(2) By the eternal Son of God, for whose sake God created all things, we are to understand the ideal of the perfect man, which in truth forms the end of creation, and is come down from heaven, etc.  To believe in Christ means to resolve to realize in one’s self the ideal of human nature which is well pleasing to God, or to make the divine disposition of the Son of God our own, not to believe that this ideal has appeared on earth as an actual man, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  The only saving faith is the belief of reason in the ideal which Christ represents, and not the historical belief in his person.  The vicarious atonement of the ideal man for those who believe on him is to be interpreted to mean that the sufferings and sacrifices (crucifixion of the flesh) imposed by moral conversion, which are due to the sinful man as punishment, are assumed by the regenerate man:  the new Adam bears the sufferings of the old.  In the same way as that in which Kant handles the history of Christ and the doctrine of justification, all biblical narratives and ecclesiastical doctrines are in public instruction (from the pulpit) to be interpreted morally, even where the authors themselves had no such meaning in mind.

(3) The Church is a society based upon the laws of virtue, an ethical community or a people of God, whose members confirm each other in the performance of duty by example and by the profession of a common moral conviction; we are all brothers, the children of one father.  Ideally there is only one (the universal, invisible) Church, and its foundation the pure faith of reason; but in consequence of a weakness peculiar to human nature the foundation of an actual church required the addition of a statutory historical faith, with claims to a divine origin, from which a multitude of visible churches and the antithesis of orthodox and heretics have sprung.  The history of the Church since the establishment of Christianity represents the conflict between the historical faith and the faith of reason; its goal is the submission of the former to the latter, as, indeed, we have already begun to perceive that God does not require a special service beyond the practice of virtue.

(4) The true service of God consists in a moral disposition and its manifestation:  “All that man supposes himself able to do in order to please God, beyond living a good life, is false service” False service is the false subordination of the pure faith of reason to the statutory faith, by which the attainment of the goal of religious development is hindered and the laity are brought into dangerous dependence upon the clergy.  Priestcraft, hypocrisy, and fanaticism enter in the train of fetich service.  The church-faith is destined little by little to make itself superfluous.  It has been necessary as a vehicle, as a means for the introduction and extension of the pure religion of morality, and it still remains useful for a time, until humanity shall become of age;