I. If one shouts to the liberals and also to the indifferent: Religion should not make any difference! The more insightful [among them] draw a more appropriate distinction. If religion is what you believe about your relationship to the Deity, and what you do for yourself as a result, then this is your affair. For that reason, you are constitutionally and de facto guaranteed not only freedom of conscience but also freedom to worship God in your own way.
But if you count as part of your relationship to God and your religious practices that which must imperil and damage others around you, then they will regret your error; but they are so understandingly liberal for themselves and their own folk so as to admit and concede nothing to you from which a peril to their well-founded rights and civic relations might be anticipated. This is something that state legislation must secure for all, but in the first place for those who originally made up political society and who have to admit others only when well thought out, in stages, and individually, depending on proof of their qualification.
This distinction between freedom of religion and non-freedom – for applying religious opinions at others' peril – must be observed toward all religious parties, because all are capable of degenerating into damaging conclusions against others. Whoever attributed to his religion that he was allowed to borrow and make off with the Egyptians' gold and silver, that the Canaanites had to concede their land to him, etc., or whoever still attributes to his religion that the God of everything will choose his people before all other peoples and, in the end, raise the Moschiach [Messiah] over all – to him, admittedly, the liberal will not prohibit this [kind of] belief, but he concedes to him no share of offices wherein he could rehearse his way to that preferred universal world government – initially at our cost.
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