Locke

, he regards as "the most obvious truth that reason discerns," and as resting on evidence equal to mathematical certainty. Morality is, he maintains, entirely bas

he maintains that such true ground "can only be the Will and Law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender." Again, "the Rule prescribed by God is the true and only measure of Virtue." But how are we to ascertain this rule? "God has by an inseparable connexion joined Virt

ers. "By the fault is the rod, and with the transgression a fire ready to punish it." But, notwithstanding the divine origin and the divine sanction of morality, its measure and test are purely human. Each man is required by the Law of God to do all the good and prevent all the evil that he can, and, as good and evil are resolved into pleasure and pain, th

f the Divine attributes, would then simply mean the conformity of God to His own Will. An elder contemporary of Locke, Ralph Cudworth, so clearly saw the difficulties and contradictions involved in this view of the nature and origin of morality, that he devotes a considerable portion of his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (which, however, was not published till 1731) to its refutation. And, possibly, Locke himself may have been conscious of some inconsistency between this theory (the ordinary one amongst the vulgar, though a comparatively rare one amongst philosophers) and the attribution of goodness to God. For, in

of demonstration. The other, which is elaborately set out in the chapter on Power in the Essay (Bk. II., ch. xxi.), is that, though the Agent is free to act as he wills, the Will itself is invariably det

te, yet Human Reason could attain to no clearness, no certainty about it, but it was Jesus Christ alone who brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." (Third Letter to the Bp. of Worcester.) But if the main sanctions of morality are those of a future state, and if it is Christians alone who feel anything approaching to an assurance of such a state, sur

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in accordance with the requirements of human reason, or, in other words, to reconcile the divine light with the natural light of man. The main results at which he arrived may be stated very briefly, as follows. Adam had been created immortal, but, by falling from the state of perfect obedience, "he lost paradise, wherein was tranquillity and the tree of life; that is, he lost bliss and immortality." "In Adam all die," and hence all his descendants are mortal. But this sentence is to be taken in its literal sense, and not in the signification that "every one descended of him deserves endless torment in hell-fire." For it seems "a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery." Much less can death be interpreted as a necessity of continual sinning. "Can the righteous God be supposed, as a punishment of our sin, wherewith He is displeased, to put man under the necessity of sinning continually, and so multiplying the provocation?" Here it will be seen Locke strikes at the root of the doctrines of the taint and guilt of original sin, doctrines which had long been stoutly opposed by the Arminians or Remonstrants with whom he had associated in Holland. But though it would have been an injustice to condemn men, for the fault of another, to a state of misery "worse than non-being," it was no wrong to deprive them of that to which they had no right, the exceptional condition of immortality. Adam's sin, then, subjected all men to death. But in Christ they h

nsions of the vulgar and mass of mankind, that one manifestly sent from God, and coming with visible authority from him, should, as a king and law-maker, tell them their duties and require their obedience, than leave it to the long and sometimes intricate deductions of reason to be made out to them. Such trains of reasoning the greater part of mankind have neither leisure to wei

ught out of the mine as we, who have it delivered already dug and fashioned into our hands, are apt to imagine;" moreover, "experience shows tha

e nor could be denied by any of the enemies or opposers of Christianity." And "this plain matter of fact being granted, the truth of our Saviour's doctrine and mission unavoidably follows." But once acknowledge the truth of Christ's mission, and the rule of life is evident. "To one who is once persuaded that Jesus Christ was sent by God

nd in this world, destined to labour and travail." "The writers and wranglers in religion," indeed, "fill it with niceties, and dress it up with notions, which they make necessary and fundamental parts of it, as if

anity, speaking of the writers of the Epistles, he says:-"These holy writers, inspired from above, writ nothing but truth." And, to the same effect, in his Second Reply to Stillingfleet, he writes:-"My lord, I read the revelation of the holy scripture with a full assurance that all it delivers is true." The word "infallible" is applied

as distasteful to one party as a Christianity which ignored Church authority and the exclusive privileges of the apostolical succession must have been to the other. And to the zealots of both parties alike, a statement of doctrine which was silent on the mystery of the Trinity, or rather which seemed to imply that the Son, though miraculously conceived, was not co-equal or co-eternal with the Father, and which, by implication, appeared

the theological difficulties of his age were moral and metaphysical rather than scientific and critical. The moral consciousness of many reflecting men was shocked by doctrines like those of original sin, predestination, the atonement, and everlasting punishment. Nor could they reconcile to their reason the seeming contradictions of the doctrine of a Triune God. But the study of nature had not advanced sufficiently far, or been sufficiently widely spread, to make the idea of supernatural intervention in the ordinary course of affairs, such as is constantly presented to us in the Biblical history, any serious or general stumbling-block. Much less had the criticism of the Sacred Text, or the comparison of it with the sacred books of other religions, become sufficiently common, or

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as that worship or those beliefs may interfere with the ends of civil government. The respective provinces of a commonwealth and a church are strictly defined, and are shown to be perfectly distinct. "The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who

se moral rules which are necessary to the preservation o

th is not to be kept with heretics," that "kings excommunicated forfeit th

such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion: I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate, as neither those that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion. For what do all these and the like doctrines si

do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the

, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold up

eists, and perhaps certain sects of Antinomians. Roman Catholics, however, would not have been excluded on the ground of their belief in T

humane doctrines. The practical conclusions at which Taylor arrives, in his noble work on the Liberty of Prophesying, bear a close resemblance to those of Locke's Letters on Toleration, while the theoretical considerations on which he mainly founds them, namely, the difficulty of discovering religious truth, and the small number of theological propositions of which we can entertain anything like certainty, might be regarded as anticipating, to no small extent, some of the views expressed in the Reasonableness of Christianity. Locke's attention had been turned to these questions at an early period of his life by the religious dissensions which accompanied the Civil Wars, and, during the years immediately preceding the publication

as exercised, and always must exercise, in the affairs of any spiritual body on which it confers special privileges. This conclusion, we can hardly doubt, he would have readily accepted. As far back as 1669, he had objected to one of the articles in the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina," providing for the establishment and end

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tians already, and so could not be designed to teach them the fundamental articles and points necessary to salvation." But to one who accepted the divine inspiration and infallibility of all parts of Scripture, it was essential to establish the consistency and coherence of the whole. Accordingly, in the lat

the Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, and Ephesians, together with An

and fairness. They are often quoted with approbation by commentators of the last century. But in the present more advanced s

e true and essential import of God's Revelation to man. His theoretical conclusion is that the articles of saving faith are few and simple, and the practical application of that conclusion is that