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Under the head of Locke's theological writings may be included the Treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity with the two Vindications of it—the Essays on Toleration, and the Commentaries on some of the Epistles of St. Paul. The Reasonableness of Christianity was published in 1695, and may be taken as expressing Locke's most matured opinions on the questions of which it treats, though, in reading it, we must always bear in mind the caution and reticence which any writer of that time who diverged from the strict path of orthodoxy was obliged to observe. There can be no doubt that his object in this work was to commend what he regarded as the fundamental truths of Christianity to the attention of reflecting men, and to vindicate to the Christian religion what he conceived to be its legitimate influence over mankind. But, in trying to effect this his main object, he seems also to have wished to correct what he regarded as certain popular errors, and to bring back Christianity to the norm of the Scriptures, instead of implicitly following the Fathers, the Councils, and the received theology of the Churches and the Schools. He attempted, he tells us, to clear his mind of all preconceived notions, and, following the lead of the Scriptures, of which he assumed the infallibility, to see whither they would lead him. We may certainly trust his own assertion that he had no thoughts of writing in the interest of any particular party, though, at the same time, it was evidently his aim to extract from the Scriptures a theory as much as possible in accordance with the requirements of human reason, or, in other words, to reconcile the divine light with the natural light of man. The main results at which he arrived may be stated very briefly, as follows. Adam had been created immortal, but, by falling from the state of perfect obedience, "he lost paradise, wherein was tranquillity and the tree of life; that is, he lost bliss and immortality." "In Adam all die," and hence all his descendants are mortal. But this sentence is to be taken in its literal sense, and not in the signification that "every one descended of him deserves endless torment in hell-fire." For it seems "a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery." Much less can death be interpreted as a necessity of continual sinning. "Can the righteous God be supposed, as a punishment of our sin, wherewith He is displeased, to put man under the necessity of sinning continually, and so multiplying the provocation?" Here it will be seen Locke strikes at the root of the doctrines of the taint and guilt of original sin, doctrines which had long been stoutly opposed by the Arminians or Remonstrants with whom he had associated in Holland. But though it would have been an injustice to condemn men, for the fault of another, to a state of misery "worse than non-being," it was no wrong to deprive them of that to which they had no right, the exceptional condition of immortality. Adam's sin, then, subjected all men to death. But in Christ they have again been made alive, and "the life which Jesus Christ restores to all men is that life which they receive again at the resurrection." Now the conditions of our obtaining this gift are faith and repentance. But repentance implies the doing works meet for repentance; that is to say, leading a good life. And faith implies a belief not only in the one invisible, eternal, omnipotent God, but also in Jesus as the Messiah, who was born of a virgin, rose again from the grave, and ascended into heaven. When Christ came on earth, the minds of men had become so far blinded by sense and lust and superstition that it required some visible and unmistakable assertion of God's majesty and goodness to bring them back to true notions of Him and of the Divine Law which He had set them. "Reason, speaking ever so clearly to the wise and virtuous, had never authority enough to prevail on the multitude." For the multitude were under the dominion of the priests, and the "priests everywhere, to secure their empire, had excluded reason from having anything to do in religion." "In this state of darkness and error, in reference to the 'true God,' our Saviour found the world. But the clear revelation he brought with him dissipated this darkness, made the 'one invisible true God' known to the world; and that with such evidence and energy, that polytheism and idolatry have nowhere been able to withstand it." And, as he revealed to mankind a clear knowledge of the one true God, so also he revealed to them a clear knowledge of their duty, which was equally wanting.
"Natural religion, in its full extent, was nowhere that I know taken care of by the force of natural reason. It should seem, by the little that has hitherto been done in it, that it is too hard a task for unassisted reason to establish morality in all its parts, upon its true foundation, with a clear and convincing light. And it is at least a surer and shorter way to the apprehensions of the vulgar and mass of mankind, that one manifestly sent from God, and coming with visible authority from him, should, as a king and law-maker, tell them their duties and require their obedience, than leave it to the long and sometimes intricate deductions of reason to be made out to them. Such trains of reasoning the greater part of mankind have neither leisure to weigh, nor, for want of education and use, skill to judge of.... You may as soon hope to have all the day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairy-maids, perfect mathematicians, as to have them perfect in ethics this way. Hearing plain commands is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice. The greater part cannot learn, and therefore they must believe."
It is true that reason quickly apprehends and approves of these truths, when once delivered, but "native and original truth is not so easily wrought out of the mine as we, who have it delivered already dug and fashioned into our hands, are apt to imagine;" moreover, "experience shows that the knowledge of morality by mere natural light (how agreeable soever it be to it) makes but a slow progress, and little advance in the world."
