to know best, Le Clerc’s version seems more plausible: the parallel between the two names of Limborch and Locke seems natural; and Limborch contradicts himself by also saying that Locke “wanted our names to be hidden by the letters of the title.” In offering his explanation, Limborch was probably being modest.
When Locke’s publisher Awnsham Churchill issued the first edition of the Works in 1714, he placed an epigraph (in Latin) on the title page of the Letter, from Cicero, De Officiis, ii.83, saluting Locke: “A wise and outstanding man, he thought that he should consult the interests of all; and it showed the wisdom and extreme reasonableness that befits a good citizen that he did not separate the interests of the citizens, but held everyone together under a single standard of fairness.”
I have taken the opportunity of the present edition to provide a fair amount of information by way of explanatory notes. Oddly, scarcely any of the editions published in the past half-century provide notes, and yet the references and allusions in the text are not always perspicuous. I have also drawn attention to some of the clues that the Letter provides to Locke’s secular politics and hence to connections with his Two Treatises of Government. Although Popple’s text has been reproduced in its original form, the scriptural citations that were awkwardly placed have been moved to appropriate points in the text and the names of biblical books spelled out.
Excerpts from A Third Letter for Toleration
Of the three responses that Locke prepared against his critic Jonas Proast, much the longest is the Third Letter for Toleration, published by Awnsham Churchill in 1692. Anonymous, it is signed “Philanthropus, June 20, 1692,” and fills 350 quarto pages. It is sadly neglected today, though readers can be forgiven for not pursuing Locke through all the thickets of his relentless contradiction of Proast.
The tract is too long to reprint in its entirety here, and I have selected passages that either illuminate themes in the original Letter or pursue new lines of inquiry. In the footnotes I indicate the location of the excerpts in the 1692 edition and in volume 6 of the Works, 1801 and 1823. The topical headings supplied to each excerpt are mine. The first excerpt usefully incorporates passages from Locke’s Second Letter (1690). Locke’s marginal citations have been transferred to notes, except that biblical citations are incorporated in the text.
Proast’s principal claim was that compulsion can indirectly achieve religious conversion and that the function of laws for conformity was to make people reconsider their beliefs. State and church were obliged to ensure that civil penalties were accompanied by evangelizing effort. It is these arguments that Locke sets out to refute.
An Essay Concerning Toleration
The Essay Concerning Toleration was written in 1667, shortly after Locke joined the household of Lord Ashley, later Earl of Shaftesbury. It remained in manuscript during Locke’s lifetime and was not published until the nineteenth century, though a number of its arguments later appeared in the Letter: the parallels are numerous and I have not sought to record them in the notes. The Essay registers Locke’s conversion to the principle of toleration and his break with the position he took in his earlier Two Tracts on Government (1660–62).
There are four surviving manuscripts, whose interrelationship is complex, and no attempt has been made to record textual variants: there are over a thousand of them. The version printed here derives from the manuscript in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California (HM 584). With the generous permission of J. R. Milton and Philip Milton, I have used their authoritative transcription (2006) but have modernized the text. To clarify the structure, I have slightly adjusted Locke’s numeration of paragraphs and introduced a few section breaks. Some of the more significant variants in the version in MS Locke c. 28 are recorded in notes, as are also a couple of variants within the Huntington MS. Some other modern editions have preferred to use MS Locke c. 28 as their copy-text. An Essay Concerning Toleration is Locke’s own title, but in one part of the Huntington MS he gives an alternative: “The Question of Toleration Stated.”
Additions to the Essay.
The version in MS Locke c. 28 contains three additional passages not found in any other: these are Additions A to C (fols. 22, 28). Another of the manuscripts contains two further additions, which also have no counterpart: D and E (the notebook called “Adversaria 1661,” pp. 125, 270–71). A to C are probably contemporaneous with the Essay; D probably dates from ca. 1671–72, and E from ca. 1675. I have indicated in the notes the places where A to C belong; D and E have no placements, since they follow at the end of the main body of the manuscript.
In the final two additions Locke sketches the corruption of Christianity by the ambition of priests, and the rise of the persecution of heresy and dissent. He suggests there has often been an unholy alliance between priests and princes, the former preaching the divine right of kings, the latter persecuting those deemed unorthodox. Locke notes the propensity of all priesthoods to domineer over civil society.
Fragments on Toleration
This is a collection of Locke’s essays, notes, and memoranda on topics relating to toleration, composed at various times between the 1660s and 1690s. With the exception of The Constitutions of Carolina, none was published in Locke’s lifetime. Some items carry the title Locke gave them; other titles are editorially supplied.
Infallibility (1661).
Untitled. The National Archives: PRO 30/24/47/33. Written in Latin, with the title “An necesse sit dari in ecclesia infallibilem sacro sanctae scripturae interpretem? Negatur.” (Is it necessary that an infallible interpreter of Holy Scripture be granted in the church? No.) The translation used here is from J. C. Biddle, “John Locke’s Essay on Infallibility: Introduction, Text, and Translation,” Journal of Church and State 19 (1977): 301–27. The format of this essay—a question posed for disputation—is simi lar to that of Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature (1663–64).
Locke addresses the topic of scriptural hermeneutics and evinces a conventional Protestant hostility to Catholicism. He perhaps borrows from William Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants (1638) and Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (1647). He affirms the principle of sola scriptura (the self-sufficiency of the Bible), in opposition to the Catholic claim that Scripture is often obscure and must be understood in the light of the church’s tradition of authoritative teaching. Catholics believed that the church’s authority to interpret the Bible was infallible (but did not necessarily place that infallibility in the pope). Locke warns against clogging the mysteries of faith with vain philosophy.
The Constitutions of Carolina (excerpt) (1669–70).
Published as The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1670) and dated 1 March 1670. A manuscript (1669) in the National Archives, PRO 30/ 24/ 47/ 3, is almost identical, except for the absence of clause 96. There is uncertainty about Locke’s role in drafting this document.1 The manuscript opening and a number of corrections are in Locke’s hand, and a colleague of his referred to “that excellent form of government in the composure of which you had so great a hand” (Sir Peter Colleton, October 1673). However, Locke cannot have been the sole author, for he was serving his masters, Lord Ashley and the other proprietors of Carolina. Only the clauses relating to religion are reproduced here.
Against Samuel Parker (1669–70).
MS Locke c. 39, fols. 5, 7, 9. Endorsed: “Q [uerie]s on S.P.’s discourse of toleration. 69.” A commentary on Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie: wherein the authority of the civil magistrate over the consciences of subjects in matters of religion is asserted; the
