No amount of sophistry can disguise the fact that the church is
primarily a doctrinal organization. No theories of supernaturalism
are needed, in order to teach a pure morality, founded on the social
relations of human beings. If the church existed primarily for
ethical purposes, we should not have the spectacle of some hundreds of
struggling sects, each loudly proclaiming itself as the great repository
of fundamental truth. The religious denominations, at their best, are
rival establishments, vociferously competing for public favor. To say
this, is to cast no reflection on their sincerity. But even the highest
degree of sincerity does not necessarily involve freedom from error.
As mutually destructive theories cannot be alike true, it follows as
an imperative conclusion that not more than one religious body can be
entirely correct in its doctrinal formulas. All may be wrong; all but
one must be. And if the truth rests in a single religious sect, there
exists no competent and wholly impartial arbiter to settle the dispute
in the eyes of everybody. Even if it were not a fact that majorities
cannot determine truth, no one denomination has anything like a
majority. The largest single body is the Roman Catholic. Yet even
this powerful body numbers less than a sixth of the population of our
country. Far behind it comes the Methodist, a much subdivided body. Even
if all its branches be counted as one united organization, it includes
less than one in ten of the population, and is far from containing even
a majority of the Protestant Christians. Exemption from taxation is
primarily assistance toward the spreading of doctrine. Inasmuch as only
one of the beneficiaries of this disguised state aid (if even one) is
the repository of basic truth unmixed with glaring error, it follows
that, no matter where the truth may lie, at least five-sixths and
possibly an enormously higher proportion of the money thus released for
doctrinal proselytism represents the subsidizing by the state of what is
mathematically proved to be false teaching. On this simple proposition
all must agree.