it is the teaching of the entire Roman Catholic church and of the largest section of the Protestant church. In its coarsest and crudest form, it has in our own day been preached to huge audiences from one end of the country to the other by the spectacular evangelist, Billy Sunday, as the only true Christianity; and this otherwise negligible religious mountebank has received the explicit endorsement of the principal evangelical organizations and an overwhelming majority of the orthodox preachers in every one of the largest and a multitude of the lesser cities of our land. The churches in which this repulsive and vicious doctrine is taught receive much the larger share of the benefit from tax exemption. DOUBLE PRICE FOR SALVATION. But from a social point of view the case is even more serious. It is not the most intellectual and refined classes which even the wildest zealot will claim to stand in special need of religion to restrain them from crime and from all forms of conduct calculated to injure their neighbors in the community, but the most ignorant and crude; and it is precisely these latter types which remain totally impervious to highly developed forms of religious expression, and throng to the Catholic cathedrals and the revival meetings of the Billy Sundays and Gipsy Smiths, where belief is emphasized above integrity of character. Just those persons who may be assumed to need whatever ethical element is to be found in religion are those who receive the least of it. If, in spreading its gospel of faith and obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, the churches incidentally lead an occasional individual to a more honest and upright social life, this result is simply a by-product of the religious operation, and creates no claim on the state. In reclaiming the down-fallen, the church wins another supporter for itself, and adds a soul to the "kingdom." In seeking a subsidy from the state, it foregoes its higher pretensions, and seeks to be paid double for a work which it undertook on its own account. If it is part of the function of the church to teach morality, so is it part of the function of the home; and in the average decent home there is much more specific, concrete and effective teaching of good morals, brought closely home to the individual, than there is in the best of churches. Yet the home does not claim exemption from taxation because of its moral influence. As has been suggested elsewhere, the argument as to moral influence speedily leads to a _reductio ad absurdum_, implying, as it does, that all taxes should be raised from the vicious and immoral elements in the community--that criminals should be the only taxpayers, or that taxes should be levied on citizens and institutions in inverse ratio to the moral character and ethical influence of each! Every legitimate enterprise of any description exercises a wholesome moral influence in the community, and directly benefits society in one way or another;