Justified True Belief

(●) The physician who asked what a mind can actually know, and answered in a way that reshaped how Christians defend the faith and how free countries treat their neighbours. + Most philosophers are remembered for what they concluded. Locke is remembered for a question. Before you argue about God, or the soul, or the right form of government, he said, stop and ask what a human mind is equipped to settle in the first place. Find the edges of what we can know, and a great deal of angry disagreement turns out to be argument about things nobody was ever in a position to prove. He was not a professional academic writing for other academics. He was a doctor by training and a political servant by career, a man who helped open a patron’s abdomen to drain an abscess and who spent five years in exile with a price effectively on his head. He published almost nothing until he was fifty-seven, and then, in a single extraordinary year, released the book that founded modern empiricism, the book that supplied the argument for religious liberty, and the book the American founders would quarry for the phrase about life and liberty. Empiricism is the plain-sounding claim that everything in a mind got there through experience, that no ideas are issued to us at birth, and after Locke it became the working assumption of English-speaking philosophy for the next two centuries. For Christian readers he is a double figure, and the doubleness is the interesting part. He wrote that reason must judge every claim, including a claim to revelation, and English apologists spent the next century building on exactly that. He also wrote a short book arguing that the creed of the New Testament is briefer than the churches had made it, and was accused of heresy for it before the ink was dry. Both Lockes are in the record, and an honest account of him has to hold the two together.

(●) 1632 AD: Born in a Somerset village to a Puritan lawyer who would soon ride to war against his king. + John Locke was born on 29 August 1632 at Wrington, in Somerset, and baptised the same day. The family home was a modest house at Belluton, near Pensford, a few miles south of Bristol. His father was a country lawyer and clerk to the local justices of the peace, a man of small means and strict Puritan convictions; his mother, Agnes Keene, was a tanner’s daughter roughly ten years her husband’s senior. Puritan, in the England of the 1630s, meant wanting the national church swept clear of what its members took to be leftover Roman ceremony, and in a house like that one it meant Scripture read aloud, Sunday kept strictly, and a child taught early that his own conscience was answerable to God rather than to a bishop. When Locke was ten the English Civil War broke out, and his father took a commission as a captain of horse in a parliamentary regiment raised by Alexander Popham, a local member of Parliament. The war went badly for that regiment and the family fortunes never quite recovered. What did come of it was a patron: Popham remembered the captain’s son. Locke wrote later, in his book on education, that a child’s mind is more easily bent than a grown man’s and that a father should govern by love rather than by the rod. He also recorded that his own father kept him at a distance in childhood and relaxed into friendship as the boy grew up. He seems to have thought the arrangement worked.

(●) 1647 AD: Westminster School and then Oxford bored him, and medicine rescued him. + Popham’s influence got the boy into Westminster School in 1647, then the best school in England. On 30 January 1649, half a mile up the road from the schoolroom, Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The headmaster, Richard Busby, was a royalist, and the story that he kept his pupils at prayer in school that morning rather than let them into the street is a tradition rather than a documented fact. Whether or not Locke heard the crowd, he grew up knowing exactly what a kingdom in religious civil war costs. In 1652 he was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, and there he stayed for more than thirty years. A studentship, despite the name, was Christ Church’s word for what other colleges called a fellowship: a place on the college foundation with rooms and an income attached, held for life by a man who kept the rules. It could also be taken away, and a king could do the taking. He took his degrees, BA in 1656 and MA in 1658, and disliked nearly everything he was taught. The Oxford curriculum was still built on disputation in the medieval manner: set questions, set authorities, victory going to whoever handled the technical vocabulary best. Locke called that sort of learning a way of talking rather than a way of knowing. What caught him instead was medicine and the new experimental science. He fell in with Robert Boyle, the chemist and devout Christian whose work on air and pressure was remaking natural philosophy, which is what that century called the study of nature and what we would simply call science. Later he fell in with Thomas Sydenham, the physician who insisted that a doctor should watch what diseases actually do rather than deduce what they ought to do. That is where Locke’s whole method came from. Sydenham at the bedside, patiently recording symptoms and refusing to guess at hidden causes, is the model behind every page of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

