Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 June 1875 — RELIGIOUS AND EDUCATIONAL. [ARTICLE]

RELIGIOUS AND EDUCATIONAL.

—Gen. Eaton, United States Commissioner of Education, estimates the child population between the ages of six and sixteen in the thirty-seven States and Territories at about 10,288,000. An army of 300,000 teachers is needed to educate this host of citizens and future freemen. —The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church does not present a satisfactory report for the past year. The entire receipts were $456,718, $32,000 less than the previous year. The debt of the Board on the Ist of May was $38,282. The gifts of the Ladies’ Boards of Missions during the year increased, but there was a falling oft’ in the legacies and in the contributions from the churches. —ln Massachusetts the law requires that free industrial drawing-classes shall be established in all cities of over 10,000 inhabitants. Last year twenty cities complied with the law and three disregarded it. It is now proposed that the law shall be amended so as to include all towns of over 5,000 inhabitants, which would include forty-three more. There is difficulty in obtaining competent teachers. —The Church Journal (Episcopal) make this startling statement: “Isit an exaggeration to say that the professed churchmen of a city like New York, the people who kneel at our chancels and communicate at our altars, spend more on their wines than on their religion? We believe that the statement is far within the truth. Their amusements cost them far more than their churches. Their luxuries receive their dollars; their charities carefully count their pennies f” —The number of ministers of the Gos£el in the service of the American Home iissionary Society for the past year in thirty-three States and Territories was 952 ; 460 were pastors of single congregations; 277 have supplied two or three congregations each, and 215 have extended their labors over still wider fields. Two missionaries have preached to congregations of colored people, and thirty-four in foreign languages—Welsh, German, French and Swiss. Sixty-seven congregations were organized and sixtythree churches built. —The Southern Baptist Convention, which met at Charleston, S. C., recently, reported that the Home Missionary Board ha 3 employed during the year fifty-one missionaries and agents, including the native Indian preachers. It also reported 1,045 Dapiisms, twenty churches organized, thirteen meeting-houses built, and 204 stations supplied by the missionaries. In thirty years 39,970 baptisms had been administered, 1,940 Sunday-schools organized, 4,650 churches and stations supplied, and $925,255 contributed for missionary work. —Softly now the tender-hearted wife imparts to her searching husband the intelligence that she sent his ' linen clothes to the Kansas sufferers last winter. •! . J —Artificial eyes for horses are, anncranqed. ,1;