Like all false principles, the habit of accepting a subsidy from
the state does not fail to bring harm to the church itself, as the
intelligent and high-minded among its friends are beginning to realize.
It is not with impunity that an individual or institution adopts
parasitism as a basic condition of existence. At the New York hearing
already referred to the Rev. Charles T. Terry, pastor of the Brick
Presbyterian church of New York City, did not hesitate to aver that
the removal of the exemption graft would kill many churches. A divinely
ordained institution is indeed in a parlous state when it has no shame
in confessing that it is dependent for its very life on the favor of the
politicians, its God having totally forsaken it. Such an organization
is better dead. If the alleged divine head of the church is not able or
willing to preserve it, in accordance with his emphatic promise, "even
unto the end of the world," it is plain either that his promises are
spurious, and hence the whole Christian fabric rests upon imposture and
deserves to perish; or that the church which fails for lack of divine
aid is a pretender and not the real body of believers whom he is pledged
never to forsake. Let those so-called Christians, who cling frantically
to the legislature instead of to Christ for the preservation of the
agency for preaching his gospel, take which horn of the dilemma they
please.
Every form of union with the state has not merely made of the church
an instrument of oppression by reason of its preferred position and the
artificial power thus conferred on it, but has been poison to the church
itself. Its political alliance invariably sullies whatever primitive
purity it may be believed to possess. No person having faith in its
spiritual mission and anxiety to see it kept "unspotted from the world"
and faithful to its "high calling" can fail to oppose every "entangling
alliance" which may tend to corrupt it in even the smallest degree. In
theory, the church should be purged of all motives of self-interest, and
devoted solely to the good of mankind. Exemption from taxation and the
lobbying necessary to maintain this special privilege infallibly defeat
its alleged aims. In the scramble for political favors, it learns the
tricks of "practical politics" at the expense of the unselfish devotion
by which alone it could justify its claims to spiritual leadership.
It gains material wealth at the cost of its own higher purpose. It
unconsciously learns to regard money as the chief object of attainment,
and to compromise its sterner principles for self-advantage. "_Facilis
descensus Averno_" is the motto over its downward path.