"A Letter Considering Toleration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Locke John)

In the third place, the care of the salvation of men's souls
cannot belong to the magistrate; because, though the rigour of laws
and the force of penalties were capable to convince and change men's
minds, yet would not that help at all to the salvation of their souls.
For there being but one truth, one way to heaven, what hope is there
that more men would be led into it if they had no rule but the
religion of the court and were put under the necessity to quit the
light of their own reason, and oppose the dictates of their own
consciences, and blindly to resign themselves up to the will of
their governors and to the religion which either ignorance,
ambition, or superstition had chanced to establish in the countries
where they were born? In the variety and contradiction of opinions
in religion, wherein the princes of the world are as much divided as
in their secular interests, the narrow way would be much straitened;
one country alone would be in the right, and all the rest of the world
put under an obligation of following their princes in the ways that
lead to destruction; and that which heightens the absurdity, and
very ill suits the notion of a Deity, men would owe their eternal
happiness or misery to the places of their nativity.

These considerations, to omit many others that might have been urged
to the same purpose, seem unto me sufficient to conclude that all
the power of civil government relates only to men's civil interests,
is confined to the care of the things of this world, and hath
nothing to do with the world to come.

Let us now consider what a church is. A church, then, I take to be a
voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own
accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as
they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of
their souls.

I say it is a free and voluntary society. Nobody is born a member of
any church; otherwise the religion of parents would descend unto
children by the same right of inheritance as their temporal estates,
and everyone would hold his faith by the same tenure he does his
lands, than which nothing can be imagined more absurd. Thus,
therefore, that matter stands. No man by nature is bound unto any
particular church or sect, but everyone joins himself voluntarily to
that society in which he believes he has found that profession and
worship which is truly acceptable to God. The hope of salvation, as it
was the only cause of his entrance into that communion, so it can be
the only reason of his stay there. For if afterwards he discover
anything either erroneous in the doctrine or incongruous in the
worship of that society to which he has joined himself, why should
it not be as free for him to go out as it was to enter? No member of a
religious society can be tied with any other bonds but what proceed
from the certain expectation of eternal life. A church, then, is a
society of members voluntarily uniting to that end.