CHURCH AND STATE IN AMERICAN HISTORY.
Our fight against church graft is not new, for through the ages of human history men slow in learning the lesson of equal liberty have made this warfare inevitable. Even those honestly desirous to be fair have found it easy to cheat themselves with convenient sophistry, and to frame fantastic reasons for deeming the public weal inseparably bound up with their particular group of dogmas, so that the good of mankind must require the submission of dissenters to the popular creed. That the whole community should be forced to support the church appeared axiomatic to the New England of Governor Bradford, Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. The settlement of Rhode Island by Roger Williams and his associates, on the basis of complete religious liberty, was the first event to startle Puritanism into a realization that the right of the church to control the state was not as self-evident as had been thought. Later were heard bold voices to demand that the church take its proper position in the community as a voluntary body of believers, free to worship in its own fashion, and leaving all others free to do likewise or not to worship at all. And finally the foremost and boldest thinkers began to see that there could be no equal justice while unbelievers were mulcted in taxation to support the churches. One of the first protests against the wrong which still prevails, although now disguised under the form of exemption, took the shape of a memorial to the general court (legislature) of Massachusetts in 1775. The core of the argument is contained in the following paragraph:
"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.