I am in receipt of a very interesting letter from the Reverend A. B.
Taylor, Lakeside, New York, in which he says that he reads _The Fra_ with
much pleasure and profit, and often receives valuable help therefrom
in compiling his sermons. Doctor Taylor is an orthodox Methodist, and
the fact that I am able to express for him, in degree, many of the
things he holds as truth is one of the encouraging signs of the times.
It is frank, friendly and beautiful in Doctor Taylor to write me his
acknowledgments. But after writing the letter he adds a postscript. I
might say that I have a suspicion he wrote the beautiful letter in order
to add the postscript, but I will not. Here is the P.S.: “One thing I do
not like, and can not comprehend, is why you so wrongfully advocate the
taxing of church property.” ¶ Then he encloses a column clipping from
_The Christian Work and Evangelist_, wherein the reasons for exemption
of church property from taxation are fully set forth. Very seldom does
one get the entire argument at first hand, but here it all is, skilfully
presented ❦ I give it in its entirety: “The worst enemy New York has, or
any city has, is the perennial critic who would tax the churches. Some
interesting correspondence has recently been going on in one of the New
York papers over this matter. Some one by the name of Hubbard discovered
that there were several million dollars’ worth of property in churches
which was untaxed. The critic supported his arguments by statements
that the churches are not direct public servants, as are schools and
hospitals; that they exist to teach certain doctrines of their own,
differing among themselves, and which have no direct relation to the
public good—some of the doctrines, indeed, being pernicious, according
to this critic. The short-sightedness of all this is apparent to the
most superficial mind. The policy of taxing the churches would be almost
suicidal to any town or city. The churches save New York fifty times
what the city loses in taxes from them. Here are a few facts which when
perceived stop all such talk at once: The Church is the greatest police
force in the community. The Roman Catholic Church alone—we mention that
Church because it practises the negative doctrine of restraint more
than do the Protestant churches—restrains hundreds of thousands of men
and women from petty crimes that would cost New York more than all her
courts and police and jails and prisons have cost her for years. Take
the churches out of New York for ten years and it would be an unsafe
city to live in, and the expense of administering its criminal courts
and prisons would bankrupt it. As a matter of fact, the teaching of any
particular theological doctrine is the smallest part of any work the
churches do ❦ Go into any church in New York and you will find that fully
three-fourths of all the efforts are being directly expended in making
good citizens. In Sunday school the children are being taught honesty,
purity, brotherhood, ambition and the unselfish life. Fully two-thirds
of the sermons of the average preacher are direct inspirations to the
moral life or instructions in ethics. We venture to say that had our
friend collected fifty of the sermons preached in New York last Sunday
he would have found forty-nine which dealt with practical religious life
to one on the doctrine, say, of the future life. ¶ Of course, there
are millions of people who have found in their experience that the
‘peculiar doctrines,’ as our friends call them, produce the highest type
of citizenship. As a matter of fact, the main efforts of the churches of
New York are put on producing honest and altruistic men ❦ Heaven only
knows what would become of the city if its one thousand four hundred
churches were crippled by great taxes. It is bad enough now. The police
service the churches render New York saves the city millions every year.
The service of furnishing her with honest and unselfish men can not be
put in numbers. There are none large enough.” ¶ It will please be noticed
that the editor of _The Christian Work and Evangelist_ starts his article
by informing us who the worst enemy of New York or any city actually is.
