It is not strictly true, however, that the church is in no sense a
profit-making institution, or that it has no commercial aspects. If the
church were not successful in a business sense, it could not accumulate
property or capital, and would not have to worry about exemption. There
are more ways of making profits than by straight buying and selling.
An organization which is able to play on the hopes and fears, the
superstitions and sentiments, the beliefs and enthusiasms of its members
and of those who come under its spell, and thereby to secure the means
of buying land, erecting buildings and paying v current expenses, cannot
honestly pretend to be a purely benevolent society. Let its teachings
be true or false, good or bad, the principle is precisely the same.
It receives money from individuals, who believe that they receive,
in spiritual, to some extent in intellectual and esthetic and even in
physical values, an adequate return for what they pay. This is a plain
business proposition, whether the value is really there or not. The fact
that no definite price is fixed for the services, but that payment is at
least nominally voluntary, is wholly irrelevant. A restaurant conducted
on the liberal plan of "eat what you like, and pay what you think it is
worth," would be no less a business enterprise, and its property taxable
as such. As a matter of fact, business men in some lines have actually
been known to follow a similar plan. How successful the church has been
in this regard may be seen by the enormous wealth which various
church corporations have acquired, always under the claim of being
non-profit-making institutions. Trinity Church corporation of New York
owns hundreds of houses, and pays taxes on some $15,-000,000 worth
of property, which it cannot deny that it uses for purely commercial
purposes, besides its immense holdings of valuable land and buildings
claimed to be used by it only for worship and hence exempt from
taxation, amounting to approximately an equal value. Where did Trinity
church, which keeps up the sham of representing the faith of the poor
Nazarene reformer, who "had not where to lay his head," and who lived
mainly by hand-to-mouth charity, get the means of purchasing some
$30,000,000 worth of property, if it is a purely non-profit-making
institution, which has honestly followed its alleged master's express
injunction to "take no thought for the morrow," and to "lay not
up treasure on earth"? Exemption on that part of its property used
"exclusively for worship," by setting free a large proportion of the
moneys accruing to it from its members and benefactors, which would
otherwise have been used in paying its debt to the community, enabled
it to use its surplus in investments which were of a directly commercial
nature. One hand washes the other, and the state is the dupe of the
pious legerdemain.