It is not strictly true, however, that the church is in no sense a profit-making institution, or that it has no commercial aspects. If the church were not successful in a business sense, it could not accumulate property or capital, and would not have to worry about exemption. There are more ways of making profits than by straight buying and selling. An organization which is able to play on the hopes and fears, the superstitions and sentiments, the beliefs and enthusiasms of its members and of those who come under its spell, and thereby to secure the means of buying land, erecting buildings and paying v current expenses, cannot honestly pretend to be a purely benevolent society. Let its teachings be true or false, good or bad, the principle is precisely the same. It receives money from individuals, who believe that they receive, in spiritual, to some extent in intellectual and esthetic and even in physical values, an adequate return for what they pay. This is a plain business proposition, whether the value is really there or not. The fact that no definite price is fixed for the services, but that payment is at least nominally voluntary, is wholly irrelevant. A restaurant conducted on the liberal plan of "eat what you like, and pay what you think it is worth," would be no less a business enterprise, and its property taxable as such. As a matter of fact, business men in some lines have actually been known to follow a similar plan. How successful the church has been in this regard may be seen by the enormous wealth which various church corporations have acquired, always under the claim of being non-profit-making institutions. Trinity Church corporation of New York owns hundreds of houses, and pays taxes on some $15,-000,000 worth of property, which it cannot deny that it uses for purely commercial purposes, besides its immense holdings of valuable land and buildings claimed to be used by it only for worship and hence exempt from taxation, amounting to approximately an equal value. Where did Trinity church, which keeps up the sham of representing the faith of the poor Nazarene reformer, who "had not where to lay his head," and who lived mainly by hand-to-mouth charity, get the means of purchasing some $30,000,000 worth of property, if it is a purely non-profit-making institution, which has honestly followed its alleged master's express injunction to "take no thought for the morrow," and to "lay not up treasure on earth"? Exemption on that part of its property used "exclusively for worship," by setting free a large proportion of the moneys accruing to it from its members and benefactors, which would otherwise have been used in paying its debt to the community, enabled it to use its surplus in investments which were of a directly commercial nature. One hand washes the other, and the state is the dupe of the pious legerdemain. A STRICTLY CASH BUSINESS.