An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo, who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of “latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as non-essential.
Locke had the same temperament as Hobbes. He too remained within the Church until the end of his life but he was heartily in favor of a most generous interpretation both of life and of faith. What was the use, Locke and his friends argued, of ridding the country of one tyrant (who wore a golden crown) if it only led up to a fresh abuse of power by another tyrant (who wore a black slouch hat)? Why renounce allegiance to one set of priests and then the next day accept the rule of another set of priests who were fully as overbearing and arrogant as their predecessors? Logic undoubtedly was on their side but such a point of view could not possibly be popular among those who would have lost their livelihood if the “latitude men” had been successful and had changed a rigid social system into an ethical debating society?
And although Locke, who seems to have been a man of great personal charm, had influential friends who could protect him against the curiosity of the sheriffs, the day was soon to come when he would no longer be able to escape the suspicion of being an atheist.
That happened in the fall of the year 1683, and Locke thereupon went to Amsterdam. Spinoza had been dead for half a dozen years, but the intellectual atmosphere of the Dutch capital continued to be decidedly liberal and Locke was given a chance to study and write without the slightest interference on the part of the authorities. He was an industrious fellow and during the four years of his exile he composed that famous “Letter on Tolerance” which makes him one of the heroes of our little history. In this letter (which under the criticism of his opponents grew into three letters) he flatly denied that the state had the right to interfere with religion. The state, as Locke saw it (and in this he was borne out by a fellow exile, a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Bayle, who was living in Rotterdam at that time composing his incredibly learned one-man encyclopedia), the state was merely a sort of protective organization which a certain number of people had created and continued to maintain for their mutual benefit and safety. Why such an organization should presume to dictate what the individual citizens should believe and what not—that was something which Locke and his disciples failed to understand. The state did not undertake to tell them what to eat or drink. Why should it force them to visit one church and keep away from another?
The seventeenth century, as a result of the half-hearted victory of Protestantism, was an era of strange religious compromises.
The peace of Westphalia which was supposed to make an end to all religious warfare had laid down the principle that “all subjects shall follow the religion of their ruler.” Hence in one six-by-nine principality all citizens were Lutherans (because the local grand duke was a Lutheran) and in the next they were all Catholics (because the local baron happened to be a Catholic).
“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future salvation.”
That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly nation.
Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they professed a different faith.