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On his principle, any proposition in a professed revelation that was not provable or disprovable by reason and knowledge must pass as true. His final position, that
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(bk. iv, ch. xviii, § 10), is tolerably elastic, inasmuch as he really reserves the question of the actuality of revelation. Thus he evades the central issue. Naturally he was by critical foreigners classed as a deist. Cp. Gostwick, German Culture and Christianity, 1882, p. 36. The German historian Tennemann sums up that Clarke wrote his apologetic works because
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treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) Locke played a similar part. It was inspired by the genuine concern for social peace which had moved him to write an essay on Toleration as early as 1667, [479] and to produce from 1685 onwards his famous Letters on Toleration, by far the most persuasive appeal of the kind that had yet been produced; [480] all the more successful so far as it went, doubtless, because the first Letter ended with a memorable capitulation to bigotry:
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Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides, also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. This handsome endorsement of the religion which had repeatedly
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in a pandemonium of internecine hate, as compared with the one heresy which had never broken treaties or shed blood, is presumably more of a prudent surrender to normal fanaticism than an expression of the philosopher's own state of mind; [481] and his treatise on The Reasonableness of Christianity is an attempt to limit religion to a humane ethic, with sacraments and mysteries reduced to ceremonies, while claiming that the gospel ethic was
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Locke proposed, in his Reasonableness of Christianity, to ascertain the exact meaning of Christianity, by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings.... The fallacy of his position obviously was that he could not strip himself of his education and acquired notions.... He seemed unconscious of the necessity of trying to make allowance for his unavoidable prepossessions. In consequence, he simply fell into an old groove of received doctrines; and these he handled under the set purpose of simplifying the fundamentals of Christianity to the utmost. Such purpose was not the result of his Bible study, but of his wish to overcome the political difficulties of the time. He found, by keeping close to the Gospels and making proper selections from the Epistles, that the belief in Christ as the Messiah could be shown to be the central fact of the Christian faith; that the other main doctrines followed out of this by a process of reasoning; and that, as all minds might not perform the process alike, these doctrines could not be essential to the practice of Christianity. He got out of the difficulty of framing a creed, as many others have done, by simply using Scripture language, without subjecting it to any very strict definition; certainly without the operation of stripping the meaning of its words, to see what it amounted to. That his short and easy method was not very successful the history of the deistical controversy sufficiently proves
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[483] On his positive teachings he was assailed by Bishop Stillingfleet; by the Rev. John Milner, B.D.; by the Rev. John Morris; by William Carrol; and by the Rev. John Edwards, B.D.; [484] his only assailant with a rationalistic repute being Dr. Thomas Burnet. Some attacked him on his Essays; some on his Reasonableness of Christianity; orthodoxy finding in both the same tendency to
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[485] In the opinion of the Rev. Mr. Bolde, who defended him in Some Considerations published in 1699, the hostile clericals had treated him
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[486] This is especially true of Edwards, a notably ignoble type; [487] but hardly of Milner, whose later Account of Mr. Lock's Religion out of his Own Writings, and in his Own Words (1700), pressed him shrewdly on the score of his
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Socinianism. In the eyes of a pietist like William Law, again, Locke's conception of the infant mind as a tabula rasa was