With the restoration of the Monarchy and the Anglican Church, religious liberty was extinguished by a series of laws against Dissenters.  To the Revolution we owe the Act of Toleration (1689) from which the religious freedom which England enjoys at present is derived.  It granted freedom of worship to Presbyterians, Congregationalists,

[101] Baptists and Quakers, but only to these; Catholics and Unitarians were expressly excepted and the repressive legislation of Charles II remained in force against them.  It was a characteristically English measure, logically inconsistent and absurd, a mixture of tolerance and intolerance, but suitable to the circumstances and the state of public opinion at the time.

In the same year John Locke’s famous (first) Letter concerning Toleration appeared in Latin.  Three subsequent letters developed and illustrated his thesis.  The main argument is based on the principle that the business of civil government is quite distinct from that of religion, that the State is a society constituted only for preserving and promoting the civil interests of its members —­civil interests meaning life, liberty, health, and the possession of property.  The care of souls is not committed to magistrates more than to other men.  For the magistrate can only use outward force; but true religion means the inward persuasion of the mind, and the mind is so made that force cannot compel it to believe.  So too it is absurd for a State to make laws to enforce a religion, for laws are useless without penalties, and penalties are impertinent because they cannot convince.

Moreover, even if penalties could change

[102] men’s beliefs, this would not conduce to the salvation of souls.  Would more men be saved if all blindly resigned themselves to the will of their rulers and accepted the religion of their country?  For as the princes of the world are divided in religion, one country alone would be in the right, and all the rest of the world would have to follow their princes to destruction; “and that which heightens the absurdity, and very ill suits the notion of a deity, men would owe their eternal happiness or their eternal misery to the places of their nativity.”  This is a principle on which Locke repeatedly insists.  If a State is justified in imposing a creed, it follows that in all the lands, except the one or few in which the true faith prevails, it is the duty of the subjects to embrace a false religion.  If Protestantism is promoted in England, Popery by the same rule will be promoted in France.  “What is true and good in England will be true and good at Rome too, in China, or Geneva.”  Toleration is the principle which gives to the true faith the best chance of prevailing.

Locke would concede full liberty to idolaters, by whom he means the Indians of North America, and he makes some scathing remarks on the ecclesiastical zeal which forced these “innocent pagans” to forsake