(●) 1666 AD: A patient he happened to treat, the future Earl of Shaftesbury, pulled him out of the university and into the government of England. + In the summer of 1666 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, later the first Earl of Shaftesbury, came to Oxford to take medicinal waters and met the young don, as Oxford calls its resident scholars, who had been asked to see to them. They liked each other immediately. Within a year Locke had moved into Exeter House on the Strand as Ashley’s physician, secretary, and man of business. In 1668 he earned his keep in the most literal way available. Ashley was dying of an abscess on the liver, and Locke organised and assisted at an operation to open the abdomen and drain it, leaving a silver tube in the wound so that it could keep draining afterwards. Ashley lived another fifteen years with that tube in his side, and never stopped telling people that Locke had saved his life. The same year Locke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Politics came with the household. Ashley was a founding force behind the Whigs, the party of parliamentary power and Protestant succession, and Locke worked as his secretary through the fights over the exclusion of the Catholic Duke of York, the king’s brother and heir, from the throne. Some of the secretarial work was worse than dull. He also wrote out, in his own hand and as Ashley’s servant, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina of 1669 for the colony’s proprietors, a document whose surviving text gives every freeman absolute power and authority over his enslaved Africans. He was thirty-six, he was somebody’s employee, and nothing he wrote in the thirty-five years left to him ever took that sentence back. And in the middle of all this the great book began, almost by accident. Locke tells the story himself in the epistle to the reader at the front of the Essay: five or six friends met in his chamber to argue about something quite different, ran into difficulties on every side, and after a while it struck him that they had taken the wrong course, and that before setting out on enquiries of that kind they needed to examine what their own understandings were fitted to deal with. Scholars usually place that evening in the winter of 1670 and 1671. He set down some hasty and undigested thoughts against the next meeting, and those few pages became nearly twenty years of work.

(●) 1683 AD: He fled to Holland under suspicion of treason, and wrote the case for toleration in exile. + Shaftesbury’s cause collapsed. Charged with treason, acquitted, then hounded again, he fled to Amsterdam and died there in January 1683. That summer the Rye House Plot, a conspiracy to assassinate the king and his brother, was uncovered, and the government swept up everyone who had stood near the Whig leadership. Locke was almost certainly not a plotter. He was also plainly not safe. In September 1683 he crossed to Holland, and he did not come back for five and a half years. Exile was not comfortable. He moved between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Cleves and Rotterdam, lived for a time under the assumed name Dr van der Linden, and in November 1684 was expelled from his studentship at Christ Church by direct order of Charles II. He was for a while on a list of fugitives whose extradition the English government demanded. Ordinary life went on around the danger: he botanised, he wrote long affectionate letters, he doctored his friends. He also wrote. In the winter of 1685 and 1686, lodging in Amsterdam in the house of the physician Egbert Veen, he composed a letter in Latin on the question of toleration and addressed it to the Arminian theologian Philipp van Limborch, the closest friend he made in Holland. Arminians were the Dutch Protestants who held that God’s grace can be genuinely resisted, and their own national synod had condemned them in 1619 and driven their ministers out before the country grudgingly let them back. Locke, in other words, was writing about toleration to a man whose church had needed some. The timing is the point as well. Louis XIV had just revoked the Edict of Nantes in October 1685, stripping French Protestants of the legal protection they had held for most of a century, and the refugees were arriving in Holland as Locke wrote. His Epistola de Tolerantia is not an abstract exercise. It is a document written among people who had just lost their homes for the sake of what they believed.

