'In my father's house are many mansions', said Christ.

Everything finds its place in the Kingdom of God, everything can be hound by an inner harmonious connection, nothing has to be suppressed or destroyed. The spiritual society—the Church—should subject worldly society to itself by raising it up to itself, by spiritualizing, it, by making the worldly element its instrument and means, its body; then the external unity would appear by itself, as a natural result. In Catholicism, however, the external unity appears not as the result but as the foundation, and at the same time as the aim. For [the attainment of] an external unity as a [deliberate] aim, however, there is but one means—an external force; and Catholicism adopts it and [thereby] places itself in the ranks of the other external, i.e. the worldly, forces. But asserting itself as a worldly external force, Catholicism thereby obviously justifies also the self-assertion of those other external forces which it strives to subject to itself, and thus itself renders that subjection impossible.

As the higher principle, the principle of the general, Catholicism demands subjection to itself on the part of the particular and individual, the subjection of the human personality. By becoming an external power, however, it ceases to be the higher principle and loses its right of dominion over the human personality (which does possess internal power); while its factual domination appears only as coercion and suppression, provoking a necessary and just protest on the part of the personality—in which lies the essential meaning and justification of Protestantism.

Beginning with Protestantism, Western civilization represents a gradual emancipation of the human personality, of the human ego, from that historical bond, founded on tradition, which united but at the same time enslaved men during the period of the Middle Ages. The great meaning of the historical process which began with the Reformation consists in the fact that it has segregated the human personality and left it to itself in order that it might consciously and freely turn to the divine beginning, enter with it into a perfectly free and deliberate union.

… Part of the Church, led by the Roman hierarchy, succumbed to that temptation—and dragged with it the majority of Western humanity in the first great period of its historical life, the Middle Ages. The essential falsity of this path [of this type of Christianity] is contained in that hidden unbelief which lies at its root. Indeed, the actual faith in the truth of Christ presupposes that this truth is stronger than the evil which reigns in the world, that it can by its own spiritual [and] moral force subjugate evil, i.e. bring it to [convert it into] the good; [whereas] to assume that the truth of Christ, i.e. the truth of the eternal love and of the unconditional good, for its realization needs alien and even directly opposite means of coercion and deceit, is to profess this truth to be powerless, to profess that evil is stronger than the good; it means not to believe in the good, not to believe in God. And this unbelief, which at first was hidden in Roman Catholicism as an unperceivable embryo was later on clearly revealed. Thus in Jesuitism—that extreme, purest expression of the Catholic principle—the moving force was an outright lust for power, and not the Christian zeal; nations were being brought into subjection not to Christ, but to the Church authority; the people were not asked for a real confession of the Christian faith—the acknowledgment of the Pope [as the head of the Church]—and obedience to the Church authorities, were sufficient.^[*] Here the Christian faith is but a chance form, the essence and the aim is posited in the sovereignty of the hierarchy; but this is a direct self-conviction and self-annihilation [on the part] of the false principle, for here is lost the very foundation of that authority for which [in the name of which] they act.

The falsity of the Catholic way was early recognized in the West, and finally this realization found its full expression in Protestantism. Protestantism rebels against the Catholic way of salvation [regarded and practised] as an external act, and demands a personal religious relation of man to God, a personal faith without any traditional ecclesiastical mediation. …

This self-confidence and self-assertion of human reason in life and knowledge is an abnormal phenomenon, it is the pride of the mind: in Protestantism, and in rationalism which issued from it, Western humanity fell into the second temptation. But the falsity of this path was soon manifested in the sharp contradiction between the excessive claims of the reason and its actual impotence. In the practical domain, reason found itself impotent against the passions and [the lower] interests [of the people], and the kingdom of reason proclaimed by the French Revolution ended in a wild chaos of insanity and violence; in the domain of theory, reason found itself impotent against the empirical fact, and the pretention to build a universal science on the principles of pure reason, ended in the construction of a system of empty abstract concepts.