"I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law of human nature; spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best morally when he is equipped with the religious garments whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and besides I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a might power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought.”
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889.
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