burned. If you have a well, see that the water thereof is not contaminated by drainage from the house or outhouses. If you have the slightest suspicion that it is, boil the water before using, or, better still, shut up that well and dig another away from all chance of such contamination. If you use river water, which is always more or less polluted, see that it is boiled before drinking it, and you will save your health for the trouble. Avoid crowding in sleeping rooms. See that each room is properly ventilated, nothing being so conducive to disease as an overcrowded and ill ventilated apartment. Plenty of fresh, pure air, pure water, and wholesome food, with household and personal cleanliness, will do more to prevent the access of cholera to your dwelling than all the supplications of the credulous, or the nostrums of the charlatan. While there is danger of cholera, or, indeed, any epidemic disease, developing in your midst, it is an act of prudence to avoid excessive fatigue from any source, as the system when tired or exhausted is much more liable to infection and less able to resist it than in other conditions. It is also indispensable that the stomach and bowels be kept in a healthy state by avoiding all unripe fruit, decaying vegetables, fish, flesh, or any food that is not perfectly sweet and fresh. Temperance in all things should be enjoined, and especially in alcoholic beverages, as it is found by experience that the intemperate, or those addicted to drinking intoxicating fluids habitually, are the first to die in an epidemic of cholera. Nature knows no mercy in dealing with the violators of Nature's laws; if her laws are transgressed the punishment is swift and certain. Food should not be kept in the same room with the sick from any infectious disease; neither should that unconsumed by the sick be used by others, but either burned or disposed of in some other safe way.—California State Board of Health.
News and Notes.
RELIGIOUS.
—No less than thirty-three distinct missionary agencies are at work in Africa at the present time.
—There are upwards of 10,000 Protestant children attending Catholic educational institutions in the United States.
—The pastor of a Congregationalist Church in Schenectady has engaged a brass band to play at his Sunday services.
—The church in London of which Newman Hall is pastor has nineteen Sunday-schools, which number in all 5,600 children.
—Mr. Ronayne, the well-known anti-Masonic lecturer and writer, has embraced the faith of the Bible sabbath and connected himself with the Seventh-day Baptists.
—Bishop McQuaid (Roman Catholic) of Rochester, N. Y., has ordered that hereafter, in his diocese, none but Roman Catholics and actual communicants shall sing in the choirs.
—An exchange says: “The lawyer who knows as little about Blackstone and the Supreme Court reports as the average Christian does about the Bible, would never have but one case. The sheriff would be his next client.”
—In the University of Berlin a scholarship has been established, open to all theological students, only on condition that they go as missionaries to the East Indies, or to accept a professorship at the European missionary school in Calcutta or Madras.
—A Christian merchant of Philadelphia, in conversation with Dr. Arthur Mitchell of New York, declared that, while interest in foreign missions is increasing among women, it is not among men, because of the increasing conviction that the heathen can and will be saved without the gospel. Perhaps this accounts for the large indebtedness of the various foreign missionary societies.
—The following from an Eastern pastor is a good answer to the argument that skating rinks should be approved because they draw people away from the saloons: “Graduates from the liquor saloons are not suitable companions for our children. Men are not regenerated nor reformed by the rinks. These are not schools for teaching morality. A leper is a leper still, though perched on skates.”
—The American Baptist Missionary Union enters on the current year with a debt of $50,615.76. The friends feel much relieved, as they apprehended a much larger deficit. The Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions is behind about $80,000. This does not give a very hopeful outlook for the millennium, when we remember what giant strides the nations are taking in the art of war. Missionary and war operations are both carried on, it seems, with borrowed capital, but the latter enterprise has less difficulty to get it.
—The New York Observer, in its notice of the efforts of the railroad commissioners to secure the discontinuance of Sunday trains, says, approvingly: “They hold that Sunday rest is a law of nature, and that the best results of labor will be attained by laying off one day out of seven.” The last statement may be granted, but the statement that nature demands rest on Sunday must be taken with several grains of salt. The Jews are noted for their health and longevity, yet their weekly rest is on Saturday and not on Sunday. The Sunday cause is so weak and flimsy, it would seem, that arguments of great strength are not required for its support.
—Dr. H. Stebbins (Unitarian) preached in his church in San Francisco last week from the text: “Nation shall arise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.” His idea was that this state of things is according to the divine plan; that “Christianity adopts nature, and takes the world as it finds it.” Therefore since it is in man’s nature to fight, Christianity approves fighting! Again, he claimed that war is right, “because it is the Almighty’s fiat that the map of the world must from time to time be changed; there must be fresh grouping of the people;” and this can be accomplished only by war. He would put war on an equal footing with peace, for he says: “Though war is often called criminal, peace is seldom innocent.” From these observations he concludes that war “is one of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, and has its natural place in the moral order of nations.” All of which shows that when a professed preacher of the gospel, swings loose from the word there are no limits to the wild theories he may advance.
—Dr. Coxe, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York, is reported as saying: “By a solemn act of the Diocesan Council, every clergyman who receives less than $1,000 and a house to live in, is recognized as a contributor to his parish of the difference between his actual receipts and that sum, which is fixed as the lowest salary which should be offered.”
—The clergy of Portland, Maine, have united in an earnest request to the local press of that city to suppress the details of the criminal reports. There is no doubt but the editors would be inclined to do so, but they well know that their patronage would fall off very rapidly if they should. Newspapers publish sensational news because the majority of people want it.