(●) 1689 AD: He came home in the revolution’s wake and published three of the modern world’s founding books in one year. + James II fled England in December 1688. In February 1689 Locke sailed home in the convoy that carried Princess Mary, soon to be crowned Mary II alongside her husband William. He was fifty-six years old and had published, under his own name, essentially nothing. Then everything at once. The Epistola de Tolerantia appeared in Latin at Gouda in the spring, and William Popple’s English version, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in the autumn. The Two Treatises of Government came out anonymously before the year was over. And in December the printer released An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the only one of the three to carry his name, a folio of more than three hundred thousand words that had taken him nearly twenty years. A folio was the largest and most expensive page size a printer used, the format kept for Bibles and law books, and putting a work of philosophy into one was a statement about how it expected to be taken. Two things about that year are worth holding on to. The first is that the Two Treatises was not written to justify the revolution of 1688, as generations assumed; the bulk of it dates from around 1680, when Locke was arguing for a right of resistance that had not yet been exercised and might have got him hanged. The second is how the three books hang together. The Essay asks what a mind can know. The Letter says that because certainty about another man’s salvation is not among the things we can know, no magistrate may compel it. The Two Treatises says that because men are made by God and belong to him, no man may treat another as property. One question, three answers.

(●) 1695 AD: He argued that the New Testament’s creed is short, and was accused of heresy for it. + Locke read the Bible constantly and privately, and in 1695 he published, anonymously, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures. His method was to work through the Gospels and Acts asking a single question: what did the apostles actually require a person to believe in order to be baptised? His answer was that they required faith that Jesus is the Messiah, together with repentance and a changed life. The reaction was immediate and hostile. John Edwards, a Cambridge divine, which is the old English word for a professional theologian, replied within months that the book was a covert argument for Socinianism, the position associated with the sixteenth-century theologian Faustus Socinus that Christ is not God but a uniquely commissioned man. Edwards noticed what was absent as much as what was present, and pressed on the silence. Locke answered twice, in A Vindication and a much longer Second Vindication, insisting that he had reported what the sacred text requires for entry and had not written a system of divinity. He never, in print, made the plain confession of Christ’s deity his critics were asking for. A second and more formidable opponent arrived in 1696, and to see what worried him, take a lump of sugar and strip away everything you can actually observe about it, the whiteness, the sweetness, the weight in the hand, and then ask what is left underneath holding all those qualities together. Philosophers called that leftover something the substance, and Locke’s answer in the Essay was that we have no clear idea of it whatever, only the supposition that there must be something there. Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, saw where that led and argued that such an account of substance would leave the doctrine of the Trinity without a foothold. The creeds confess Father, Son and Spirit as one substance; if nobody can say what a substance is, the confession looks as though it rests on a word that cannot be cashed. The exchange ran to three long letters and lasted until the bishop’s death in 1699. It was courteous, technical, and never really resolved. Public life continued through all of it. From 1696 to 1700 Locke sat on the Board of Trade, drafting policy on coinage, colonies and the poor, an old man in bad health taking the coach up to London and back.

(●) 1704 AD: He died at a friend’s house in Essex while the Psalms were being read to him. + Locke’s lungs had never forgiven him for London’s coal smoke. From 1691 he lived mostly at Oates, the manor house of Sir Francis and Lady Damaris Masham at High Laver in Essex. Lady Masham was the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, a philosopher in her own right and Locke’s closest friend for the last twenty years of his life; the household gave him a study, quiet air, and conversation. The Cambridge Platonists were a circle of English divines who argued, against the harder men on both sides of them, that reason is God’s own gift and no enemy of faith. It was a house already friendly to the way he thought. He died there on 28 October 1704, aged seventy-two. By Lady Masham’s account he spent his last morning listening to her read the Psalms, and died in the afternoon in his chair. He was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, High Laver, under a Latin inscription he had composed himself, which tells the passing traveller that here lies a man contented with his own modest lot, and that a reader wanting an example of how to live will find one in the Gospels. He left work unfinished. A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, the fruit of his last years of Bible study, came out in parts between 1705 and 1707, along with Of the Conduct of the Understanding and A Discourse of Miracles. Within two generations his Essay was the standard textbook in the English-speaking universities, his Letter the standard argument for religious liberty, and his Two Treatises the book Americans reached for when they wanted to say why a government may be replaced.

