Love Quote by Moses Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn draws a bright line where early modern states worked hardest to blur it: coercion belongs to government, conscience to religion. The sentence is almost deceptively calm, but its architecture is polemical. "Physical power" is blunt, nearly clinical language for the state’s real claim to legitimacy: the monopoly on force. He concedes that reality without romance - the state "uses it when necessary" - and the phrase quietly normalizes coercion as a tool of order, not a moral vocation.

Then he pivots to religion and refuses it the same machinery. By defining religion’s power as "love and beneficence", he’s not praising churches as they often were; he’s prescribing what religion must be if it is to be defensible in a plural society. The subtext is aimed at Europe’s long habit of enforcing doctrine with civil penalties: if religion reaches for the sword, it stops being religion and becomes just another state project, with metaphysical branding.

Context matters: Mendelssohn, a Jewish Enlightenment thinker in Protestant Prussia, is writing under regimes where toleration is conditional and minority faiths are constantly asked to justify their presence. This line reads as both philosophical principle and survival strategy. It argues for a civic order where the state can secure peace without managing salvation, and where religion earns public standing by persuasion and ethical action rather than compulsion. The rhetorical trick is moral judo: he grants the state its hardness so religion can be held to a higher, softer standard - and kept from being weaponized.