tives of intolerance may at any
time be just and the principle high. For the theory of religious unity
is founded on the most elevated and truest view of the character and
function of the State, on the perception that its ultimate purpose is
not distinct from that of the Church. In the pagan State they were
identified; in the Christian world the end remains the same, but the
means are different.

The State aims at the things of another life but indirectly. Its course
runs parallel to that of the Church; they do not converge. The direct
subservience of the State to religious ends would imply despotism and
persecution just as much as the pagan supremacy of civil over religious
authority. The similarity of the end demands harmony in the principles,
and creates a decided antagonism between the State and a religious
community whose character is in total contradiction with it. With such
religions there is no possibility of reconciliation. A State must be at
open war with any system which it sees would prevent it from fulfilling
its legitimate duties. The danger, therefore, lies not in the doctrine,
but in the practice. But to the pagan and to the mediaeval State, the
danger was in the doctrine. The Christians were the best subjects of the
emperor, but Christianity was really subversive of the fundamental
institutions of the Roman Empire. In the infancy of the modern States,
the civil power required all the help that religion could give in order
to establish itself against the lawlessness of barbarism and feudal
dissolution. The existence of the State at that time depended on the
power of the Church. When, in the thirteenth century, the Empire
renounced this support, and made war on the Church, it fell at once into
a number of small sovereignties. In those cases persecution was
self-defence. It was wrongly defended as an absolute, not as a
conditional principle; but such a principle was false only as the modern
theory of religious liberty is false. One was a wrong generalisation
from the true character of the State; the other is a true conclusion
from a false notion of the State. To say that because of the union
between Church and State it is right to persecute would condemn all
toleration; and to say that the objects of the State have nothing to do
with religion, would condemn all persecution. But persecution and
toleration are equally true in principle, considered politically; only
one belongs to a more highly developed civi