This worst enemy, according to my Christian colleague, is the critic who
would tax the churches. Thus, before he attempts to reply to the critic,
he denounces the critic as not only an enemy of the State, but its
worst enemy. Grafters, thieves, dealers in dope, procurers, sweat-shop
fiends, murderers, all take second place: the worst enemy of a city—any
city—is the man who advocates the taxation of church property. The editor
himself is a Christian, a church-member and a clergyman. Does he stand
as a sample of the head, hand and heart of the modern church-member? ❦ I
think so. He is a man of education, of position, honored and respected
in his denomination. And he tells us that people who disagree with him
in a matter of finance are not only the enemies of the State, but its
worst enemies. “A traitor to God is a traitor to his country.” Thus did
religious fanaticism once link the heretic and the traitor as one ❦ To
disagree with the prevailing religion was to be regarded as the foe of
society. How hard the tyrants die! ¶ Yet many clergymen believe that it
would be better to put church property on an absolute parity with all
other property. In fact, many churches now voluntarily pay taxes. The
great and influential congregation presided over by Rabbi Leonard Levy
of Pittsburgh requested the assessors to tax their synagogue at its cost
valuation of three hundred thousand dollars ❦ In Toronto is a Baptist
church—the Jarvis Street Baptist Church, I believe—that has paid taxes
on its property for more than twenty years, because the congregation
voting on the question decided that an evasion of taxes on the part of a
church because it did “good” was really no better than the exemption of
an individual for the same reason. ¶ The enemy of the State, forsooth,
is the man who asks some one to pay a few paltry dollars for police
and fire protection! ❦ Naturally, one might say the enemy of the State
is the man who refuses to pay his quota of expense for the maintenance
of the Government machinery. ¶ The editor of _The Christian Work and
Evangelist_ is a clergyman ❦ He is paid by the religious denomination
he serves. This denomination has large holdings of real estate, upon
which it pays no taxes. If it paid taxes it would not have so much money
to pay clergymen; therefore, one of its leading clergymen, acting as
spokesman for the rest, defines for us the worst enemy of New York—“or
any city.” Thus we get the quality of logic that rules in our churches.
It would be laughable were it not pitiable in its weakness. The church
isn’t dead—it can still call vile names ❦ How nimbly it yet flings the
theologic stink-pot! The fires of the auto da fe are not extinguished.
They are only banked, banked in the editorial office of _The Christian
Work and Evangelist_. “The worst enemy of New York or any city!” It
is the old, old cry of “Away with him!” ❦ It is the cry of entrenched
tyranny, that he who disagrees with you in religious matters is the
enemy of the State. Socrates spoke disrespectfully of the gods, and for
this they brewed for him the hemlock. The crime of Jesus was that he
undermined the State ❦ Savonarola, Bruno, Latimer, Wyclif, enemies of
society—all! ¶ The editor of _The Christian Work and Evangelist_ thinks
that the State and Religion are one. And he is right. For just as long as
the State grants immunity from taxation to church property, the divorce
is not complete. We haven’t yet caught up with Thomas Jefferson. Well,
you know what the State in the past has done to those who are considered
its enemies? Yes, and that is just what the meek and lowly editor of
_The Christian Work and Evangelist_ would do to you if he had the power.
¶ Carefully read, analyzed and digested, we find that the sole excuses
churches have for not paying taxes are: First, the churches form a police
system which prevents certain people from committing crime. Second, the
churches supply us a great number of honest and unselfish citizens, who
otherwise would be rogues ❦ For these two things they claim a cash
reward from the community. My answer is that both propositions are
assumptions, quite gratuitous, but that, even if they were true, it
would not justify the State in remitting their quota of taxes. ¶ I have
had a large and varied experience with clergymen and church-members,
and that they are better morally and stand higher intellectually are
propositions which they admit, but which no one besides themselves
puts forward. The names of clergymen, Sunday-school teachers and pious
deacons who go wrong would fill a five-foot shelf of books. In fact,
it is an axiom that the bankers’ colony in every penitentiary is made
up mostly of church-members ❦ When the University of Copenhagen says
that church-members are better citizens than non-church-members, I may
believe it. Until then, the verdict must be, “Not Proved”—and especially
so, in view of the fact that when Christianity was absolutely supreme
the headsman worked overtime, and crime, grime, blood, poverty, disease
and woe were the rule, not the exception. The doctrine that some folks
are so much better than others that they deserve eternal bliss is the
most selfish idea ever put forth by mortal man. Folks who think they
are better than others, usually aren’t. That the idea of endless joy
for believers, and endless hell for doubters, is not being preached
now so much as it was a few years ago, is nothing to the credit of
church-members. ¶ All separations of society into sacred and secular,
good and bad, saved and lost, learned and illiterate, rich and poor,
are illusions which mark certain periods in the evolution of society ❦
The offer of endless life and the threat of endless hell are frightful
rudimentary errors of the savage mind, born of fear and frenzy, and then
perpetuated as a police system by a Divine Collection Agency. For not
only does a religion of fear keep people “good,” but it also makes them
pay for being kept good. The offer of immunity from the penalties of sin,
through belief in the blood of Jesus, is merely the immunity that human
sacrifice once provided, slightly refined and modified. The “belief” in
a blood sacrifice has taken the place of the sacrifice itself. ¶ The
orthodox Christian Church still teaches immunity from penalties on the
acceptance of its creed. From exemption from the natural penalty of a
misdeed to exemption from taxation is but a step. The man who can accept
the one takes kindly to the other. “Jesus died and paid it all—yes, all
the debt I owe.” “Saved by the blood of the Lamb.” That is, throw it off
on some one else. Who cares! Any way to go scot-free! And this evasion
of a penalty for wrong committed is called “the glad tidings of great
joy.” To escape the payment of taxes is a variation of the same idea ❦
Many of these “saved” people do not pay their debts until compelled to.
