Many of the writers with whom I have been concerned so far held that morality is tied in some way or other to salvation. If they did not think that morally decent behavior would by itself lead to or guarantee salvation, they took it to be at least a necessary condition of salvation, or a sign of it. Either you had to behave decently in order to become qualified for saving grace, or you could earn eternal life by moral goodness, or if you were of the elect you would show it by morally good behavior. Even the natural lawyers, reticent on principle about such matters in their jurisprudential treatises, had salvation somewhere in mind: witness Pufendorf's claim that dedication to performance of imperfect duties in the right spirit may win us merit – and not only in this life (Chapter 7.iv). Extreme antinomians, indeed, may have held that if you are saved, then anything you do counts as good, and morality is quite beside the point. But such views drew philosophical consideration, if at all, only to be rejected. Philosophers with serious religious convictions tended to think that there had to be some connection between morality and salvation.

For atheists, of course, there was no issue here. The so-called libertines in France during the first half of the seventeenth century proposed a wide variety of unorthodox standpoints, with atheistic morality among them.