Taking the church population instead of the general population as, from
some points of view, a fairer measure of the degree to which the city
churches amass wealth at the expense of the country churches, we find
that the total number of communicants in 1890 was 20,618,307 in
the entire country. In the 124 cities of importance, the number was
5,302,018. It should further be remembered that the Roman Catholics are
concentrated in the cities, about one-tenth of all the Catholics in the
country being in the single city of New York; and that this sect does
not keep honest records of its communicants, but practically forces all
the children of nine years of age and above, born in Catholic families,
to become communicants, and then on the basis of "once a Catholic,
always a Catholic," counts them forever after in its doctored figures.
Thus the hundreds of thousands of born Catholics who have turned
Protestants are counted twice in making up religious statistics, once
as Catholics and once as members of the denomination to which they have
transferred their allegiance; while the ex-Catholics who have left the
church altogether are still counted in to swell the total. Thus through
accepting the crooked Roman Catholic statistics, the ostensible number
of church members in the country is greatly overestimated by Dr. Carroll
and others, while the proportion of Catholics to the whole number is
likewise immensely exaggerated. Could we squeeze out the water from the
religious statistics, it would be found that the actual percentage of
genuine communicants in the cities is much less than one in four. Even
from Dr. Carroll's figures, however, it is but little more. Thus a
church member in one of the cities is a partner in twice the wealth of a
church member in the country; and "where the treasure is, there will the
heart be also." By the same census, the number of communicants in New
York city was only 866,564, or less than one-twenty-third of the
total, and this in spite of having much more than its share of persons
dishonestly counted as Catholic "communicants." So, according to the
system of church exemption, the rich New York churches, with less than
one church member in every twenty-three in the country as a whole, have
swept into their hands, by the method attributed by the author of the
Proverbs to the daughters of the horseleech, more than one-tenth of all
the church wealth. No wonder they can afford to hire expensive counsel
to appear before the state legislature and the Constitutional Convention
to demand that they be left undisturbed in the profitable enterprise of
impoverishing the community to provide more luxury for themselves.