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.

(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