Indeed, the theism of Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies, albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason. In one passage he declares that “reason is natural revelation,” while “revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouchsafes the truth of.”[167] This compromise appears to be borrowed from Spinoza, who had put it with similar vagueness in his great Tractatus,[168] of which pre-eminent work Locke cannot have been ignorant, though he protested himself little read in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza, “those justly decried names.”[169] The Tractatus being translated into English in the same year with the publication of the Essay, its influence would concur with Locke’s in a widened circle of readers; and the substantially naturalistic doctrine of both books inevitably promoted the deistic movement. We have Locke’s own avowal that he had many doubts as to the Biblical narratives;[170] and he never attempts to remove the doubts of others. Since, however, his doctrine provided a sphere for revelation on the territory of ignorance, giving it prerogative where its assertions were outside knowledge, it counted substantially for Unitarianism insofar as it did not lead to deism.
See the Essay, bk. iv, ch. xviii. Locke’s treatment of revelation may be said to be the last and most attenuated form of the doctrine of “two-fold truth.” On his principle, any proposition in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that “whatever is divine revelation ought to overrule all our opinions” (bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because “the consequences of the empiricism of Locke had become so decidedly favourable to the cause of atheism, skepticism, materialism, and irreligion” (Manual of the Hist. of Philos. Eng. tr. Bohn ed. § 349).
In his “practical” treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on Toleration as early as 1667,[171] and to produce from 1685 onwards his famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal of the kind that had yet been produced;[172] all the more successful so far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with a memorable capitulation to bigotry: “Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration.” This handsome endorsement of the religion which had repeatedly “dissolved all” in a pandemonium of internecine hate, as compared with the one heresy which had never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably more of a prudent surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression of the philosopher’s own state of mind;[173] and his treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a humane ethic, with sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies, while claiming that the gospel ethic was “now with divine authority established into a legible law, far surpassing all that philosophy and human reason had attained to.”[174] Its effect was, however, to promote rationalism without doing much to mitigate the fanaticism of belief.
Locke’s practical position has been fairly summed up by Prof. Bain: “Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, to ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity, by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.... The fallacy of his position obviously was that he could not strip himself of his education and acquired notions.... He seemed unconscious of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable prepossessions. In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost. Such purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He found, by keeping close to the Gospels and making proper selections from the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the practice of Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed, as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language, without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words, to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy method was not very successful the history of the deistical controversy sufficiently proves” (Practical Essays, pp. 226–27).
That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved by the many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even the first Letter on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to demonstrate “the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration.”[175] On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.;[176] his only assailant with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to “subvert the nature and use of divine revelation and faith.”[177] In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile clericals had treated him “with a rudeness peculiar to some who make a profession of the Christian religion, and seem to pride themselves in being the clergy of the Church of England.”[178] This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type;[179] but hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of his “Socinianism.” In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again, Locke’s conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was “dangerous to religion,” besides being philosophically false.[180] Yet Locke agreed with Law[181] that moral obligation is dependent solely on the will of God—a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as the negation of morality.
See the Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit, pt. iii, § 2; and the Letters to a Student, under date June 3, 1709 (p. 403 in Rand’s Life, Letters, etc., of Shaftesbury, 1900). The extraordinary letter of Newton to Locke, written just after or during a spell of insanity, first apologizes for having believed that Locke “endeavoured to embroil me with women and by other means,” and goes on to beg pardon “for representing that you struck at the root of morality, in a principle you laid down in your book of ideas.” In his subsequent letter, replying to that of Locke granting forgiveness and gently asking for details, he writes: “What I said of your book I remember not.” (Letters of September 16 and October 5, 1693, given in Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 226–27, and Sir D. Brewster’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton, 1855, ii, 148–51.) Newton, who had been on very friendly terms with Locke, must have been repeating, when his mind was disordered, criticisms otherwise current. After printing in full the letters above cited, Brewster insists, on his principle of sacrificing all other considerations to Newton’s glory (cp. De Morgan, Newton: his Friend: and his Niece, 1885, pp. 99–111), that all the while Newton was “in the full possession of his mental powers.” The whole diction of the first letter tells the contrary. If we are not to suppose that Newton had been temporarily insane, we must think of his judgment as even less rational, apart from physics, than it is seen to be in his dissertations on prophecy. Certainly Newton was at all times apt to be suspicious of his friends to the point of moral disease (see his attack on Montague, in his letter to Locke of January 26, 1691–1692; in Fox Bourne, ii, 218; and cp. De Morgan, as cited, p. 146); but the letter to Locke indicates a point at which the normal malady had upset the mental balance. It remains, nevertheless, part of the evidence as to bitter orthodox criticism of Locke.
