The Toleration Act and Locke’s Letter

In London on 24 May 1689 William III, seated on the throne before the Lords and the Commons, gave the royal assent to “An Act for exempting Their Majesties Protestant Subjects dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of certain Laws” (Lords Journal vol. 14, 24 May 1689).

The Act says that some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion may help to unite the king’s and queen’s Protestant subjects. It lists the laws of Elizabeth I and her successors that punished absence from the parish church and attendance at other religious meetings, and it provides that they shall not apply to dissenters who take the oaths appointed by an Act of the same Parliament and subscribe the declaration required by the Act of Charles II that kept Roman Catholics out of Parliament (Toleration Act recital and sections 1–3). Their meetings must be held with the doors unlocked, in places certified to the bishop, the archdeacon or the justices, and they still owe tithes to the parish (Toleration Act sections 4 and 16). Their ministers must subscribe the Articles of Religion, except the thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth and a clause of the twentieth on the church’s power to decree rites and its authority in controversies of faith; those who scruple the baptism of infants are excused part of the twenty-seventh as well (Toleration Act sections 6–7). Those who refuse all oaths, as the Quakers did, may make a declaration of fidelity and profess their faith in the Trinity and in Scripture instead (Toleration Act section 10). The Act gives no benefit to “any Papist or Popish Recusant whatsoever” or to anyone who denies the doctrine of the Trinity in his preaching or writing (Toleration Act section 14).

In the same year John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration appeared in English (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration title and year as given in the edition). Locke calls toleration “the chief characteristic mark of the true Church” (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration opening paragraph). The commonwealth, he argues, exists only to secure civil interests; the care of souls is not committed to the magistrate, because his power is outward force and true religion is the inward persuasion of the mind (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration the definition of the commonwealth and the first two arguments). A church is “a voluntary society of men” (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration the definition of a church). He sets limits of his own: a church whose members deliver themselves to the service of another prince has no right to toleration, and “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God” (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration the paragraphs beginning “Again: That Church” and “Lastly”). Within those limits he writes that “neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion” (Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration the paragraph beginning “Ecclesiastical assemblies”, near the end).

The Act did not repeal the old laws. It lifted their penalties from those who met its conditions (Toleration Act recital and sections 1–3) and declared the laws on attending divine service on Sunday still in force against everyone who did not go to a congregation it allowed (Toleration Act section 13). In 1744 a pamphlet against the Methodists charged that their preachers had not qualified themselves under “the Act of Toleration” and were therefore defying the law (Observations upon the Methodists (1744) pp. 3–4); see John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism.