Note 171 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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.