If they work for you they loaf and visit on “company time.” They cheat
you in a hundred ways, and often spend as much time trying to evade the
responsibility of shouldering the burden as, rightly used, would have
carried the message to Garcia. ¶ The entire Christian doctrine of rewards
and punishments, of a vicarious atonement, and the substitution of a pure
and holy man for the culprit, is a vicious and misleading philosophy ❦
That fear in some instances has deterred men from crime, there is no
doubt. But the error of religion as a police system lies in the fact
that it makes superstition perpetual. Untruth that good may follow is
not a nice philosophy. ¶ It will be noted that the learned editor of
_The Christian Work and Evangelist_ pleads, as a reason why churches
should not pay taxes, the assertion that three-fourths of all sermons now
preached deal with present-day problems, and the effort is not merely
to save souls but to make better citizens. This is doubtless true ❦
The church is saving herself from dissolution by becoming secularized.
Gradually the world is being educated into the belief that one world at
a time is enough. Also, a vast number of men and women see the fact that
immunity and exemption are not desirable, that nothing can ever be given
away, and that something for nothing is very dear ❦ To make a man exempt
is to take from him just so much manhood; and to make a church exempt
is to weaken the fabric and place the institution on a mendicant basis
❦ To accept salvation for yourself, with the consciousness that there
is still one soul in hell, would turn your paradise into purgatory, if
your soul were worth a damn. “One man is no man,” said Aristotle four
hundred years before Christ. We are all parts and particles of each
other. ¶ This matter of exemption from taxation of certain edifices
and certain men, transportation at half-rates, and the ten-per-cent
discount to clergymen and teachers, all hinges on a lack of the Ethical
Monistic Concept ❦ It assumes that certain work is sacred and other work
secular; that certain places are holy and others profane. My esteemed
colleague, the editor of _The Christian Work and Evangelist_, admits
that this world is no longer “but a desert drear, heaven is my home.”
He admits that we are here, and that this is our home now, at least.
When he goes a step further and admits that this is God’s world, not
the Devil’s; that every man is doing the best he can with the light and
power he possesses; that all human service is sacred; that there is no
high nor low; that there are no “saved” so long as men are in bonds to
fear, superstition and incompetence; that a smokestack is as sacred as a
steeple—then he will agree with me that churches should pay their just
quota of taxes. Good people no longer ask immunity from payment of bills
because they are “good.” Businessmen are just as “good” as preachers.
Business today is founded on the thought of reciprocity and mutuality ❦
We help ourselves only as we help others. And all transactions in life
should be co-operative and reciprocal. ¶ Granting for argument’s sake
that the Church does do all the good claimed by my Christian brother,
still that is no reason for its exemption. “So far as this Court knows,
all men who live in houses are good men, making the world of men better
by their lives; but this is no reason why their residences should be
exempt from taxation.” So said a wise and learned judge in deciding the
question of taxation of parsonages in Illinois. Here we get the growing
concept of the world of thinking men and women, the concept of Ethical
Monism. All is One, and the sacred is that which serves. Pay the price,
and provided you pay the price, the thing you buy is worth the money.
¶ The churches will never do the good they are capable of doing until
they throw off mendicancy. ¶ And the beggar is a robber who has lost his
nerve, a bandit with a streak of yellow in his ego. The churches must
take their stand, firmly and frankly, as human institutions, asking no
exemption, demanding no immunity. Then they will be free. For her own
good the Church must meet her responsibilities, and not shift her burden
of taxes upon the people who do not believe her creed. If you believe in
a “peculiar” doctrine, that is your affair, and you are the man to pay
for its support. To say that I must pay for the support of your creed or
else be branded as a foe of society is bad logic, worse ethics, and very
indelicate, not to say discourteous ❦ Only that is fair and beautiful
which neither threatens, bribes, evades, demands nor supplicates.
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