right of kings was a salient case: priests elevate princes so that princes will return the favor by awarding churches the trappings of temporal power. Over a longer historical span, it is possible to see that Locke’s claim that religions are projections of temporal power and worldly aspirations is one of the high roads to atheism. Locke provided a signpost to that road but did not himself make the journey. After all, the charge that religion has been perverted by worldliness lies deep in the Christian tradition itself. In this sense, distinguishing the Enlightenment from the Reformation is far from straightforward.
Early Reception
By the end of the eighteenth century, Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration had been published in twenty-six editions, as well as being included in nine editions of his Works and in the Œuvres diverses de Monsieur Jean Locke (1710). It appeared in Latin, French, German, and Dutch and achieved its first American edition at Boston in 1743. Voltaire’s edition of 1764 accompanied his own Traité sur la tolérance, provoked by the Calas affair, in which the philosophe sought and achieved a posthumous pardon for a Protestant merchant of Toulouse wrongly executed for murdering his son. In North America, Locke’s arguments were appropriated in Elisha Williams’s Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants, subtitled “A Seasonable Plea for the Liberty of Conscience, and the Right of Private Judgment, in Matters of Religion, Without any Control from Human Authority” (1744), a protest against a Connecticut law that restricted itinerant preachers. Another conduit to North America was the English “commonwealthman” Thomas Hollis, who published a collected edition of all Locke’s Letters and presented a copy to Harvard: “Thomas Hollis, an Englishman, Citizen of the World, is desirous of having the honor to present this Book to the library of Harvard College, at Cambridge in N. England. Pall Mall, Jan. 1, 1765.” The book’s frontispiece carries an engraved portrait of Locke: he is wreathed in oak leaves, and beneath his image is the cap of liberty.
Mark Goldie
On Tolerance and Intolerance
Coffey, John. Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
Grell, O. P., J. I. Israel, and N. Tyacke, eds. From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Israel, Jonathan I. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Eman cipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Marshall, John. John Locke, Toleration, and Early Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Murphy, Andrew R. Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.
Walsham, Alexandra. Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Zagorin, Perez. How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
By Locke
Epistola de Tolerantia: A Letter on Toleration. Edited by Raymond Klibansky and J. W. Gough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
An Essay Concerning Toleration and Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–1675. Edited by J. R. Milton and Philip Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Political Essays. Edited by Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
The Reasonableness of Christianity. Edited by John C. Higgins-Biddle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Selected Correspondence. Edited by Mark Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Selected Political Writings. Edited by Paul E. Sigmund. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Edited by John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Two Tracts on Government. Edited by Philip Abrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Writings on Religion. Edited by Victor Nuovo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
With Locke
Bayle, Pierre. A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel Them to Come In” (1686). Edited by John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005.
Penn, William . “The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience” (1670). In The Political Writings of William Penn. Edited by Andrew Murphy. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002.
Pufendorf, Samuel. Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society (1687). Edited by Simone Zurbuchen. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002.
Spinoza, Baruch. Theological-Political Treatise (1670). Edited by Jonathan Israel and Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Walwyn, William. The Compassionate Samaritan (1644). Excerpts in Divine Right and Democracy, edited by David Wootton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Williams, Elisha. The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (1744). In The Church, Dissent, and Religious Toleration, 1689–1773. Vol. 5 of Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics: From the 1690s to the 1830s. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999.
Williams, Roger. The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644). Excerpts in Divine Right and Democracy, edited by David Wootton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Against Locke
Long, Thomas. The Letter for Toleration Decipher’d (1689). In The Church, Dissent, and Religious Toleration, 1689–1773. Vol. 5 of Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics: From the 1690s to the 1830s. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999.
Proast, Jonas. The Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration Briefly Consider’d and Answer’d (1690). In The Church, Dissent, and Religious Toleration, 1689–1773. Vol. 5 of Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics: From the 1690s to the 1830s. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999.
On Locke
Anstey, Peter, ed. John Locke: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2006.
Ashcraft, Richard. Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of
