s
tax. It embodies, not true piety, but pharisaic selfishness. The community
has a right to keep it out for self-protection. The social consciousness
has now developed enough to teach us that the right of individuals to form
endless churches must be curtailed, for the general welfare, exactly as
other individual rights, such as carrying pistols, public expectoration,
working young children, and riding bicycles on city sidewalks, have to be
surrendered in a social age. Thus social cooperation is displacing
individualism and religious cranks should not be immune to the law of
progress. To insist upon individual rights to form a new sect or to burden
an overchurched community with a needless church is a grave social
injustice and a sin against the Kingdom of God.

A small village in South Dakota applied the referendum to the question
whether they should have a Methodist or a Congregational church. The plan
was proposed by the village Board of Trade. It was entered into by the
whole community as a sensible proposition and the losers accepted the
verdict, under pressure of public opinion. The village has but one church
to-day. When denominational leaders agree to force no church upon such a
community as this, and to help support no church with home missionary
funds where it is neither needed nor wanted, the cause of religion in
small communities will be greatly advanced. Fortunately some of the larger
churches are frankly accepting this principle and are working with a large
measure of comity and denominational reciprocity.

_The New Christian Statesmanship_

For many years the leading churches in Maine have had an
"Interdenominational Comity Commission" which has kept out unnecessary
churches, and has reduced the number in overchurched communities by a sort
of denominational reciprocity. Other states in New England and the West
have adopted the plan, and now the Home Mission Council has recently
organized on a national scale, in the interest of all Protestant churches.

The Interdenominational Commission of North Dakota includes the Baptist,
Congregational, Methodist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches of the
state. This simple statement of their working agreement is an excellent
one:

(1) No community in which the concurring denominations have a claim should
be entered by any other denomination through its official agencies without
conference with the denominations having such claim.

(2) A feeble church should be re