"For a civil legislature to impose religious tax is, we conceive, a power which their constituents never had to give, and therefore going entirely out of their jurisdiction. We are persuaded that an entire freedom from being taxed by civil rulers to religious worship is not a mere favor from any man or men in the world, but a right and property granted us by God, who commands us to stand fast to it. We should wrong our consciences by allowing that power to men which we believe belongs only to God." In the same spirit, the pious and learned Rev. Dr. Wayland, in his "Political Economy," wrote: "All that religious societies have a right to ask of the civil government is the same privileges for transacting their own affairs which societies of every other sort possess. This they have a right to demand, not because they are religious societies, but because the exercise of religion is an innocent mode of pursuing happiness. If it happens accidentally that others are benefited, it does not follow that they are obliged to pay for this benefit. It cannot be proved that the Christian religion needs the support of the civil government, since it has existed and flourished when entirely deprived of this support." AN OPINION BY FRANKLIN. After the theologian, the philosopher. These are the words of the truth-loving friend of justice, Benjamin Franklin: "When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so its professors are obliged to call for help from the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one." The soundness of Franklin's test cannot be successfully disputed. If the churches must look to the state, instead of to their God, for continued life and prosperity, it is "a sign," indisputable as a voice from heaven, that they are not divinely commissioned, but are impostors. The demand for exemption from taxation is a confession of lost spiritual values. WHAT GRANT AND GARFIELD SAID. Two presidents of the United States, braving ecclesiastical censure, have had the moral courage to speak out on the present question. One of them, the heroic Grant, was heretical in his religious views; the other, the martyred Garfield, was an orthodox Christian, and had been a clergyman and president of a religious college. In Grant's presidential message in 1875, he said: