Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by gving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statemanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past . . .Conduct deprived of its religious supports, detereorates in epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.

Historian Will Durant in an exposition of the interaction of church and state in societies. From The Story of Civilization, volume 1, page 7.