"WHAT DISCOURSES or writings of philosophers, what laws of any commonwealth in any land or age, are worthy for a moment to be compared with the two commandments on which Christ says that all the law and the prophets hang: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself”? All philosophy is here—physics, ethics, logic: the first, because in God the Creator are all the causes of all existences in nature; the second, because a good and honest life is not produced in any other way than by loving, in the manner in which they should be loved, the proper objects of our love, namely, God and our neighbour; and the third, because God alone is the Truth and the Light of the rational soul. Here also is security for the welfare and renown of a commonwealth; for no state is perfectly established and preserved otherwise than on the foundation and by the bond of faith and of firm concord, when the highest and truest common good, namely, God, is loved by all, and men love each other in Him without dissimulation, because they love one another for His sake from whom they cannot disguise the real character of their love."
-- Letters, 175, 5: To Lord Volusianus (A.D. 412).
"FOR WHAT is a republic but a commonwealth? Therefore its interests are common to all; they are the interests of the State. Now what is a State (civitas) but a multitude of men bound together by some bond of concord? In one of their own authors we read: “What was a scattered and unsettled multitude had by concord become in a short time a State.” But what exhortations to concord have they ever appointed to be read in their temples? So far from this, they were unhappily compelled to devise how they might worship without giving offense to any of their gods, who were all at such variance among themselves, that, had their worshippers imitated their quarrelling, the State must have fallen to pieces for want of the bond of concord, as it soon afterwards began to do through civil wars, when the morals of the people were changed and corrupted."
-- Letters, 138, 2: To Marcellinus (A.D. 412)
"HOW MUCH MORE, then, ought we unhesitatingly to obey God, the Governor of all His creatures! For as among the authorities of human society the greater authority is obeyed before the lesser, so must God above all."
-- Confessions, 3, 8.
~St. Augustine of Hippo