of the coinage, but all other public works of a secular character; while the latter would hold them in the end accountable for their failure to obey his commandments, summed up in the injunction to "love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself." The difference between the Pharisees, to whom Jesus laid down the law in favor of the payment of honest taxes, and the churches, who are called upon to-day to perform this elementary civic obligation, lies simply in the greater impudence of the latter. The interlocutors of Jesus, says the text, "marveled, and left him, and went away." It is not stated that they proceeded to mend their ways, and to become honest; but they at least had the decency not to attempt to bluff themselves out of a false position. Confronted with the same issue, the churches of our time reject the commands of their alleged lord and master, and consult only their own greed of profit. They will cheat both Caesar and God out of what is due. That which they themselves hypocritically pretend to adore as the word of God they spit on in their actual performance, by deliberate disobedience. In spite of the almost unlimited capacity of human nature to deceive itself, it is practically incredible that they can seriously believe in the puerile sophistry by which they seek to conjure up pretexts for stealing the public revenues. The one plain reason is that they want the money, and are not honest enough to do their duty to the state which shelters and fosters them. They know this perfectly well, however glib they may be in trying to persuade the credulous that in cheating the community out of part of its revenues they are actuated only by the highest and holiest motives, and that the fact that they happen to be beneficiaries of the steal is merely an irrelevant coincidence. It is possible that there are still marines, to whom such a tale can be told. In justice to sincere believers in Christianity, who do not make their piety a cloak for greed and dishonesty, it should be stated that a conscientious minority in the churches has consistently accepted the principle of religious liberty and of equal justice and has steadily protested against every infringement of the secular principle, even when the abuse seemed to favor their own interests. AMERICA'S FIRST SECULARIST.