News of the Week | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, April 21, 1885

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 62, No. 16

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News of the Week.

FOR WEEK ENDING APRIL 18.

DOMESTIC.

—Massachusetts, New York, and Dakota will each take a census this year.

—The Tennessee Legislature passed a bill making ball playing on Sunday a crime punishable by a fine of $50.

—It is said that there are more than 40,000 persons in New York City who depend upon gambling for a living.

—The bill providing for a free park around Niagara Falls was sent to the Governor of New York for his signature.

—Business failures for the week are reported at 196, against 174 last week and 155 in the corresponding period of 1884.

—Apache Indians are reported to be raiding the section about Morenci, Arizona, and two ranchers are said to have been killed.

—Early Monday morning last the steamship Main was in collision with a bark, cutting through the latter craft, and drowning one of her crew.

—The section near Hamlet, N. C., was swept by a cyclone Thursday afternoon, timber, fences, and houses being leveled, but no lives were lost.

—The name “Gazette” has been in use for newspapers since 1570, when it was applied in Italy to a sheet that was sold for a small coin, Gazetta.

—The 1,200 policemen in Philadelphia will hereafter be taxed 25 cents each per month to pay for surgeons and lawyers to look after their welfare.

—General Grant slept well Thursday night, and arose feeling stronger. He passed Friday in a quiet manner, at times pacing his room, and suffered no pain in swallowing his food.

—The Fall River manufacturers of print cloths decided Wednesday to stop their mills for four weeks between now and July 1, which is expected to reduce the stock by 800,000 pieces.

—A ten-pound can of gunpowder was exploded Thursday night in the cellar opening of a boarding-house at Baltimore, partially wrecking the lower portion of the structure and causing great alarm.

—The national government is taking precautions to prevent the introduction of cholera, and the sanitary inspectors attached to the foreign consulates have all been re-appointed by the Secretary of State.

—At Salt Lake City Thursday the Grand Jury returned two indictments under the United States statute, supposed to be for polygamy, and include Bishop H. B. Clawson and Mr. Rossiter, of the theater.

—To make shoe pegs enough for American use consumes annually 100,000 cords of timber, and to make lucifer matches 300,000 cubic feet of the best pine are required.—Philadelphia Press.

—Unknown persons blew up a Chinese wash-house at Anaconda, M. T., Wednesday, four Chinamen being killed and one fatally injured. The explosion shook the town and caused great excitement.

—Belle Kinney, a twelve-year-old girl of Marysville, Ohio, holds her book upside down when she reads, inverts her copy-book and writes with the left hand, and in both is as skillful as other children with their books in the usual position.

—At Oscoda, Mich., Monday, while seven men were cleaning the brick out of John Graw’s mill smoke-stack the bottom tier gave way, and the workmen were buried under 50,000 brick. Four were killed outright and the others seriously injured.

—It is said that the latest surgical luxury—unless we except cocaine, of which such wonderful things are told—is an instrument by which incisions may be made with scarcely any pain. This consists of a knife that is so regulated by a clock-work attachment as to move at the regular rate of one inch in six hours. Patients are not prevented from sleeping while the knife is at work.

—Monday afternoon, in New York, while workmen were engaged in bracing up the yielding foundation of eight five-story tenements on the south side of West Sixty-second street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, the whole structure fell, not a stick remaining standing in the entire row. Up to midnight fifteen or twenty workmen, carpenters, lathers, plumbers, and others had been extricated from the ruins, many seriously injured, and taken to the hospital or their homes. Threats of lynching were uttered against the contractor who immediately after the collapse fled.

FOREIGN.

—Tawhiao, the Maori King, has recommended his people to embrace Christianity.

—General Wolseley says he has no idea of abandoning his intention to recapture Khartoum in the autumn.

—Three days’ quarantine has been ordered at Marseilles, France, on account of the suspected prevalence of cholera at the Spanish port.

—Rumors were flying around Winnipeg Sunday night that the Nineteenth Battalion had a skirmish with Riel, in which eighty men were killed.

—A treaty of peace has been signed between the governments of San Salvador and Honduras, and the latter republic has joined the alliance against Guatemala.

—Reports from Battleford are that the beleaguered people are starving. The Indians in the district are burning and pillaging. Prince Albert is believed to be in a bad condition, and it is feared that Riel’s forces have captured Fort Pitt and massacred the people. Middleton is pressing forward, but his ammunition is said to be almost worthless, and the commissary department is in a wretched state.

RELIGIOUS INTELLIGENCE.