What He Taught

(T1) The mind begins as blank paper, and everything written on it comes from experience. + Ask someone born blind to describe scarlet. They can learn every fact about the wavelength, they can use the word correctly in a sentence, and they still cannot summon the colour, because the one door that idea comes through has never been open. Locke thought that little failure told us something enormous about all of us. The view he was attacking is called innatism: the belief that certain ideas and principles are stamped on the human mind at birth, waiting to be uncovered. It was the standard teaching of the schools, and it did useful work, because if the idea of God and the first rules of morality are printed on every soul from the start, then anyone who denies them is not mistaken but wicked. Locke opens the Essay by taking that apart. If a principle were truly written on every mind, children and the mentally impaired would assent to it, and they do not. If it needs teaching before it is recognised, it is learned, not native. And the plain evidence of travellers’ reports, he says, is that whole nations have held moral rules flatly contrary to the ones supposed to be universal. So where does the furniture of the mind come from? Two sources, and only two. Sensation, which is the five senses reporting the world, and reflection, which is the mind noticing its own operations, its own doubting, believing, willing, remembering. From those simple ideas the understanding compounds everything else. The idea of an army is built from ideas of men; the idea of infinity from the idea of adding one more, repeated without stopping; the idea of God, Locke argues, from ideas of existence, knowledge, power and goodness taken from ourselves and extended without limit. The consequence he cared about most was not psychological but pastoral. If nothing is known except by experience, then no one is born believing anything, and a person’s convictions are the product of what has actually reached them. That is a levelling thought. It also aims straight at the man who is certain because he has always been certain.

(Q) "Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE." + Source: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.i.2 (Fraser’s 1894 edition of Locke’s text). The sentences just before these are the famous ones: "Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished?" Fraser’s text prints the last word of the answer in capitals, which is Locke leaning on the table as he says it. The Latin phrase tabula rasa, scraped tablet, is fixed to Locke by later writers; his own image is the sheet of paper (T1).

(T2) Reason is not faith’s rival but its gatekeeper, because something must judge which claimed revelation is genuine. + Suppose two men knock at your door on the same afternoon. Each says God has spoken to him, and their messages contradict each other. You cannot accept both. Whatever you use to decide between them, that is what Locke means by reason, and his point is that you were always going to use it, whether or not you admitted so. He is careful about the terms. Faith, in his definition, is assent to something on the credit of the person proposing it, as coming from God; reason is the mind judging what follows from what it knows. He does not put reason above the content of revelation. He says that revelation, once received, may carry us far beyond anything reason could have discovered, and he lists the resurrection of the dead as exactly such a truth: nothing in nature suggests it, and it is believed on God’s testimony rather than worked out. What reason judges is the credential, not the content. Is this a revelation, and is this what it says? Take away that gate and you get what Locke calls enthusiasm, which in the seventeenth century did not mean eagerness. It meant the claim to a private illumination that needs no evidence and answers to nobody. He had watched it tear England apart for forty years, every faction certain, each certainty as unanswerable as the last. His diagnosis is dry and devastating: the strength of a persuasion is no proof at all of its truth, since men are as firmly persuaded of contrary things. Positively, this gave him an apologetic. If a message is genuinely from God he expected outward marks that anyone could examine, and above all miracles, which is why he wrote a short treatise on the subject arguing that the miracles of Christ are the credential of his mission. That programme, revelation authenticated by public evidence, is the shape English defence of the faith took for the next hundred years.

(Q) "Reason must be our last judge and guide in every thing." + Source: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.xix.14 (Fraser’s 1894 edition). The sentence comes from the chapter Locke added in 1700, Of Enthusiasm, and the surrounding argument makes his meaning narrower than the sentence sounds on its own. He is not saying reason outranks God’s word. He is saying that when a man tells you God has revealed something to him, only reason can weigh whether that is so, and that the alternative is to hand yourself over to whoever is most confident (T2).

