A Letter Concerning Toleration
Locke’s argument, published in 1689, that the civil magistrate has no charge over the salvation of souls and that churches are voluntary societies which ought to tolerate one another. He excepts from toleration atheists and those bound to a foreign prince.
Read the text at en.wikisource.org ↗The same translation in another online edition ↗
The Letter is written as a reply to a friend who had asked the author’s thoughts on “the mutual toleration of Christians”. It defines the commonwealth as a society for securing civil interests, which it lists as life, liberty, health and property, and the church as a free and voluntary society for the public worship of God. From those definitions it concludes that force belongs to the magistrate and persuasion to the church, and that neither may do the other’s work.
It is a philosopher’s case, not a law. Its limits are its own: it denies toleration to those who teach that faith need not be kept with heretics or that kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns, to a church whose members owe obedience to another prince, and to those who deny the being of God. See the Toleration Act and Locke’s Letter.
Cited in
- 24 May 1689, firm date