—The International Sunday-school Lesson Committee has been in session in Cincinnati this week to make arrangements for Sunday-school lessons for the coming seven years.

—The British and American Anti-Mormon Association is an organization of recent birth. It proposes to send emissaries abroad to stop proselytizing and frustrate Mormon agents from enlisting new converts, and cut off the foreign immigration into Utah. The headquarters of the association are at No. 204 West Madison street, Chicago.

—The Interior says: “The Exposition at New Orleans is open on the Sabbath (Sunday). The friends of the Sabbath made an earnest protest against this, but were not successful. The only effectual protest would be one from the exhibitors, who should quietly cover their exhibits, and insist upon their right to retain the Lord’s day as a day of rest and worship.”

—The Moravian Theological Seminary at Bethlehem, Pa., has received $5,000 by a bequest of the late Samuel Riegel, of Bethlehem. Some friends of other denominations at Boston, Mass., interested in the work of saving the heathen Esquimaux of Alaska, have quietly sent the sum of $717 to the Mission Board of the Moravian Church at Bethlehem, Pa., to help establish that church’s proposed mission in Northern Alaska. The church in America has itself thus far raised over $5,000 for this cause, and will send two missionaries with their wives to the Esquimaux early in April.

—It was recently announced in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Montreal that a number of relics brought from Rome by the bishop of the diocese were spurious, yet they have been working miracles quite as well as if genuine. There is nothing strange about this, for 99 per cent of all the Romish relics are spurious; and their healing virtue does not at all depend upon their genuineness, but upon the faith of those who use them. Of all the humbuggery which has appeared in any age or land, none surpasses this relic business.—Indiana Baptist.

—Mr. Guinness reports that when he visited King Leopold he asked him, “What makes you so interested in Africa?” His answer was, “You know God took away from me my son, my only son, and then he laid Africa upon my heart. I am not spending the revenue of Belgium on it, but my own private resources, and I have made arrangements that when I die this civilizing and evangelizing work in Africa shall go on.” At the present time the king is expending $400,000 a year in Africa out of his private purse. Having lost his natural heir he has made Africa his heir.

—Mr. A. V. Adrainof, a Russian, who has been traveling in the Altai and Sayan Mountains, found near the Neusel River, a colony of Russian dissenters which dates from the time of the Patriarch Nikon, when the “Raskolniki” strove to seclude themselves from heresy and from authority. They were led by one Ivan Afanasief, who gave himself out to be a Moses leading the people to the land of promise. This land was discovered out toward the Chinese frontier, and the people formed themselves into a kind of commune, and placed the whole of their joint property under the uncontrolled administration of Afanasief. Their occupations are agriculture and hunting.

—Quite a flutter has been caused in Protestant Episcopal church circles in New York, by a sermon delivered recently by Rev. R. Heber Newton, in which the preacher questioned the sanity of Christ, and made other equally bold and radical assertions of a similar character. In his sermon, Mr. Newton, in alluding to Christ as the prince of idealists, said: “The last, worst doubt that could come to me would be the suspicion that this greatest of idealists was carried off his feet by the tide of heavenly life that flooded his soul with divine enthusiasm; that he lost his head in the greatest mission ever trusted to the child of man.” Mr. Newton is to be investigated again as to his theological soundness.

—In Egypt, Syria, and throughout the East generally, Christian missionaries have been directing their energies chiefly to the young. Experience has taught them that very little progress is to be made in dealing with the adult population. Teaching, therefore, has to a large extent taken the place of preaching, and the school that of the church. The schools are well attended, and large numbers of Moslem youth have been and are still being indoctrinated with the principles of Christianity. The Mohammedan leaders have at last taken alarm, and in order to prevent Moslem children from attending the mission schools it has been decreed that no Moslem shall be considered his own master until he is twenty years of age. If it be found possible to enforce such a law it will certainly prove obstructive to mission work.

—Bishop Wm. Taylor of the Methodist Episcopal Church has recently organized a singular missionary expedition to the interior of Africa, consisting of some eighty individuals, men, women, and children. Their proposed route is by ship to Loanda, 200 miles south of the Congo, which is the easier part of the journey and will occupy some five weeks. Thence by boat 120 miles up the Cuanza River. And thence, as best they may—probably on foot—1,000 miles into the interior of Africa. He has refused any help from the church, and goes without purse or scrip, taking only some food, clothing, and tents for shelter. He claims, he says, the right to accept the hospitality of the natives, and teach them to sustain the work of Christianity among them. His church predict a failure, and the work will be watched with interest.