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.

53. The Ten Commandments Tell Us What Evils Are Sins

What nation, in the whole world, does not know that it is evil to steal, to commit adultery, to kill and to bear false witness? If they did not know this, and if they did not pass laws to guard against anyone’s doing these things, it would be the end of them, for any society, republic or kingdom would collapse without these laws.

Who can suppose that the Israelite nation was, more than any other nation, so stupid as not to know that these acts are evil? One may wonder, therefore, why these laws, universally known the world over, were promulgated from Mount Sinai by Jehovah Himself, accompanied by so great a miracle.

But listen, they were promulgated with so great a miracle in order for people to know that these laws were not only civil and moral laws, but also spiritual laws, and that to disobey them was not only to do evil to one’s fellow citizen and community, but was also to sin against God. By being promulgated by Jehovah from Mount Sinai, therefore, these laws became laws of religion. For it is plain that whatever Jehovah God commands, He intends to be a commandment of religion, and that it must be obeyed for His sake, and for the sake of people’s salvation.