The evidence of Christ's mission is to be found in the miracles, the occurrence and the divine origin of which Locke, both here and in the paper on Miracles published among his Posthumous Works, appears to have thought it impossible to gainsay. "The miracles he did were so ordered by the divine providence and wisdom, that they never were nor could be denied by any of the enemies or opposers of Christianity." And "this plain matter of fact being granted, the truth of our Saviour's doctrine and mission unavoidably follows." But once acknowledge the truth of Christ's mission, and the rule of life is evident. "To one who is once persuaded that Jesus Christ was sent by God to be a King, and a Saviour of those who do believe in him, all his commands become principles; there needs no other proof for the truth of what he says, but that he said it. And then there needs no more, but to read the inspired books, to be instructed; all the duties of morality lie there clear, and plain, and easy to be understood."
This, then, is Locke's scheme of a plain and reasonable Christianity. "These are articles that the labouring and illiterate man may comprehend. This is a religion suited to vulgar capacities, and the state of mankind in this world, destined to labour and travail." "The writers and wranglers in religion," indeed, "fill it with niceties, and dress it up with notions, which they make necessary and fundamental parts of it, as if there were no way into the church but through the academy or lyceum;" but the religion which he had enunciated was, Locke conceived, the religion of Christ and the Apostles, of the New Testament and of Common-Sense.
That Locke, though he had no respect for the dogmas of the Church, never seriously questioned the supernatural birth of Christ, the reality of the Christian miracles, or the infallibility of the Scriptures, is abundantly evident. On the last point his testimony is quite as emphatic as on the former two. In the Reasonableness of Christianity, speaking of the writers of the Epistles, he says:—"These holy writers, inspired from above, writ nothing but truth." And, to the same effect, in his Second Reply to Stillingfleet, he writes:—"My lord, I read the revelation of the holy scripture with a full assurance that all it delivers is true." The word "infallible" is applied, without any misgiving or qualification, to the contents of Scripture, though he assumes to each individual believer full liberty of interpretation. During his residence in Holland, as we have already seen, he appears to have entertained some doubts on this subject, but, at a later period, those doubts appear to have been finally laid.
Notwithstanding, however, the sincerity and simplicity of Locke's religious faith, the doctrines which he maintained must have represented but a very attenuated Christianity to the partisans of the two great religious parties which were at that time nominally the strongest in England. A Christianity which did not recognize the hereditary taint of original sin, and which passed over the mystery of the Atonement in silence, must have been as distasteful to one party as a Christianity which ignored Church authority and the exclusive privileges of the apostolical succession must have been to the other. And to the zealots of both parties alike, a statement of doctrine which was silent on the mystery of the Trinity, or rather which seemed to imply that the Son, though miraculously conceived, was not co-equal or co-eternal with the Father, and which, by implication, appeared to suggest that, though the righteous would be endowed with immortality, the torments of the wicked would have an end, might well seem not to deserve the name of Christianity at all. We need feel no wonder, then, that the appearance of Locke's work was followed by a bitter theological controversy which lasted during the rest of his life, and beyond it. Of these attacks upon him, and his Vindications, I have spoken in a previous chapter.
Whether Locke's presentation of Christianity is really more "reasonable" than the ancient and venerable creeds which it attempted to replace, is a question which might be debated now with fully as much vigour as in his own day. On the one hand, it might be maintained that a religion which has no mysteries, which has been pared down to the requirements of human reason, has ceased to be a religion altogether. That which is behind the veil can only be partially revealed in our present condition and to our present faculties. Now we know, and can know, only in part. On the other hand, it might be said that the "reason" is quite as much offended by the doctrines which Locke retained as by those which he rejected. It is necessary, however, to recollect, in estimating his position, that the theological difficulties of his age were moral and metaphysical rather than scientific and critical. The moral consciousness of many reflecting men was shocked by doctrines like those of original sin, predestination, the atonement, and everlasting punishment. Nor could they reconcile to their reason the seeming contradictions of the doctrine of a Triune God. But the study of nature had not advanced sufficiently far, or been sufficiently widely spread, to make the idea of supernatural intervention in the ordinary course of affairs, such as is constantly presented to us in the Biblical history, any serious or general stumbling-block. Much less had the criticism of the Sacred Text, or the comparison of it with the sacred books of other religions, become sufficiently common, or been carried out with sufficient rigour, to disturb, to any great extent, the received opinion that the Bible was literally, or, at least, substantially, the Word of God. Hence the via media on which Locke took his stand, though it might have been impossible to a philosopher of the next generation, seemed reasonable and natural enough to speculative men among his contemporaries. And for him it had at least this advantage, that it enabled him honestly to reconcile the conclusions of his philosophy with the singular piety and devoutness of his disposition. Had his religious doubts proceeded further than they did, there would probably have ensued a mental struggle which, besides causing him much personal unhappiness, might have deprived posterity of the more important of his works.
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