All throughout the world are saved, who acknowledge God and live from a religious motive in accordance with the civil law-code. By civil law-code we mean the kind of precepts contained in the Ten Commandments, prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft and false witness. These precepts are incorporated into the civil law-code in all the kingdoms of the earth, because without them no kingdom could hold together.

[2] But some people live by these precepts out of fear of legal penalties, some out of obedience to civil power, some also for religious reasons. It is those who do this for religious reasons who are saved. The reason is that God is in them, and a person who has God in him is saved. Can anyone fail to see that the Children of Israel on their departure from Egypt had among their laws the prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft and false witness, since their community or society would not have been able to hold together without them? Yet those same laws were proclaimed by Jehovah God on Mount Sinai amid an astonishing miracle. But the reason they were proclaimed was so that these same laws should become also laws of religion. They were thus to observe them not merely for the good of the community, but also for God's sake; and when they did so for religious reasons, for God's sake, they were saved.

[3] From this it can be established that the heathen who acknowledge God and live in accordance with a civil law-code are saved. For they cannot be blamed for knowing nothing of the Lord, and consequently nothing of the chastity of marriage with one wife. For it is contrary to Divine justice that those should be condemned, who acknowledge God and live for religious reasons in accordance with the laws of justice, which prescribe the shunning of evils, because they are offences against God, and doing good deeds, because they are pleasing to God.