The following item sent us from New York is to the point: “Kings County Wheelmen’s Club, which numbers fifty members, gave its annual reception, recently, in Knickerbocker Hall, Clymer Street, Brooklyn. Several clubs from New York and vicinity attended. The wheelmen gave an exhibition of fancy riding, and there was also a bicycle drill, in which movements were made by single file, and by twos, fours, and eights. At one part of the drill two lines of bicyclers advanced in opposite directions, met each other, came to a standstill, and saluted.” We feel like encouraging the use of the bicycle. As a sport it is an improvement on any of the games on which we have had a craze in late years. Roller skating, or standing to roll on spools, is not the healthiest or best exercise; perhaps it is the best substitute that can be invented for skating, but it is a failure for this purpose. The bicycle is useful and graceful, when in motion, and the wheelman gets genuine exercise out of turning the wheel.
There are many opinions advanced on the Newton case. Rev. Heber Newton, of the Episcopal Church, was silenced from delivering a course of lectures on the Old Testament, in which he advanced some startling and new opinions. As to their weight authorities differ. One remarks that they were “The work of a shallow thinker, with fragmentary knowledge, intent on saying startling things.” Others contend that he thought he could make the Bible a more helpful book. Let him have charity; he certainly acted the part of a moderate and wise man in obeying his bishop without making a hubbub. His attempt is but that of hundreds of other men in orthodox churches who every winter introduce courses of lectures in which they instruct their flocks in speculative philosophy, new theories and scientific teachings. A friend recently remarked to the writer: “The first idea of doubt that ever entered my mind was on hearing one of a series of scientific lectures delivered from a Christian pulpit. Pantheism was presented so invitingly that I went home a pantheist.” If minds are speculative they should enter another realm; the practical truth of the gospel is the work of the pulpit.
Decidedly the most sensible opinion on matters in Sudan is that of “Chinese” Gordon, who says: “That the people were justified in rebelling, nobody who knows the treatment to which they were subjected will attempt to deny. Their cries were absolutely unheeded at Cairo. In despair they had recourse to the only method by which they could make their wrongs known; and, on the same principle that Absalom fired the corn of Joab, so they rallied round the Mahdi, who exhorted them to revolt against the Turkish yoke. I am convinced that it is an entire mistake to regard the Mahdi as in any sense a religious leader; he personifies popular discontent. All the Sudanese are potential Mahdis, just as all the Egyptians are potential Arabis. The movement is not religious, but an outbreak of despair. Three times over I warned the late Khedive that it would be impossible to govern the Sudan on the old system after my appointment to the governor-generalship.”
Charles Scribner’s Sons have decided to begin a new issue of The Book Buyer. It was discontinued in 1877, but the demand for such a concise, readable and reliable “Summary of American and Foreign Literature” has led to republication. The Book Buyer is so cheap (fifty cents per year) that every one can have it; it is so useful and authoritative that no book-lover can afford to be without it.
Public opinion on the question of woman’s rights has so shaped itself that we all feel inclined to smile at the speech of the Solicitor of the Treasury against issuing the license as master of a steamboat on the Mississippi, for which Mrs. Mary A. Miller, of Louisiana, applied. Had it been on the ground of inability to fill the position no one would have commented, but on the ground of its “shocking the sensibilities of humanity,” the world laughs. The truth is, no one is seriously shocked—except fossils. Whatever ideas, pro or con, the public may hold on woman’s suffrage, it does recognize the right of women to earn their living in any employment for which they are fitted. The weight of public sentiment would say of Mrs. Miller: “If she be competent to do the work, let her do it.”