WorkJohn Locke

Further Letters Concerning Toleration

Three replies to one Oxford critic, two signed Philanthropus and the last broken off mid-paragraph in the year Locke died.

by John Locke772 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1690(aged 58)
Original language: English

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Overview

The reply to A Letter Concerning Toleration that Locke took most seriously came from Oxford in 1690, from a college chaplain named Jonas Proast. Proast granted the Letter's main point and still rejected its conclusion. Force cannot plant a belief directly, he agreed. But moderate penalties can make careless people stop and weigh arguments they would otherwise never hear, and a magistrate may therefore use them to bring dissenters to the true religion. Locke answered three times. He finished two of the replies and signed them Philanthropus, lover of mankind. The first, his second letter on toleration, came out within months, in 1690. The third letter, in 1692, replies to Proast's next pamphlet and is by far the longest of the series. Its argument keeps returning to one question: who decides which religion is the true one? Every ruler believes his own to be true, so Proast's rule gives Louis XIV the same warrant against French Protestants that it gives the Church of England against English dissenters. Locke adds that the English laws punished people for staying away from church, whatever they had considered, and never asked a conforming churchgoer whether he had examined anything at all. Proast did not publish again until 1704. Locke, ill at Oates in Essex, began a fourth letter and stopped in the middle of a paragraph; he died that October, and the fragment was printed in 1706. The exchange is still argued over. In 1988 the legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron contended that Proast had found the weak point: Locke's claim that force cannot produce belief does not rule out force that works indirectly.

Key concepts

What does “indirectly and at a distance” mean?

It is the phrase of Locke’s critic Jonas Proast for the service he thinks force can do religion. Proast agrees that a penalty cannot produce belief directly. His claim is that it can do so by a detour: discomfort makes a careless person stop and attend to arguments, and the arguments then do the convincing. The letters are Locke’s attempt to show the detour leads nowhere.

What does “consideration” mean in these letters?

Consideration is the careful weighing of the grounds of one’s religion, which Proast says penalties are meant to bring about. Locke asks how a law could ever test it. A magistrate sees whether a man is in church; he cannot see whether the man has examined anything. In practice, Locke argues, the only proof of having considered that Proast accepts is ending up in the national church.

How does Locke distinguish the national religion from the true religion?

The national religion is whichever one a country’s laws establish; the true religion is the one that actually leads to salvation. Proast writes as if the two coincide in England. Locke keeps them apart: every country has a national religion, they contradict one another, and a principle that arms the established church arms it everywhere, in Spain and Turkey as well as at home.

What is “conformity”?

Conformity is outward compliance with the established church: attending its services and taking part in its rites. It is the only thing the English penal laws required and the only thing a court can observe. Locke’s point is that conformity and conviction are different things. A law can fill the pews with people who believe nothing, and it stops troubling them the moment they sit down.

What does Locke mean by the magistrate’s “commission”?

A commission is the authority someone has been given for a task. Locke holds that a magistrate’s commission comes from the people who set up the government, and that they gave it for civil ends: protecting each from injury by others. Proast derives a power to punish from its usefulness to souls. Locke answers that being useful confers no authority, or anyone who could do good by force might use it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Can Force Help at a Distance?

Granted that a penalty cannot plant a belief, may it still be used to make careless people listen to the arguments that could? Proast said yes, and Locke has to show that the modest version of persecution fails as well.

Proast’s proposal sounds mild: moderate penalties, laid on those outside the national church, only until they have considered. Locke takes it apart on its own terms. A punishment needs a fault, and nobody can show that every dissenter has failed to consider or that every conformist has done so; the English laws punished absence from church and asked nothing more. Proast never says which penalties are moderate or when a man has considered enough, so the pressure ends only when he conforms. And usefulness gives no right. A wound may happen to cure, and that does not make stabbing a kind of medicine.

religious coercion
coercion
punishment
religious conformity
conformity
law
religious conversion
religious persuasion
persecution
justice
argumentation

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Who Judges the True Religion?

