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.

68. These three kinds of murder are latent in a person from his birth, but he learns, even from early childhood, to cover them up with civil and moral conduct, which he is obliged to display with people in the world, and he keeps them from showing the more he loves honor and material gain. Thus is formed his outer self, while these latent inclinations to murder constitute his inner one. Such is the human character in itself.

Now because he puts off his outer self along with his body when he dies, but keeps his inner self, it is apparent what a devil he would be without being reformed.