(T3) No magistrate may compel belief, because force cannot produce the one thing that saves a soul. + Here is the argument in its simplest form. Put a sword to a man’s throat and you can make him say the creed. You cannot make him mean it. Belief is not something the will can switch on to order; it follows what a person finds convincing, and threats do not make anything more convincing, they only make speech less honest. So the persecutor, even granting that he is right about doctrine and sincere in wanting his neighbour saved, has chosen an instrument that cannot do the job. He fills the church with liars. Locke builds the case from Scripture as much as from psychology, and it matters that he does. By the magistrate he means the civil power in any of its shapes, the king, the parliament, the sheriff, the local justice with authority to fine a man or lock him up, and not a judge in a modern traffic court. That commission, he argues, runs to life, liberty and property, the goods that force can actually protect; the care of souls was never committed to him by God or by the people, and no man can hand another the power to choose his religion for him, since he does not have that power over himself. Christ’s own answer to Pilate drew the line already: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). And the parable of the weeds forbids the servants to tear up the field before the harvest (Matthew 13:24-30). Toleration, on this reading, is not indifference to truth. It is obedience to how truth was said to spread. The limits he set are as revealing as the principle. He would not extend toleration to opinions that destroy civil society, nor to any church whose members owe allegiance to a foreign prince, which in 1689 meant Roman Catholics; and he denied it to atheists, on the ground that promises and oaths, the bonds of society, can have no hold on a man who does not believe in God. Those exclusions were normal in his century and they are still his. What survived was the engine, not his fence around it. Once you have granted that coercion cannot make faith, the argument runs on past the exceptions its author wanted to keep, and within a century it had.

(Q) "Such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force." + Source: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (William Popple’s English translation, 1689). Locke wrote the letter in Latin while exiled in Holland, addressed to his friend the Arminian theologian Philipp van Limborch, in the months after Louis XIV stripped France’s Protestants of their legal protection. Limborch saw it through the press at Gouda in 1689 without telling him. Popple, an English merchant and Unitarian, which is to say a man who denied the Trinity outright, translated it without asking him and added a preface calling for absolute liberty, which Locke had not written.

(T4) Men are free and equal because they are God’s workmanship, and belong to him rather than to each other. + The Two Treatises begins as a demolition. Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha had argued that kings rule by a fatherly authority handed down from Adam, so that subjects are born into obedience the way children are born into a family. Locke spends the whole first treatise showing that the Genesis text will not carry the weight, and that even if it would, nobody alive could show that his particular king is Adam’s heir. The second treatise builds. Imagine people before any government exists, which is what Locke means by the state of nature: not chaos, but no common judge. Even there, he says, they are not free to do as they please, because a law of nature governs them, and reason is that law. Every one of them is the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, sent into the world by his order and about his business. They are his property, made to last during his pleasure and not one another’s. That is the whole ground of the equality, and it is a theological ground: no one may treat another as disposable stock, because no one made him. From that root come the familiar conclusions. Government exists by consent, for the preservation of life, liberty and estate. Its power is held in trust. A ruler who turns that power against the people has broken the trust and put himself in a state of war with them, and the people may resist. Locke knew what he was writing. He wrote most of it around 1680, years before the revolution it is usually credited with defending, at a time when saying it aloud could have cost him his neck. The line to read slowly is the one about property. Locke argued that a man owns his own person and therefore the labour of his body, and that mixing that labour with the common stock of the world is what makes something his. It is an argument for the dignity of ordinary work, and it is also, as the next century noticed, an argument that a human being cannot be owned.

(Q) "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." + Source: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, chapter II, section 6. The sentence continues into the reason for the rule: men are all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker, all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by his order and about his business. Thomas Jefferson’s "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is the best-known descendant of the phrase, by way of the Virginia Declaration of Rights (T4).

