325. 2. Consequently, under divine providence everyone can be saved; and everyone is saved who believes in God and lives a good life. What has just been presented shows that everyone can be saved. There are people who think that the Lord's church exists only in the Christian world because only there is the Lord known and only there is the Word found. Still, there are a good many people who believe that the church of God is wider, spread out and scattered through all regions of the world, even among people who do not know about the Lord and do not have the Word. They say that it is not these people's fault and that they cannot help being ignorant. It would fly in the face of God's love and mercy if anyone were born for hell when we are all equally human.

[2] Since many Christians (though not all) have a belief that there is a wider church called "a communion," it follows that there must be some very general principles of this wider church that comprises all religions, so that they do make up one communion. We shall see that these most general principles are belief in God and living a good life, in the following sequence. (a) Belief in God brings about God's union with us and our union with God; and denial of God brings about severance. (b) Our belief in God and union with him depend on our living a good life. (c) A good life, or living rightly, is abstaining from evils because they are against our religion and therefore against God. (d) These are the general principles of all religions, through which everyone can be saved.

23. There is one human God from whom springs all else. All powers of human reason join together and center, so to speak, on the existence of one God, the creator of the universe. Consequently any person possessed of reason, owing to the common sense of his intellect, does not and cannot think otherwise. Tell anyone possessed of sound reason that there are two creators of the universe, and you will encounter an antipathy to you because of it, even perhaps from just the sound of the words in his ear. It is apparent from this that all powers of human reason join together and center on the existence of one God.

For this there are two reasons. The first is that the very ability to think rationally regarded in itself is not a person's own, but is God's gift in him. On it depends human reason in general, and that dependence in general causes it to see, as though of itself, the existence of one God.

The second reason is that through that faculty a person either is in the light of heaven or draws the general tendency of his thought from it, and the universal precept of the light of heaven is the existence of one God.

A different circumstance occurs if a person has used that faculty to corrupt the lower constituents of his intellect. He possesses that faculty indeed, but by a twisting of its lower elements he turns it in another direction so that his reason becomes unsound.