religious. And the great majority do not cease to be religious
by being religious privately.

The political elevation of the individual above religion shares all
the defects and all the advantages of political elevation generally.
For example, the State as State annuls private property, the
individual declares in a political manner that private property is
abolished as soon as he abolishes the census for active and passive
eligibility, which has been done in many North American States.
Hamilton interprets this fact quite correctly from the political
standpoint: "The great multitude has won the victory over the property
owners and the monied men." Is not private property ideally abolished
when the have-nots become the legislators of the haves? The census is
the last political form to recognize private property.

Yet private property is not only not abolished with the political
annulment of private property, but is even implied therein. The State
abolishes in its fashion the distinctions of birth, status, education,
and occupation when it declares birth, status, education, and
occupation to be unpolitical distinctions, when, without taking
account of these distinctions, it calls upon every member of the
community to participate in the popular sovereignty on an equal
footing, when it deals with all the elements of the real popular life
from the State's point of view. Nevertheless the State leaves private
property, education, occupation operating in their own manner, that
is, as education, as occupation, and developing their potentialities.

From abolishing these actual distinctions, it rather exists only upon
their basis, and is conscious of being a political State and
enforcing its communal principle only in opposition to these its
elements. Consequently Hegel defines the relation of the political
State to religion quite correctly when he says: "If the State is to
have reality as the ethical, self-conscious realization of spirit, it
must be distinguished from the form of authority and faith. But this
distinction arises only in so far as the ecclesiastical side is in
itself divided into several churches. Then only is the State seen to
be superior to them, and wins and brings into existence the
universality of thought as the principle of its form." ("Philosophy of
Right," Eng. tr. p. 270.)

By its nature the completed political State is the generic life of man
in contradistinction to his material life. All the assumpti