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.

108. If Someone Refrains from Evils for Any Other Reason Than That They Are Sins, He Does Not Really Refrain from Them, but Only Keeps Them from Being Seen by the World

There are moral people who keep the precepts of the second table of the Ten Commandments, who do not defraud, do not blaspheme, do not take revenge, and do not commit adultery, and among them some who are personally convinced that such conduct is evil, being harmful to the country and so contrary to laws of humanity, and who also practice charity, honesty, justice, and chastity.

However, if they do these goods and refrain from the aforesaid evils only because they are evil, and not at the same time because they are sins, they are still merely natural people, and in merely natural people the root of evil remains deeply seated and is not removed. As a result, the good they do is not good, because it springs from themselves.