had shown the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate.  Nor had example been wanting.  The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom.  Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable.  And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a remarkable anticipation of Locke’s own theory.

Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was consistent in a worthy outlook.  He proceeds by a denial that any element of theocratic government can claim political validity.  The magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal with the problem of men’s souls.  Where, indeed, opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst and last of remedies.  In the English situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans and atheists.  The first are themselves deniers of the rights they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance in a foreign power.  Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct.  Though Church and State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution.  For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine legation.  He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal conviction.  But even if that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth.  Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of heaven be accepted.  “No religion,” says Locke finely, “which I believe not to be true can be either true or profitable to me.”  He thus makes of the Church an institution radically different from the ruling conceptions of his time.  It becomes merely a voluntary society, which can exert no power save over its members.  It may use its own ceremonies, but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power.  Nor must we forget the advantages of toleration.  Its eldest child is charity, and without it there can be no honesty of opinion.  Later controversy did not make him modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay’s hands, to be a vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.