[p. 520]
|520| and let grace prevail before right. What Frederick II and Joseph did, the former against the Catholics, the latter against the Protestants, was grace contrary to the rights of the Peace of Prague and of Westphalia. It coincides with the higher natural rights of freedom of conscience and of the independence of civil rights from faith, but these higher rights are in the Peace of Religion and of Westphalia not only not recognised but excluded, and their exclusion most solemnly guaranteed by Protestants as well as Catholics, and from this standpoint one is so little to insist on these guaranteed rights that the grace that is spurned is infinitely higher.
Religion is a still more important determining ground of the relation of the individual parts of Germany to the whole; it has probably contributed most to tearing the union of the state asunder and to making this tearing asunder legal. The times in which religion split were too unskilled to separate the church from the state and, in spite of the division of faith, to preserve the latter, and the princes could find no better ally, in order to withdraw from the overlordship of the Empire, than the conscience of their subjects.
By virtue of the laws of the Empire gradually formed thereby, the religion of each country, of each imperial city, is determined by law, one being declared purely Catholic, another purely Evangelical, a third of parity. What, then, if a country were to violate the Peace of Westphalia so far as to pass from one purity into another purity or from parity into purity?
Equally fixed is the religion of the votes of the Imperial Diet, of the Cameral Court, of the Aulic Council, of the individual offices and posts and so on. Among these relations of the state determined by religion the most important is the so famous itio in partes, the right of the one or the other part of religion not to submit to the majority of votes. If this right were restricted to matters of religion,
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