[p. 518]
|518| character and its fate. The universal misery of the wars of religion and especially of the Thirty Years’ War has rather developed its fate further and more strongly, and their results were a greater and more consolidated separation and isolation.
Religion, instead of separating itself from the state through its own schism, has rather carried this schism into the state and contributed most to sublating the state, and has so interwoven itself into what is called the constitution that it is a condition of rights of the state.
Already in the particular states of which Germany consists, even civil rights are tied to it. In this intolerance [both] religions have an equal share and neither has anything to reproach the other with. The Austrian and Brandenburg princes, in defiance of the intolerance sanctioned by the laws of the Empire, have esteemed religious freedom of conscience higher than the barbarism of rights.
The disruption through the separation of religion was especially strong in Germany, because the bond of the state was in no country so loose as in this one, and the dominant religion was bound to be all the more embittered against those who separated, because with religion not only the innermost bond of men was torn, but because with this in a certain way almost the only bond was torn, whereas in other states a multitude of connections still remained in their firmness. Because the community of religion is already a deeper community, that of physical needs, of property, of acquisition on the other hand a lower one, and the demand for separation is in itself more unnatural than the demand that an existing union remain, the Catholic church showed itself more fanatical, because its demand was in general directed to union and to the holiest of this union, and at most wanted to hear of grace and toleration, nothing of right, that is, of the fixing of the separation
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