The mark of true religion, Hale believed, was the way that it transfigured the duties of everyday life: ‘this is the great art of Christian chymistry, to convert those acts that are materially natural or civil into acts truly and formally religious; whereby the whole course of this life is both truly and interpretatively a service to Almighty God, and an uninterrupted state of religion. …’ Hale had been taught by Selden that obedience to local regulations was really obedience to God. God had created man as a maker of binding contracts in his sight, as a creature who was free to constitute practically all of his moral obligations. As the ‘De Deo’ manuscript expressed it, ‘I do not violate another man's wife, his life, his goods because I have expressly or tacitly promised the contrary’. If a society were to survive, the God who enforced these contracts must be preached.

One of the many puritan attitudes Hale kept from the religion of his youth was the importance he attached to sermons. He wrote a little essay on the theme ‘that a preaching ministry of the Gospel must be kept up’, depicting the maintenance of preachers as an essential function of any Christian state: ‘the public neglect of the ordinances of Christ for the saving of souls will be a plain profession of rejection of Christ and a plain symptom of God's rejecting of the nation, a professed making way for the dominion of darkness and evil.’