Here is a great quotation from Francis Bacon III.—OF UNITY IN
RELIGION
“….Concerning the means of procuring unity,
men must beware that, in the procuring or muniting of religious unity, they do
not dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human society. There be two swords
amongst Christians, the spiritual and temporal, and both have their due
office and place in the maintenance of religion; but we may not take up the
third sword, which is Mahomet’s sword, like unto
it; that is, to propagate religion by wars, or, by sanguinary persecutions, to
force consciences; except it be in cases of overt scandal, blasphemy, or
intermixture of practice against the state; much less to nourish seditions,
to authorize conspiracies and rebellions, to put the sword into the people’s
hands, and the like, tending to the subversion of all government, which
is the ordinance of God; for this is but to dash the first table against the
second, and so to consider men as Christians, as we forget that they are men.
Lucretius the poet, when he beheld the act of Agamemnon, that could endure the
sacrificing of his own daughter, exclaimed;—
“Tantum
religio potuit suadere malorum.”
“To such heights of evil has religion been able to
drive men.”