In the Christian Church tithes were _at first_ given by the faithful as spontaneous offerings, at the urgent solicitations of the clergy. “Nam nemo compellitur,” says Tertullian, “sed sponte confert.” These spontaneous tithe free-will offerings were not given in cash but in kind. Some gave a tithe of sheep, others of wool, or of corn, etc., just according to the free-will of the donor. This was the germ of tithes in the Christian Church, which commenced in the fourth century, and were ordered to be paid by canon law about the beginning of the fifth century. These canons were framed and passed by ecclesiastics. The people who paid had no voice in the matter. The canons which were framed afterwards had ordered them to be paid as a right, as a divine law of the Old Testament, and were not to be considered as free-will offerings. Here is just that specimen of arbitrary conduct on the part of the ecclesiastics which would only be tolerated in the dark and middle ages. Tithes were too profitable a source of revenue to be ignored in the Christian Church. A book entitled, “The Englishman’s Brief on behalf of his National Church,” has been published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. A good cause needs no fiction to bolster it up. In that book there is quite twice as much fiction as fact. The extensive circulation of this mixture has embarrassed many in gaining a correct knowledge of the tithe question from the earliest period to the present time. It is written in the style adopted by special pleaders. It gives a one-sided account of the subject. It asks questions and then furnishes the answers. The answers are most misleading and also erroneous, and it carefully omits a great deal which could be said on the other side. I strongly object to this way in dealing with so important a subject as the history of tithes in this country. To be appreciated, the “Brief” should be impartial, which it is not. It is not my object to review the book here _seriatim_, and to point out what is fiction and what is fact. In my statements a good deal of the fiction is refuted indirectly without reference to the “Brief.” But I may just indicate one remarkable feat of fiction which appears in it. When the Christian religion was first propagated, the writer of the “Brief” would have us to believe that the converted Jews transferred the payment of their tithes from the Jewish to the Christian ministers, just as easily and as quietly as one could transfer the payment of a cheque from one bank to another. Here is the statement, “So that when the Jews and heathen became Christian, throwing off their old religion and adopting the new religion of Christianity, they never dreamt of being less liberal to that form of religion which they loved the more and had adopted, than they had been towards that which they had loved the less and had discarded. Hence the transfer of tithes from the old religion to the new religion.”[8] We are not informed