1. Every Religion Is a Way of Life, and Its Life Is the Doing of Good

Everyone with any religion knows and acknowledges that someone who lives right is saved, and that someone who does not live right is damned. For he knows and acknowledges that someone who lives right, thinks right, not only about God, but also about the neighbor; but not so someone who does not live right.

A person’s life is his love, and what a person loves he not only freely does, but also freely thinks. We say therefore that his life is the doing of good, because doing right accompanies his thinking right. If these two do not go together, they do not constitute a person’s life.

But this we will show in the following pages.

92. No One Can Refrain from Evils as Being Sins So as to Turn Away from Them Inwardly Except by Battles Against Them

Everyone knows, from the Word and from doctrine drawn from the Word, that a person’s inherent character from birth is evil, and that as a result he is led by an inborn urge to love evils and to be carried away into them, so as to want to take revenge, for example, to defraud, to defame, and to commit adultery. And if he does not think these are sins and on that account resist them, he does them whenever the occasion offers and his reputation does not suffer a loss of honor or material gain. Moreover, if the person has no religion, he does them with delight.