your Message to Congress. Its property consists of church edifices, cemeteries, school-houses, an infirmary, a rectory, and several hundred. lots of ground, which, with the exception of a few used for parochial purposes, are leased partly for short and partly for long periods. On the short leases the Corporation pays the taxes; on the long leases the taxes are paid by the lessees. I paid in September last, as Comptroller of the Corporation, on the former, $46,943 91; and we estimate the amount paid on the latter at $60,000, making over $100,000 paid to the city this year for taxes, besides a considerable sum for assessments. We pay taxes on every foot of ground used for secular purposes. We pay on our rectory, in which the Rector resides, on the office in which the business of the Corporation is transacted, although it is within the boundaries of St. Paul's Cemetery. In fact, nothing is exempt except the church edifices, the cemeteries, four school-houses, in which free schools are kept, and an infirmary, in which the sick receive gratuitous treatment.

"I know you will be glad to have this information. I have always been of opinion that the several States should tax all secular property belonging to Churches within their respective limits. Cemeteries are exempt by universal consent. I think church edifices should be, as I believe they always have been in Christian communities. To tax them would seem like making the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of the universe pay tribute to us for allowing a part of his footstool to be used for the worship which is his due.

"I am, very respectfully and truly, yours,

JOHN A. DIX."

The second letter relates to the taxation of the edifices dedicated to the worship of Almighty God. It was addressed to an eminent and well-known layman of the diocese of Albany, and is as follows:

"New York, March 7, 1876.

"MY DEAR SIR,—I was surprised and grieved to learn that the taxation of church edifices had been seriously and even earnestly advocated before the Committee of Ways and Means in the Assembly. It is virtually a proposition to impose a tax on the worship of Almighty God, unless it is rendered in the open air or in some building already subject to taxation. No one objects to the taxation of any Church property devoted to secular uses. It is the imposition of taxes on houses of worship that is objected to as a profanation of that which should be held sacred.

"One of the advocates of the measure commends to us the example of the primitive Christians in regard to out-door service, as if a parallel

could be drawn between the climate of Judea, radiant with sunshine and perennial bloom, and ours, in which (extraordinary seasons excepted) we are buried in snow two or three months, and pinched with cold, even when under cover, two or three more.

"Another says that the Apostles achieved their successes without churches.

"But these references to the habits of the early followers of the Saviour manifest an extremely superficial knowledge of ecclesiastical history. The Last Supper was administered by him in an upper room, and most of his teachings were in the synagogues. The Acts of the Apostles show that they preached in the Temple at Jerusalem whenever they were allowed to do so, and in the synagogues at Antioch, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and wherever else they went. They used Jewish houses of worship, because they had none of their own. After the ascension of their Divine Master his followers were for a long period of time the objects of Jewish and pagan persecution, sustained by the temporal authorities, and their worship was conducted in hiding-places, sometimes in catacombs in the bosom of the earth. If they had been blessed with the religious toleration which we enjoy, and had possessed our wealth, there is every reason to believe that they would have built houses of worship as tasteful and costly as our own. The instinct of all communities of men is to erect for the worship of their Creator edifices responding to their conceptions of his majesty and his beneficence. There are, as we all know, more inexpensive than expensive houses of worship; but it is because, in the great majority of religious societies, there is an inability to do more. It is creditable to Christians of all denominations that their expenditures for religious worship are only limited by their pecuniary means. We cannot doubt that the primitive Christians entertained as elevated views of the dignity of the service due to their Heavenly Father as their Israelitic predecessors, who built the Temple of Jerusalem. The Divine Founder of our faith gave an impressive proof of his conception of the sacred character of edifices consecrated to the service of God by driving the moneychangers out of the Temple-the only act of violence in his meek and compassionate life; and I trust we shall have courage and reverence enough to imitate his example, and prevent the money-changers from getting a foothold in our houses of worship and converting them into dens of thieves.

"As soon as the primitive Christians ceased to be objects of persecution, and were protected by their civil rulers, they began to erect expensive houses of worship; and from the era of Constantine they converted splendid pagan temples to the service of their Maker. There

are now in the city of Rome seven or eight of these temples reclaimed from heathenism and consecrated to Christian worship. From that day to this during the lapse of nearly sixteen hundred years—no government has undertaken to make church edifices pay tribute for the privilege of worshipping God. Even the pagans, through the veneration in which they held the temples dedicated to their idols, manifest more reverence than the promoters of this raid upon religious worship. No movement has given such encouragement and comfort to unbelievers, who would create every possible impediment to the progress of Christian teaching, as this proposal to tax church edifices. Sectarian dissensions have succeeded in driving religious instruction out of the public schools; and now cupidity and unbelief would break down the Sundayschools by pecuniary impositions upon the edifices in which they are held, and set communities and neighborhoods at work to calculate the cash value of religious worship. It is difficult to conceive that the proposition could have had its origin in any other breast than one unfriendly to all Church organizations, or one in which the love of money is the predominant passion. If those who have set on foot this movement want more money, let them tax their rum, their tobacco, their pictures, fast horses, game dogs, liquor saloons, dance-houses, clubs, theatres, diamonds, equipages-everything, in short, which ministers to their pleasures, their tastes, and their sensual indulgences. Nay, let them tax their seminaries of learning, their institutions devoted to human science, and even the grounds in which the unconscious bones of their ancestors repose, rather than invade with mercenary exactions the edifices devoted to the worship of Almighty God, and to the teaching of our duty to him. and our neighbors.

