[p. 521]
|521| the justice and necessity of this right would be self-evident. The separation would be immediately harmless to the state, because it would concern only objects which at bottom are no concern of the latter. But by virtue of the itio in partes the separation of the minority from the majority is legitimated in every affair of state that has nothing at all to do with religion; over war and peace, the raising of an army of the Empire, taxes, in short over all the little that earlier times had still left over as the shadow of a whole, the majority of votes is not legally decisive, but even without any efficacy of politics the minority, which forms a religious party, can obstruct the activity of the state.
It goes too far when, as some do, this right is put in parallel with the right of insurrection, hallowed in some of the many French constitutions made during the past decade. For one must regard Germany as an already dissolved state and its parts which do not submit to a majority of the whole as independent states subsisting in themselves, whose separation, if they cannot arrive at a common conclusion, does not have as its inevitable consequence the dissolution of all social bonds and not always internal wars.
Yet while religion has completely torn the state asunder, it has in a wonderful way at the same time given the presentiment of some principles on which a state can rest. Since its schism tore men apart in their innermost essence and yet some union was still to remain, it must unite externally over external things, waging war and so on – a union which is the principle of the modern states. Precisely by the fact that the most important parts of public law were woven into the religious schism, two religions have been woven into the state and all political rights thereby made dependent on two or properly three religions[; indeed]
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