Benefit of clergy, though theoretically as obsolete as it is inexcusable in a secular democracy, is known to all who are on the inside to be a tangible fact in our land today. It is one of the forms of indecent favoritism of which the church and its agents are always eager to avail themselves. In any one of the annual reports of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the reader may observe that the late Anthony Comstock, though an excessively pious Christian and hater of all forms of unbelief, bears reluctant testimony in tabular form to the overwhelming preponderance of religious offenders among those whose convictions he has secured. For example, the total number of arrests for crimes against the obscenity and lottery laws from March, 1872, to January, 1915, was 3,641. Of these (annual report for 1914) 1078 were Jews, 964 Catholics, 954 Protestants, and 564 of no known religion, leaving only 80 to be distributed among the several classes of Freethinkers, Spiritualists and "heathen." The figures speak for themselves. Turning from statistics to scientific criminology, we find abundant confirmation of the close relation between religion and crime. So far from being a restraint, religious faith of a very intense sort is commonly found closely associated with criminal tendencies, and is one of the most marked characteristics of the typical criminal. This conclusion, unpalatable though it is to the defenders of the churches, is irrefutably proven valid by the most competent observers. (See "The Criminal," by Havelock Ellis, fourth edition, pages 185-190, with facts and citations from Ferri, Garofalo, Casanova, et al.) Let it not be thought that the writer is here attempting to prove that religion is a frequent cause of crime. It is enough to show that it is practically inoperative as an inhibition. The many good men and women who are also pious put the cart before the horse in crediting their religion with their moral character. Whatever ethical elements the higher forms of religion contain in theory, it is not these on which the incidence is laid in religious teaching or in the performance of religious ceremonies. Consequently, no matter how much is said in the churches of righteousness, as an observed sociological fact religion has little to do with it, one way or the other. The good man or woman, on becoming religious, remains good; the bad man or woman does not cease to be bad because of possessing a strong religious faith and participating in religious exercises. Those who have been both virtuous and religious all their lives would have been no less virtuous if they had never heard of religion. Even the tyro in the study of the evolution of religious belief knows that primitive forms of religion are entirely void of ethical content. The moral imperative is a gradual development of the social instinct; while the religious "instinct" is the reaction of the individual to external influences which inspire him, in his ignorance