Only among the ranks of the redeemed, by God’s inexplicable mercy and the gratuitous bestowal of supernatural grace, can now be attained the peace and harmony that, in the state of innocence, man had enjoyed as his natural condition. As for the rest of humankind, their very survival depends on the protection of new institutions and new laws of an essentially political nature appropiate to their fallen condition. Those laws and institutions are designed in part to mitigate, at least, the horrors attendant upon the incessant struggle of humankind for mutual domination and to make possible, via the coerced suppression of conflict, the achievement of a minimal external peace and the reverberation through society of at least a dim harmonic of justice. And even the redeemed, condemned as they are to journeying in this life as pilgrims among the unregenerate majority of humankind, cannot be secure in the peace and harmony that is properly theirs without the supervention of
those same legal and political instrumentalities, from the institution of private property to the very existence of what we today call «the state». (…) But if a punishment for our sinful condition, the commonwealths and political institutions of this world are also in some measure a remedy for it. For they strive to effect a «harmonious agreement of citizens concerning the giving and obeying of orders», even if it is one limited, in effect, «to the establishment of a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to this mortal life». And in this, that fragile measure of agreement is of service not only to the reprobate, the members of the earthly city who constitute the mass of humankind, but also to those members of the city of God who dwell as aliens in their midst.

Francis Oakley, Empty Bottles of Gentilism