Even the religious and ceremonial features of the church are not free from commercialism. The Romain Catholic church represents the extreme example of the money-making aspect of religion. Its audacity in pretending to deserve consideration as an organization devoted purely to worship, and in no sense to profit, is beyond the power of words to characterize as it deserves. The dupe of papistry pays, in good, hard, current coin, for all that he gets, and for a great deal more than the actual value that he receives. For the pious and credulous Catholic, life is one long litany of "pay, pay, pay," wherever the priest and the church are concerned. The shouting Methodist may be satisfied to yell that "salvation is free," and to take a chance on the collection as a means of defraying the high cost of delivery on the "free" article; but the Roman Catholic priest knows a better trick. It is strictly a cash business with him. The Catholic believer must pay his little ten cents every Sunday for the "privilege" of sitting on a hard bench, and listening to a ceremony very little of which is intelligible to him. In order to catch him in all the relations of life, and to entangle him in a network from which there is not even a momentary escape, the astute hierarchy has devised a series of no less than seven sacraments. So cleverly is the scheme arranged for the trapping of credulous flies that a consistent Catholic can take scarcely an important step in life without incidentally paying tribute in some form to the church, the most monumental beggar history has known. Every real or pretended service of the church has its price, and no evasion is tolerated. The confessional and the system of penance are finely constructed to wheedle or frighten more money out of the ignorant and susceptible. The greedy priest hovers about the sickbed, ready to take any possible advantage of human weakness. The patient or his relatives may be reduced to a sufficient state of imbecility to seek the aid of the church's pretended miracle system or of some of its holy relics. If recovery seems hopeless, there is always the pleasing possibility of coaxing or bulldozing the half dead and mentally decayed victim to make a will in favor of the church, no matter what cruel and unjust deprivations are thereby imposed on helpless dependents. What would be baseness in any other human being, becomes transmuted into the most exalted virtue on the part of the priest; and any graft is permissible and commendable, from the Romish viewpoint, if the church is the beneficiary. An immense traffic is carried on in all sorts of "consecrated" objects for the greatest variety of purposes. Even at death, the church does not relax its hold, but has concocted the preposterous fable of purgatory, in order to keep its foolish dupes continually paying out money for which nothing whatever is given in return. Then there are all sorts of indulgences and