Who cares! Any way to go scot-free! And this evasion of a penalty for wrong committed is called “the glad tidings of great joy.” To escape the payment of taxes is a variation of the same idea ❦ Many of these “saved” people do not pay their debts until compelled to. If they work for you they loaf and visit on “company time.” They cheat you in a hundred ways, and often spend as much time trying to evade the responsibility of shouldering the burden as, rightly used, would have carried the message to Garcia. ¶ The entire Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments, of a vicarious atonement, and the substitution of a pure and holy man for the culprit, is a vicious and misleading philosophy ❦ That fear in some instances has deterred men from crime, there is no doubt. But the error of religion as a police system lies in the fact that it makes superstition perpetual. Untruth that good may follow is not a nice philosophy. ¶ It will be noted that the learned editor of _The Christian Work and Evangelist_ pleads, as a reason why churches should not pay taxes, the assertion that three-fourths of all sermons now preached deal with present-day problems, and the effort is not merely to save souls but to make better citizens. This is doubtless true ❦ The church is saving herself from dissolution by becoming secularized. Gradually the world is being educated into the belief that one world at a time is enough. Also, a vast number of men and women see the fact that immunity and exemption are not desirable, that nothing can ever be given away, and that something for nothing is very dear ❦ To make a man exempt is to take from him just so much manhood; and to make a church exempt is to weaken the fabric and place the institution on a mendicant basis ❦ To accept salvation for yourself, with the consciousness that there is still one soul in hell, would turn your paradise into purgatory, if your soul were worth a damn. “One man is no man,” said Aristotle four hundred years before Christ. We are all parts and particles of each other. ¶ This matter of exemption from taxation of certain edifices and certain men, transportation at half-rates, and the ten-per-cent discount to clergymen and teachers, all hinges on a lack of the Ethical Monistic Concept ❦ It assumes that certain work is sacred and other work secular; that certain places are holy and others profane. My esteemed colleague, the editor of _The Christian Work and Evangelist_, admits that this world is no longer “but a desert drear, heaven is my home.” He admits that we are here, and that this is our home now, at least. When he goes a step further and admits that this is God’s world, not the Devil’s; that every man is doing the best he can with the light and power he possesses; that all human service is sacred; that there is no high nor low; that there are no “saved” so long as men are in bonds to fear, superstition and incompetence; that a smokestack is as sacred as a