After the theologian, the philosopher. These are the words of the
truth-loving friend of justice, Benjamin Franklin:
"When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and
when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it,
so its professors are obliged to call for help from the civil power, it
is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
The soundness of Franklin's test cannot be successfully disputed. If the
churches must look to the state, instead of to their God, for continued
life and prosperity, it is "a sign," indisputable as a voice from
heaven, that they are not divinely commissioned, but are impostors. The
demand for exemption from taxation is a confession of lost spiritual
values.