7. It was granted me to question some English priests who professed and preached faith alone — which I did in the spiritual world — and I asked them, when they read out that prayer in their churches, a prayer that does not mention faith, whether they believed in what it says, such as that if people do evil and do not repent, the devil will enter into them as it did into Judas and destroy both their body and their soul.
They said that in the state they were in when they read out the prayer, they knew and thought nothing else but that it was the heart of religion. But when they were composing and polishing their discourses or sermons, they thought differently, because they thought of faith as being the sole means of salvation, and of goodness of life as being a moral adjunct for the public good.
Still, they were nevertheless convinced that they too possessed the common perception that someone who lives right is saved, and that someone who does not live right is condemned, and that they had this perception whenever they were not caught up in their own self-interest.
