Note 167 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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.