It has sometimes been asserted that precedent is against the taxing of churches. At the New York hearing, this was gravely put forth by a Presbyterian preacher as a serious argument; and he sought to dismiss the proposition by cavalierly remarking that it was part of the present craze for new taxes of all sorts. His deliverance was echoed by a lawyer hired to represent Grace Episcopal church, the church which showed its moral standards by cheating its architect out of his fee on a contemptible legal technicality. "I am old-fashioned enough," remarked the lawyer, metaphorically patting himself on the back for his astute appeal to religious prejudice, "to believe that the house of God should not be taxed." In other words, whatever is, is right. No old abuse must ever be abolished, and every new idea must be wrong. Could there be a finer admission that the bent of the churchly trained mind is against all progress, and prone to resist change merely because it is new? CONFESSED TREASON TO AMERICAN PRINCIPLES. The defenders of church graft never fail in the end to reveal their real position. At no public hearing has it ever happened that the shrewder representatives of the church were able to restrain their less subtle colleagues from avowing their disbelief in the separation of church and state, and their conviction that the government should consider the support of religion as part of its business. The important hearing so often quoted had several such confessions of treason to American principles. The Rev. Charles T. Terry of the Brick Presbyterian church of New York city, when asked whether he would think it proper for the state to appropriate money directly for the support of the churches, since exemption was but an indirect way of accomplishing the same result, completely missed the object of the question, and instead of attempting to distinguish the two methods in principle calmly assumed that there could be no question of impropriety in either, and explained that he preferred the exemption method as _more dignified_. If he had been entirely frank, he might have confessed his doubt whether a direct theft from the taxpayers would be tolerated in this enlightened period. The American churches would be only too glad to adopt the English method of open and unabashed robbery of dissenting citizens for the support of the churches in whose doctrines they do not believe. This, however, has become an impossibility.