Book Twenty-Five - Laws in Relation to the Religion of Each Country and its External Politics

Summary

Chapter 1: About the Sentiment for Religion

The pious man and the atheist always speak of religion. The one speaks of what he loves, while the other speaks of what he fears.

Chapter 2: About the Motive of Attachment for the Differing Religions

The differing religions of the world do not give to them that profess them equal motives for attachment to them. That depends much on the manner in which they correspond with men's ways of thinking and feeling.

We are extremely inclined toward idolatry, while nevertheless we are not strongly to idolatrous religions. We are scarcely inclined to spiritual ideas, while nevertheless we are much attached to the religions that cause us to adore a spiritual being. That is a happy [fortunate] sentiment which derives, partly, from the satisfaction that we discover in ourselves having been intelligent enough to have chosen a religion which draws the divinity from the humiliation in which others had placed it. We consider idolatry as the religion of vulgar peoples and the religion that has a spiritual being as its object as that of enlightened peoples.

When, along with the idea of a supreme spiritual being, which constitutes the dogma, we are able also to connect the sensible ideas which figure in worship, that gives us a great attachment to the religion. For the motives we happen to be speaking about are found connected with our natural penchants for sensible things. Thus, the Catholics, who have more of that kind of worship than the protestants; they are more unshakably attached to their religion than are the Protestants to theirs, and more zealous for its propagation.

When the people of Ephesus had learned that the church fathers had decided that folk could call the virgin “mother of god,” they were transported with joy. They kissed the hands of the bishops; they grasped their knees; everything resounded with acclamations. (a)

When an intellectual religion also gives us the idea of a selection made by the divinity, and of a distinction between them that profess it and them that do not profess it, that greatly attaches us to that religion.