(T5) The faith the apostles required for baptism was short: that Jesus is the Messiah, believed and obeyed. + Locke came at the question the way he came at everything, by looking rather than deducing. He read straight through the Gospels and Acts with one question in hand: when someone was received into the church, what were they actually asked to believe? Not what a later confession says they should have been asked. What the text records. His finding was that the apostolic preaching turns on one article, that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah, the anointed king of Israel, raised from the dead and coming to judge; and that this belief is never separated from repentance and a new life. He was answering a real pastoral worry, not playing a game. If salvation requires assent to a long list of technical propositions, he asked, what becomes of the day-labourer and the illiterate, who make up the bulk of the human race and have neither the leisure nor the training to follow the arguments? A gospel for everybody must be plain enough for everybody. Two things need saying about the result, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is that Locke was not inventing a religion of good behaviour. His book insists on the atoning death and the bodily resurrection, treats the miracles as God’s public credential for his Son, and ends on judgment to come. The second is that his method could only report what the entrance requirement was, and his critics were asking a different question, about what the church confesses once inside. John Edwards read the silence about Christ’s deity as a position rather than an omission, and Locke never removed the ambiguity in print. The honest summary is that The Reasonableness of Christianity is a fine book about the minimum and an unsatisfying one about the maximum, and that its author, who spent his last years writing careful notes on Paul’s letters, seems to have been more interested in the first question than his church could accept.

(Q) "These two, faith and repentance, i.e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life." + Source: John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), near the close of the book. Locke published the book without his name on it, and never publicly admitted authorship, though everybody knew. The phrase "the new covenant" is his shorthand for the terms on which the Gospels and Acts show people being received (T5).

(Q) "Though God has given us no innate ideas of himself; though he has stamped no original characters on our minds, wherein we may read his being; yet having furnished us with those faculties our minds are endowed with, he hath not left himself without witness." + Source: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding IV.x.1 (Fraser’s 1894 edition). The chapter that follows is Locke’s own argument for the existence of God, reasoning from the certainty of his own existence to an eternal source of being and knowledge. The closing phrase is borrowed from Paul at Lystra, telling a pagan crowd that God has never left himself without witness in the world (Acts 14:17). The whole sentence is Locke in one breath: nothing is stamped on us, and God is still there to be found.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) English defenders of the faith adopted his method and built a century of evidences on it. + Locke handed Christian apologetics a programme: do not demand assent, produce the credentials. Revelation is to be received on God’s testimony, and the marks that a message comes from God, above all the miracles and the fulfilled prophecies, are public facts open to any honest examiner. His own Discourse of Miracles is a short working out of exactly that. The programme took. Robert Boyle, the chemist whose experiments had pulled the young Locke away from the disputations at Oxford, left money in his will for an annual course of London sermons defending the faith against unbelief, and those Boyle Lectures became the shop window of the new apologetics. Samuel Clarke gave the second of his two Boyle Lecture series in 1705 to the truth and certainty of the Christian revelation, resting the case on miracles and fulfilled prophecy. Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion in 1736 built its whole case on the principle that probability is the very guide of life, which is Locke’s account of judgment applied to religion; where certainty is unavailable, you weigh what is likely and act. That is what a jury does every week of the year, and nobody calls a jury unreasonable for it. William Paley’s View of the Evidences of Christianity in 1794 became the textbook every Cambridge undergraduate had to pass an examination on, and it is a Lockean book from the first page: witnesses, testimony, the credibility of men who suffered for what they said they saw. Preachers as well as philosophers went to school on him. John Wesley put the Essay on his reading list for Methodist preachers and wrote his own remarks on it. Jonathan Edwards read it as a boy at college, and his pupil and first biographer Samuel Hopkins records that Edwards picked the book up again shortly before his death and told the friends around him that he had been as much engaged, and had more satisfaction and pleasure in studying it, than the most greedy miser in gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some new discovered treasure. Neither man became a Lockean, and Edwards in particular spent his life arguing for a spiritual sense of the heart that Locke’s two sources of ideas do not obviously make room for. But both of them learned to think about the mind from him. The programme also drew the fire it deserved. David Hume’s essay on miracles, published in 1748, is aimed at precisely this apologetic, and the argument between the two positions has never stopped.

