[1180] So too with the non-combatants. Note, for instance, Locke's recoil from the scholastic philosophy, and his early eager interest in chemistry, medicine, and meteorology. Anthony à Wood records him as a student "of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never-contented"—that is to say, argumentative.
[1181] History of the Royal Society, p. 152.
[1182] Sprat, of course, carried the "free way of reasoning" only to a certain length, feeling obliged to deprecate "that some Philosophers, by their carelessness of a Future Estate, have brought a discredit on knowledge itself" (p. 367); and "that many Modern Naturalists have bin negligent in the Worship of God"; but he still insisted that "the universal Disposition of this Age is bent upon a rational Religion" (p. 366). Compare the Discourse of Things above Reason, by a Fellow of the Royal Society (1681), attributed to Boyle, and published with a tract on the same theme by another Fellow.
[1183] If, that is, the section providing for slavery be his. It probably was not. See Mr. Fox Bourne's Life of Locke, 1876, i, 239. His influence may reasonably be traced in the remarkable provisions for the freedom of sects—under limitation of theism. Id. pp. 241-43. Mr. Fox Bourne does not deal with the slavery clause.
[1184] Thoughtful observers already recognised in the time of James II that if England developed on the French lines religious freedom would disappear from Europe. See the tractate L'Europe esclave si Angleterre ne rompt ses fers, Cologne, 1677.
[1185] This may be taken as certain; but it is not clear how far he wished to go. Ranke (History of England, Eng. tr. iv, 437) and Hassencamp (History of Ireland, Eng. tr. p. 117) are satisfied with the evidence as to his having promised the German emperor to do his utmost to repeal the penal laws against the Catholics, and his having offered the Irish Catholics, before the Battle of Aghrim, religious freedom, half the churches in Ireland, and half their old possessions. For this we have only a private letter. However this point may be decided, the Treaty of Limerick is plain evidence. On the point of William's responsibility for the breach of that Treaty, see the excellent sketch of The Past History of Ireland by Mr. Bouverie-Pusey (1894).
[1186] Cp. the author's Saxon and the Celt, 1897, pp. 146-56.
[1187] A Character of King Charles II, ed. 1750, p. 45.
[1188] Continuation of the Life of Clarendon, in 1-vol. ed. of History, 1843, p. 1006.
[1189] Hallam, iii, 396, following Carte and Leland.