John Locke's Toleration and the Bonsai Religions

The assurance that State toleration makes religions to become innocuous is the art of separation: if each of the actors of the society remains "within its own borders, one response to land welfare of the Republic, the other to the salvation of the souls", as Locke wrote, there will be no discord among them and the society can spread that coercive regime of industriousness and sobriety, he predicted in his work on the civil government. Freedom, that springs from this rationalist art of sectioning the living, is the climate that makes emerging the plant of the true religion, which the State waters and prunes as a bonsai.