Proast would arm only the magistrate of the true religion. Locke asks who is to say which magistrate that is, and whether any ruler knows his religion to be true or only believes it.

The Third Letter returns to one point again and again. A rule that the true religion may use force is in practice a rule that each ruler may use it for his own, since every ruler takes his own to be the true one. What licenses the Church of England against dissenters licenses the King of France against his Protestants. Proast answers that the true religion can be known on sufficient evidence. Locke replies that religion rests on faith, which is firm belief and not knowledge, so a magistrate’s assurance is worth no more than his subject’s. The unfinished Fourth Letter presses the same question a last time.

religious truth
religious knowledge
epistemology
evidence
political authority
religious belief
religious authority
miracles
religious inquiry
salvation

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Within this work

passages held: 772
distinct concepts: 371
by passages held, corpus-wide: #86

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “religious coercion” and “religious toleration”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
religious coercion	religious toleration	181
political authority	religious coercion	166
political authority	religious toleration	130
coercion	religious toleration	86
punishment	religious coercion	47
conscience	religious toleration	44
religious coercion	salvation	41
punishment	religious toleration	37
religious authority	religious toleration	29
conscience	religious coercion	26
coercion	political authority	24
political authority	punishment	23
religious toleration	salvation	19
religious authority	religious coercion	18
coercion	punishment	17
conscience	political authority	13
coercion	conscience	9
coercion	religious authority	7
political authority	salvation	7
coercion	salvation	5
conscience	salvation	4
punishment	salvation	4
religious authority	salvation	4
political authority	religious authority	3
punishment	religious authority	3
conscience	religious authority	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1689 A Letter Concerning Toleration (Epistola de Tolerantia)
The one statement of his case for religious freedom that Locke made briefly and to a friend. Everything else he printed on the subject defends this text against one of its critics, Jonas Proast.
EN
1689 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The book Locke's reputation rests on, and the one major work of 1689 that he signed. His quarrel with Bishop Stillingfleet, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding and the letters to William Molyneux all grow out of it.
EN
1689 Two Treatises of Government
Two parts of a longer manuscript whose middle was lost before printing, as Locke's preface says. The book is his political theory, and it shares a year and a purpose with A Letter Concerning Toleration: each sets a limit on what a ruler may do.
EN
1690 Further Letters Concerning Toleration you are here EN
1693 Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Written for the household of his friend Edward Clarke and enlarged by Locke through several editions. It is his book of practical advice on raising a child, and it applies the Essay's view that the mind is formed by what it meets.
EN
1695 The Reasonableness of Christianity
His main work on religion, and the opening of the study of Scripture that occupied his last years. He defended it twice against John Edwards, a Cambridge Calvinist, and kept his name off all three books while he lived.
EN
1696 Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade
Advice written for ministers and for Parliament during the currency crisis of the 1690s, and gathered under Locke's name in 1696. The account of money behind it is sketched in the chapter on property in the Two Treatises.
EN
1697 Letters to the Bishop of Worcester
Locke's own commentary on the Essay, written under attack: three replies to Edward Stillingfleet, issued as separate pamphlets between 1697 and 1699, with a short answer to a second critic, Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charterhouse.
EN
1706 Of the Conduct of the Understanding
An unfinished draft, printed from Locke's papers two years after his death. It is the practical companion to the Essay and overlaps with his advice on education.
EN
1706 Posthumous Works
From the volume of unpublished papers that Locke's executors issued in 1706: a critique of Malebranche from the 1690s and a short discourse on miracles from 1702. Both extend arguments begun in the Essay.
EN
1708 Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of His Friends
Letters to the Molyneux brothers of Dublin — Locke's side of the correspondence — taken from a volume his publishers issued in 1708. It is the closest view of him at work on the later editions of the Essay.
EN
1720 A Collection of Several Pieces
The Carolina constitution of 1669 predates the Two Treatises by ten years or more, and the two are often set against each other. Pierre Des Maizeaux published it in 1720 together with shorter pieces left out of the collected works.
EN

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