(†) His case against coercion became the church’s own argument, and a nation wrote it into law. + It is easy to forget how new the Letter was. For more than a thousand years the working assumption of Christian Europe, held by Catholics and Protestants alike, was that a commonwealth needs one religion the way a body needs one head, and that the ruler is responsible before God for what his subjects believe. Augustine had defended the coercion of the Donatists, a rigorist North African church that had broken away over whether clergy who handed over the Scriptures under persecution could ever be trusted again, and he took his warrant from the parable of the great banquet and its "compel people to come in" (Luke 14:23). Locke’s answer was that the compelling in that parable was never a magistrate’s work, and that a church is a free society of men joining of their own accord. Dissenting Christians took it up first, because they were the ones being fined and imprisoned. In the same year the Letter appeared, the English Toleration Act of 1689 gave freedom of worship to Protestant nonconformists: the Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Quakers who would not conform to the services of the Church of England. In the American colonies the argument travelled further and faster: William Penn had already founded Pennsylvania on liberty of conscience, and the Baptists of Virginia, jailed for preaching without a licence, made Locke’s case in plainer language and made it stick. Thomas Jefferson took extensive notes on the Letter and drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, passed in 1786, which says that God, who is lord both of body and mind, chose not to propagate the faith by coercions on either. James Madison carried the same reasoning into the First Amendment. Christians have not agreed on how far this settlement is a gain, and the disagreement is honest. Some read it as the church finally trusting the Spirit rather than the sheriff, and note that the free churches have generally grown fastest where the state stood back. Others answer that a state with no religion does not stay neutral for long, and that Locke’s division of soul from society concedes too much. What almost nobody now defends is the thing he was arguing against.

(†) Where he fell short: a creed trimmed to one article, a toleration with people left outside it, and a hand in the slave trade. + Locke was a professing Christian who died with the Psalms being read over him, and his soul is not ours to weigh. Three things in his own writings and papers, however, have given his Christian readers trouble ever since. - The silence about the Trinity. The Reasonableness of Christianity makes belief that Jesus is the Messiah the entrance requirement, and never says in print that Jesus is God. Pressed on it by John Edwards and by Bishop Stillingfleet through years of controversy, Locke defended his method and declined to supply the confession. Whatever he privately held, and scholars still argue about it, what the church confesses is that the Word was God and became flesh (John 1:1, 14), that Thomas fell before the risen Christ and called him "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), and that disciples are baptised into the one name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). A gospel summary with that left out is short in a way the New Testament is not. - The fence around toleration. The Letter withholds toleration from Roman Catholics, on the ground of allegiance to a foreign prince, and from atheists, on the ground that no oath binds a man who fears no God. The first is a political judgment of 1689 that reads as prejudice now; the second sits badly with his own principle, since if force cannot make belief it cannot make unbelief either. - Carolina and the Royal African Company. Locke wrote out the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina as Shaftesbury’s secretary, and its article 110 says that every freeman of Carolina shall have "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever." He also held stock through the 1670s in the Royal African Company, which shipped enslaved people across the Atlantic, and in the Bahama Adventurers, and how those shares came to him is argued about. Set that beside the sentence he wrote in the Two Treatises, that men are the workmanship of one Maker and his property rather than one another’s, and the contradiction is his, not a later reader’s. He never wrote a line reconciling the two, and Scripture had already said where his own principle leads: in Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). None of this cancels the good. It does mean that the man who taught Europe to test its certainties left some of his own untested, and that the arguments he gave the world turned out to be better than the use he made of them.