"Some of the abettors of this movement have had the magnanimity to let us understand that they are ready to compromise with the Sovereign Ruler. They will make reasonable concessions. They will allow $1000 of the value of each of his churches to be exempt from taxation, and only exact payment on the residue. They may, perhaps, go so far as to allow $2000-as much as it would cost a well-to-do farmer to house his horses and his horned cattle. There is a degree of sublimity in this condescension which beggars all comment, and I dismiss it. With those who think the Almighty sufficiently honored by rendering him homage in buildings no better than barns and out-houses, no matter how abundant the pecuniary means of the worshippers, and who attach no more sanctity to one class of those edifices than to the other, it would be equally fruitless and humiliating to hold any parley or conference. In manifold instances, both in the Old and New Testaments, a house of worship is called the house of God, and it is always named with appropriate

expressions of reverence. The universal heart responds to this designation, and no matter how humble the edifice consecrated to his service, all men when within its hallowed walls feel more sensibly than they do amid the turmoil of the outer world that they are in the presence of the Omnipotent Being, by whom the great forces of the universe are moved and controlled, and that by ignoring him they renounce all hope of a higher state of existence.

"The scheme should be repudiated in all its parts. One can hardly debate it without a feeling of abasement. It is not a subject for human logic. It is not a problem of profit and loss, to be argued by religious obligation on one side and financial cupidity on the other. It is a matter of instinct, of inborn reverence, of the consciousness which every mind not perverted by the sophistications of worldly science has of its own immeasurable inferiority to the Sovereign Ruler of the universe, and of the homage it owes him as its Creator and Redeemer. There is something revolting to the moral sense in its normal state in the idea of making a mercenary profit out of an edifice consecrated to his service. When this inner sense is wanting argument is fruitless.

"The most attractive objects which meet us in our travels in Europe are the cathedrals. Amid all the wars, the bloodshed, the barbarities, the desolation which nations have visited upon each other, under the misguidance of their evil passions, these monuments of their faith and their devotion come out from the dark background of the picture in bright relief as sacred tributes to the Creator of the universe. No man can stand beneath their domes and vaulted roofs without feeling that they atone for much of the wrong committed by their authors, who lavished on them without stint the wealth they would otherwise have wasted on ostentatious gratifications or unholy indulgences. Heaven forbid that the lesson of these comparatively uncivilized ages should be lost on us, and that in this day of intellectual light and social refinement the tax-gatherer should be sent to fill his bag of lucre by levying contributions on the sanctuaries of the living God!

"I do not believe that any community which seeks to throw its secular expenses on the worship of God by levying contributions on the edifices consecrated to his services can long escape the chastisement it provokes. It is not necessary to look for special visitations of ill as manifestations of his displeasure. Cupidity, selfishness, rapacity, the profanation of things which should be held sacred, carry with them, by the force of immutable laws, the retribution denounced by the codes they violate.

"All religious denominations have the same interest in preventing their houses of worship from being desecrated and secularized by taxa

tion. As was beautifully expressed by Madame de Staël: 'Their ceremonies are strongly contrasted; but the same sigh of distress, the same petition for support, ascends to Heaven from all.'

"It seems to me that this whole movement is calculated to create in the breasts of reflecting persons a feeling of profound sorrow and unmitigated disgust. The proper mode of treating it is to banish it from the committee rooms, legislative halls, and social circles which it has defiled by its presence. To give it any countenance would be to furnish new ground for the national reproach too often cast upon us, that the almighty dollar is the chief object of our adoration.

66

I am, dear Sir, very truly yours,

"ORLANDO MEADS, Esq., Albany, N. Y."

JOHN A. DIX.

Another important service was rendered to the Corporation of Trinity Church by its venerable Comptroller, on occasion of an attack on it in the columns of the Index, a journal published in Boston as the organ and mouth-piece of freethinkers and infidels, whose aim is to erase from our constitutions and statute-books the name of Almighty God, and prevent any recognition of religion in the official acts of the Government. The article referred to afforded a striking instance of the recklessness in calumniation and the total disregard of facts which always characterize the mere partisan, whether he be religious or irreligious; for the spirit of bigotry, wherever it dwells, is one and the same, whether it pretend to bless the Lord or venture to curse him; and never, perhaps, was a rash assailant stripped more completely bare than on the occasion now referred to. It does not comport with the scope of this work to reprint the scurrilous libel, but the reply to it may be read in the Appendix to this volume.*

The General took a warm interest in everything relating to the parish with which he was thus personally and officially connected. He lent a ready ear to every reasonable proposal tending to the development of the work carried on among the poor residents of the lower wards, and viewed with pleasure and cordial approval the efforts of the Rector and clergy to

*See Appendix, No. XIII.