Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/229

 allow to all men, and—as the administrator of the purposes of the Human Race—must provide for all men, equal access to the existing sources of the Culture by which they may be prepared for this vocation. This is only possible by the establishment of an Absolute Equality of all men in Personal as well as Civil Freedom; in respect of Rights as well as Right. Thus the same purpose which belongs to the State as such, it receives anew from the hands of Religion; and this is the positive influence of Religion on the State,—not that it gives a new purpose to the State, which would be inconsistent with the separation from each other which we have already required, but that it summons up deeper sympathies in aid of the purpose which already belongs to the State, and impels it more powerfully towards the attainment of that purpose. Both of these developments, indeed,—that of the true Religious sense, as well as that of Political order,—only proceed by slow and gradual movements, and to a certain extent keep pace with each other; but there is nothing to prevent the former, at least in Individuals, from preceding and partly guiding the latter.

Such is the case with this relation when the State is considered only in itself and in relation to its own Citizens. But should it happen that several independent and sovereign States were to arise within the circle of the one True Religion; or, what is the same thing, that the one State of Culture and of Christianity were broken up into a Christian Republic of Nations, in which individual States should be, not indeed constrained, but incessantly observed and judged by the others;—then there would be found laid down in the Christian Doctrine a universally applicable Canon for the determination of what is praiseworthy, what tolerable, and what censurable, in the intercourse of one State with another, as well as in the conduct of private Citizens;—and the otherwise absolute Monarch, even after he had silenced his own subjects, would still, if any sense