Note 42 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Sir Leslie Stephen (English Thought, i, 283) speaks of Dodwell’s thesis as deserving only “pity or contempt.” Cp. Macaulay, Student’s ed. ii, 107–108. But a doctrine of conditional immortality had been explicitly put by Locke in his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, p. 13. Cp. Prof. Fraser’s Locke, 1890, pp. 259–60, and Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, ii, 287. The difference was that Dodwell elaborately gave his reasons, which, as Dr. Clarke put it, made “all good men sorry, and all profane men rejoice.” ↑