Note 175 — Chapter XIV · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

That Locke was felt to have injured orthodoxy is further proved by the many attacks made on him from the orthodox side. Even the first Letter on Toleration elicited retorts, one of which claims to demonstrate “the Absurdity and Impiety of an Absolute Toleration.”175 On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.;176 his only assailant with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to “subvert the nature and use of divine revelation and faith.”177 In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile clericals had treated him “with a rudeness peculiar to some who make a profession of the Christian religion, and seem to pride themselves in being the clergy of the Church of England.”178 This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type;179 but hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of his “Socinianism.” In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again, Locke’s conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was “dangerous to religion,” besides being philosophically false.180 Yet Locke agreed with Law181 that moral obligation is dependent solely on the will of God—a doctrine denounced by the deist Shaftesbury as the negation of morality.