As we have seen, President Grant, in his presidential message for 1875, quotes the amount of church property exempt from taxation in 1850 as approximately $87,000,000. This had doubled, he states, in 1860; and the official figures for 1870 were $354,483,587. This terrific rate of growth, far in excess of the growth of any other form of wealth, could not, of course, be maintained in full; but the actual increase has, none the less, been enormous and alarming. In 1890, the admitted value of church property, as compiled by H. K. Carroll, LL.D., the well-known authority on religious statistics, had risen to $679,694,439. The latest available figures of the present time are those of 1906, in which year the church property of the country was valued at $1,257,575,867. Keeping well within bounds in estimating the value of this favored class of property in the present year (1915), we shall be more than safely conservative in calling it at least $1,500,000,000; and it is still rapidly increasing. Thus, from 1850 to 1915, the value of church property was multiplied not less than fourteenfold. In the same space of time, the population had increased less than fourfold; and church membership has just about kept pace with the population; showing a growing tendency to fall behind. In other words, the churches are making money from three to four times as fast as they are gaining members (winning "souls" in their own phrase), and the same number of times as rapidly as the population is growing. They are "laying up treasures on earth" faster than any other class in the community and at the expense of the whole community; and it is no wonder that their clutch on the "things of this world" and their opposition to any check on their graft prove them amenable to the saying: "Where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also." When an organization so rapidly absorbs the wealth of the nation it cannot resent the imputation that acquiring wealth is its chief concern.