[p. 478]
|478| the latter of which makes the separation at the same time still more irritated than complete unintelligibility, the diversity of customs and of culture in the separated estates, which makes human beings recognisable to one another almost only by outward shape — such heterogeneous and at the same time most powerful elements, just as in the grown-great Roman Empire the preponderant weight of force, so in the modern states the spirit and art of state organisations is able to overpower and hold together, so that inequality of culture and of customs becomes a necessary product as well as a necessary condition of the subsistence of the modern states.
That in religion, in that in which the innermost being of human beings expresses itself and in which, even if all other external and scattered things can be a matter of indifference, they nevertheless recognise themselves as in a fixed centre and only thereby would be able, despite the inequality [and] mutability of the remaining relations and conditions, to have trust in one another and to be sure of one another — that in this there should be identity at least, has likewise been found dispensable in more recent states.
Even in the chillier Europe the unity of religion was formerly always the fundamental condition of a state. People knew of nothing else, and without this first being-one found no other being-one or trust possible. At times this bond became itself so energetic that it repeatedly transformed peoples otherwise strangers and in national enmity suddenly into one state, which, not merely as a holy commune of Christendom, nor as a coalition uniting their interests and, for the sake of these, their activity, but as one worldly power, as a state, at the same time the fatherland of its eternal and temporal life, conquered the Orient in war as one people and army.
Just as little as before and afterwards, in the division into peoples, the equality of religions prevented wars and bound them into
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