Even the religious and ceremonial features of the church are not free from commercialism. The Romain Catholic church represents the extreme example of the money-making aspect of religion. Its audacity in pretending to deserve consideration as an organization devoted purely to worship, and in no sense to profit, is beyond the power of words to characterize as it deserves. The dupe of papistry pays, in good, hard, current coin, for all that he gets, and for a great deal more than the actual value that he receives. For the pious and credulous Catholic, life is one long litany of "pay, pay, pay," wherever the priest and the church are concerned. The shouting Methodist may be satisfied to yell that "salvation is free," and to take a chance on the collection as a means of defraying the high cost of delivery on the "free" article; but the Roman Catholic priest knows a better trick. It is strictly a cash business with him. The Catholic believer must pay his little ten cents every Sunday for the "privilege" of sitting on a hard bench, and listening to a ceremony very little of which is intelligible to him. In order to catch him in all the relations of life, and to entangle him in a network from which there is not even a momentary escape, the astute hierarchy has devised a series of no less than seven sacraments. So cleverly is the scheme arranged for the trapping of credulous flies that a consistent Catholic can take scarcely an important step in life without incidentally paying tribute in some form to the church, the most monumental beggar history has known. Every real or pretended service of the church has its price, and no evasion is tolerated. The confessional and the system of penance are finely constructed to wheedle or frighten more money out of the ignorant and susceptible. The greedy priest hovers about the sickbed, ready to take any possible advantage of human weakness. The patient or his relatives may be reduced to a sufficient state of imbecility to seek the aid of the church's pretended miracle system or of some of its holy relics. If recovery seems hopeless, there is always the pleasing possibility of coaxing or bulldozing the half dead and mentally decayed victim to make a will in favor of the church, no matter what cruel and unjust deprivations are thereby imposed on helpless dependents. What would be baseness in any other human being, becomes transmuted into the most exalted virtue on the part of the priest; and any graft is permissible and commendable, from the Romish viewpoint, if the church is the beneficiary. An immense traffic is carried on in all sorts of "consecrated" objects for the greatest variety of purposes. Even at death, the church does not relax its hold, but has concocted the preposterous fable of purgatory, in order to keep its foolish dupes continually paying out money for which nothing whatever is given in return. Then there are all sorts of indulgences and dispensations for those able and willing to pay for them, besides the practical coercion by which, under the guise of voluntary beneficence, the slave of superstition is continually mulcted for various alleged needs of the church.
FREE-WILL OFFERINGS NOT ALWAYS VOLUNTARY.
The Protestant churches adopt a different method, not quite so successful in dragging the hard-earned dimes out of the worn purse of the poor washerwoman or in stealing the coppers off the eyes of the corpse, but reasonably efficacious. They, too, to at least some extent make merchandise out of "the house of the Lord." The pew rent system is as plain a business affair as the buying of seats in a theatre. The collection is the most important item in almost every Protestant religious service. It is nominally voluntary, but there are numerous ways of inflicting acute mental discomfort on those who do not come up liberally "to the help of the Lord." By skillfully playing on the emotions of the congregation, and if possible inducing in them a state of hysteria, an astute moneyseeker like Simpson of the Christian Alliance or Billy Sunday of the "gutter gospel" can induce a scared, madly excited, hypnotized crowd to help the Lord to the extent of thousands of dollars, none of which can be recovered by the victims on the next day, when they have become sobered and ashamed of their fit of spiritual intoxication. And the church has the phenomenal impudence to boast that the money thus tricked out of persons reduced to a frenzy in which they did not know what they were doing was "voluntarily" donated! Large funds are also secured by this "non-commercial institution" through church fairs, grab bags, special entertainments and other devices which are held to be decidedly commercial when carried on by worldly people, but which become mysteriously sanctified when conducted for the benefit of the church.
The claim that the church, as a non-commercial institution, is entitled to the kind chaperonage of the state in the shape of exemption from the obligation of paying its honest debts, besides being bad and invalid in itself, has not even the poor merit of resting on a basis of fact. Moreover, since there are plenty of other noncommercial institutions, which pay taxes like any other concern, no reason is given why the church should be the one special pet. Social and recreative institutions are not conducted for profit, nor are Socialistic or Anarchistic groups, the property of which is not exempt from taxation. All of these, like the church, meet the desires or gratify the tastes of individuals, and are of the greatest subjective value to those to whom they appeal, while worthless to everybody else, and in no way connected with the legitimate functions of society in its collective aspect. Hence none of them can justly make the slightest claim to be exempted from the duty of "rendering to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's."
TOWARD THE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH.
Exemption of church property from taxation is a deliberate invitation to the concentration of wealth, in opposition to its equitable distribution.
While social reformers are straining every nerve to devise and apply effective methods for the breaking down of monopoly, the policy of favoritism toward ecclesiastical bodies is building up the evil in its most aggravated form. If the churches really regarded themselves as simply trustees of the resources placed in their hands by private benevolence and state favor, and spent all or practically all that they received for the benefit of humanity, some defense, though even then an insufficient one, might be made of the practice of tax exemption. The tendency, however, is wholly in the reverse direction. The more the churches receive, the more property they accumulate, heedless of the stern warning of Isaiah, the iconoclastic Hebrew reformer, who, according to tradition, was sawn asunder for offending the priests and the king by the heretical doctrine that Jehovah "would have mercy and not sacrifice" and preferred social justice to religious ceremonialism. "Woe," cried the prophet, "unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land!"
It needs no expert knowledge of political economy to comprehend how readily untaxed property can be made to multiply. Sharing all the social advantages, and bearing none of the social burden, its owners can bide their time through all the tips and downs of the market, sure to gain in the end.
All things come to him who is in a position to wait longest. While the possessions of others are automatically limited by the effective lien placed on them by the taxing power, the churches can placidly increase their holdings to their hearts' content. In the long run, they can outbid competitors, who must add the cost of annual taxation to the original payment for the property acquired. Safe in the evasion of their civic duties, they have nothing to do but to grow richer and richer. Paying no taxes, they become independent of the state, an imperium in imperio, a power rivaling that of organized society itself.
WEALTHY CHURCHES, IMPOVERISHED PEOPLE.