On the whole, it is clear, the effect of his work, especially of his naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism; and his compromises furthered instead of checking the movement of unbelief. His ideal of practical and undogmatic Christianity, indeed, was hardly distinguishable from that of Hobbes,[182] and, as previously set forth by the Rev. Arthur Bury in his Naked Gospel (1690), was so repugnant to the Church that that book was burned at Oxford as heretical.[183] Locke’s position as a believing Christian was indeed extremely weak, and could easily have been demolished by a competent deist, such as Collins,[184] or a skeptical dogmatist who could control his temper and avoid the gross misrepresentation so often resorted to by Locke’s orthodox enemies. But by the deists he was valued as an auxiliary, and by many latitudinarian Christians as a helper towards a rationalistic if not a logical compromise.
Rationalism of one or the other tint, in fact, seems to have spread in all directions. Deism was ascribed to some of the most eminent public men. Bishop Burnet has a violent passage on Sir William Temple, to the effect that “He had a true judgment in affairs, and very good principles with relation to government, but in nothing else. He seemed to think that things are as they were from all eternity; at least he thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble.”[185] The praise of Confucius is the note of deism; and Burnet rightly held that no orthodox Christian in those days would sound it. Other prominent men revealed their religious liberalism. The accomplished and influential George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, often spoken of as a deist, and even as an atheist, by his contemporaries,[186] appears clearly from his own writings to have been either that or a Unitarian;[187] and it is not improbable that the similar gossip concerning Lord Keeper Somers was substantially true.[188]
That Sir Isaac Newton was “some kind of Unitarian”[189] is proved by documents long withheld from publication, and disclosed only in the second edition of Sir David Brewster’s Memoirs. There is indeed no question that he remained a mere scripturalist, handling the texts as such,[190] and wasting much time in vain interpretations of Daniel and the Apocalypse.[191] Temperamentally, also, he was averse to anything like bold discussion, declaring that “those at Cambridge ought not to judge and censure their superiors, but to obey and honour them, according to the law and the doctrine of passive obedience”[192]—this after he had sat on the Convention which deposed James II. In no aspect, indeed, apart from his supreme scientific genius, does he appear as morally[193] or intellectually pre-eminent; and even on the side of science he was limited by his theological presuppositions, as when he rejected the nebular hypothesis, writing to Bentley that “the growth of new systems out of old ones, without the mediation of a Divine power, seems to me apparently absurd.”[194] There is therefore more than usual absurdity in the proclamation of his pious biographer that “the apostle of infidelity cowers beneath the implied rebuke”[195] of his orthodoxy. The very anxiety shown by Newton and his friends[196] to checkmate “the infidels” is a proof that his religious work was not scientific even in inception, but the expression of his neurotic side; and the attempt of some of his scientific admirers to show that his religious researches belong solely to the years of his decline is a corresponding oversight. Newton was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia. It is therefore all the more significant of the set of opinion in his day that, tied as he was to Scriptural interpretations, he drew away from orthodox dogma as to the Trinity. Not only does he show himself a destructive critic of Trinitarian texts and an opponent of Athanasius[197]: he expressly formulates the propositions (1) that “there is one God the Father ... and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”; (2) that “the Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible”; and (3) that “the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself.”[198] Such opinions, of course, could not be published: under the Act of 1697 they would have made Newton liable to loss of office and all civil rights. In his own day, therefore, his opinions were rather gossipped-of than known;[199] but insofar as his heresy was realized, it must have wrought much more for unbelief than could be achieved for orthodoxy by his surprisingly commonplace strictures on atheism, which show the ordinary inability to see what atheism means.
The argument of his Short Scheme of True Religion brackets atheism with idolatry, and goes on: “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and no more, on either side of the face?” etc. (Brewster, ii, 347). The logical implication is that a monstrous organism, with the sides unlike, represents “accident,” and that in that case there has either been no causation or no “purpose” by Omnipotence. It is only fair to remember that no avowedly “atheistic” argument could in Newton’s day find publication; but his remarks are those of a man who had never contemplated philosophically the negation of his own religious sentiment at the point in question. Brewster, whose judgment and good faith are alike precarious, writes that “When Voltaire asserted that Sir Isaac explained the prophecies in the same manner as those who went before him, he only exhibited his ignorance of what Newton wrote, and what others had written” (ii, 331, note; 355). The writer did not understand what he censured. Voltaire meant that Newton’s treatment of prophecy is on the same plane of credulity as that of his orthodox predecessors.