Thus faith is based upon duty without being itself duty:  ethics is the basis of religion, which consists in our regarding moral laws as (instar, as if they were) divine commands.  They are not valid or obligatory because God has given them (this would be heteronomy), but they should be regarded as divine because they are necessary laws of reason.  Religion differs from ethics only in its form, not in its content, in that it adds to the conception of duty the idea of God as a moral lawgiver, and thus increases the influence of this conception on the will; it is simply a means for the promotion of morality.  Since, however, besides natural religion or the pure faith of reason (the moral law and the moral postulates), the historical religions contain statutory determinations or a doctrinal faith, it becomes the duty of the critical philosopher to inquire how much of this positive admixture can be justified at the bar of reason.  In this investigation the question of the divine revelation of dogma and ceremonial laws is neither supra-rationalistically affirmed nor naturalistically derived, but rationalistically treated as an open question.

The four essays combined under the title Religion within the Limits of Reason Only treat of the Radical Evil in Human Nature, the Conflict of the Good Principle with the Evil for the Mastery over Man, the Victory of the Good Principle over the Evil and the Founding of a Kingdom of God upon Earth, and, finally, Service and False Service under the Dominion of the Good Principle, or Religion and Priestcraft; or more briefly, the fall, the atonement (the Christ-idea), the Church, and true and false service of God.

(1) The individual evil deeds of the empirical character point to an original fault of the intelligible character, a propensity to evil dwelling in man and not further deducible.  This, although it is self-incurred, may be called natural and innate, and consists (not in the sensibility merely, but) in a freely chosen reversal of the moral order of our maxims, in virtue of which the maxim of duty or morality is subordinated to that of well-being or self-love instead of being placed above it, and that which should be the supreme condition of all satisfaction is degraded into a mere means thereto.  Morality is therefore a conversion from the evil to the good, and requires a complete revolution in the disposition, the putting on of a new man, a “new birth,” which, an act out of time, can manifest itself in the temporal world of phenomena only as a gradual transformation in conduct, as a continuous advance, but which, we may hope, is judged by him who knows the heart, who regards the disposition instead of particular imperfect actions, as a completed unity.