1. To recognise one God, to try to form the worthiest ideas of him, to take account of these worthiest ideas in all our actions and thoughts, is the most comprehensive definition of all natural religion.

2. Every human being, in proportion to his powers, is disposed and committed to this natural religion.

3. But since this proportion differs in each individual, so that each individual's natural religion will also differ, it has been thought necessary to counteract the disadvantage to which this difference can give rise – not in man's state of natural freedom, but in his state of civil union with others.

4. That is: as soon as it was recognised as desirable to make religion a communal concern, it was necessary to agree on certain things and concepts, and to attribute to these conventional things and concepts the same importance and necessity which religious truths recognised by natural means possessed in their own right.

5. That is: out of the religion of nature, which was not capable of universal and uniform practice, it was necessary to construct a positive religion, just as a positive law had been constructed, for the same reason, out of the law of nature.

6. This positive religion received its sanction from the authority of its founder, who claimed that its conventional elements came just as certainly from God – albeit through the founder's mediation – as its essential elements did through the immediate evidence of each individual's reason.