404

CHAPTER XIV.

CONTROVERSY: LATER WRITINGS.

[1696-1700.]

URING most of the years in which Locke held his office in the council of trade and plantations he had to defend himself from repeated attacks, first on 'The Reasonableness of Christianity,' and afterwards on the Essay concerning Human Understanding,' and in so doing to take a prominent part in the great war of words between trinitarians and anti-trinitarians, latitudinarians and dogmatists, which was waged in England during the last decade of the seventeenth century.

The controversy was greatly encouraged, if not started, by The Naked Gospel,' a work written by Arthur Bury, but published anonymously in 1690. Love to God and love to man were here set forth as the great rules of life which Christ came to enforce, and, when made real and lasting by faith in Christ and a hearty repentance, the only conditions of salvation. Faith in Christ was shown to consist solely in loyal devotion to him as the great teacher and exemplar of virtue, and was entirely divested of doctrinal questions and speculative dogmas. All inquiry concerning the incarnation of Christ or his relations to God, Bury regarded as "impertinent to the design of Christianity, fruitless and dangerous," that

་

. 63.

design being nothing but the restoration of human nature to its original purity, that is, the reconciliation between God and man. It is not strange that this audacious book should have been publicly burnt at Oxford a few months after its publication: but that proceeding only increased its popularity, and strengthened the unitarian movement that was just now acquiring force under the leadership of Locke's friend, Thomas Firmin.

Firmin was not, it would appear, himself the author of any of the numerous tracts published at his charge between 1689 and 1695; but he obtained the help of able writers for his anonymous publications, and by them succeeded in stirring up all sorts of rival attacks from the various sects of trinitarians and tritheists then included in the church of England, and in thus setting his antagonists to overthrow one another. Dr. Wallis, Locke's old teacher, urged that it is as natural and necessary that there should be three "somewhats "-he objected to the term "persons"-in one God as that there should be three dimensions, length, breath and height. He was too kind-hearted to venture upon much justification of the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian creed; but Dr. Sherlock proved to his own satisfaction that "none but believing Christians are in a state of salvation, however morally virtuous their lives may be," while he offered some assistance to "believing Christians" by defining the Trinity to be "three persons intimately united to each other in one undivided substance," three infinite minds distinct from one another, but joined in one by their common nature; there being three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in one Godhead, just as there may be three persons, Peter, James, and John, in one manhood. Dr. South, Locke's ribald schoolfellow of

nearly fifty years ago, went even nearer to unitarianism than Wallis, though he was not the less bitter against it on that account; but his bitterest attack was against Sherlock's treatise, which, at his instigation, was publicly condemned by the university of Oxford, in November, 1695, he having brought appropriate logic to bear upon the authorities when he urged them to withstand the progress of "deism, socinianism, tritheism," and every other form of heresy, "lest they should fall from ecclesiastical grace and the door of preferment should be shut against them."

That was the state of the controversy-as far as very brief allusion to a few tracts and treatises can indicate the purport of a hundred or more-when Locke published his 'Reasonableness of Christianity.' He there carefully kept out of the trinitarian debate, and mentioned none of those who had taken part in it. His main business, like that of Bury in The Naked Gospel,' was to steer clear of all dogmas and show how the gospel of Christ was simply and solely a gospel of love and redemption; how the Messiah came, not to perplex any one with unintelligible creeds and impracticable rules of life, but to supplement the law of nature and the law of reason by a gracious evidence of the way in which men might save themselves from death and annihilation, and win for themselves the eternal life of happiness that had been forfeited by Adam. He differed alike from those who "would have all Adam's posterity doomed to eternal infinite punishment for the transgression of Adam, whom millions had never heard of and no one had authorised to transact for him or be his representative," and from those to whom "this seemed so little consistent with the justice or goodness of the great and infinite God that they

thought there was no redemption necessary, and consequently that there was none, and so made Jesus Christ nothing but the restorer and preacher of pure natural religion, thereby doing violence to the whole tenour of the New Testament."1 He was thus more orthodox than Bury, the churchman, and many church of England divines. His work, however, was the most powerful apology for rational theology that had been made since the publication of 'The Naked Gospel,' all the more powerful because it was entirely free alike from vulgår personality and from every sort of scholastic quibble.

As we have seen, it was at once assailed by John Edwards, a very contemptible antagonist, whose language unfortunately induced him to indulge in personalities, though they were not vulgar; and Edwards's disclosure of the fact that the anonymous 'Reasonableness of Christianity' was written by the author of the Essay concerning Human Understanding,' if it gave a new importance 1 to the work, compelled him to take a larger share than he otherwise might have taken in the subsequent controversy, and was at least one cause of the opposition that soon came to be offered to the Essay' itself.

Edwards's strictures, in Some Thoughts concerning Atheism,' having been published in the autumn of 1695, and quickly met by Locke's short Vindication' as well as by an anonymous pamphlet entitled 'The Exception of Mr. Edwards against "The Reasonableness of Christianity" Examined,' he lost no time in replying to both tracts in another entitled 'Socinianism Unmasked,' the introduction to which was dated January, 1695-6. Here, with a profusion of scurrilous abuse and clever falsification, he charged Locke over and over again with 1 The Reasonableness of Christianity,' p. 6.

"A cause,'

declaring that a belief in the Messiahship of Jesus was the only thing required from Christians-in perversion of Locke's assertion that it was the only article of faith required as a condition of endeavouring to participate in the joys and duties of a Christian life—and, thus confining himself to a personal attack on the author of 'The Reasonableness of Christianity,' sought to divert attention from the work itself. Locke's real views he did not attempt to controvert; all he aimed at was to bring him into discredit, or rather perhaps to win some credit for himself by seeming to have detected a foolish and narrowminded Socinian in so eminent a man as Locke. Locke, for some time, took no notice of this treatise. he said, "that stands in need of falsehoods to support it, and an adversary that will make use of them, deserve nothing but contempt, which, I doubt not but every considerate reader thought answer enough to Mr. Edwards's 'Socinianism Unmasked.' "1 It is a pity he did not hold to that opinion, especially as Samuel Bolde, a Dorsetshire clergyman, unknown to him, promptly came to his assistance, and, in some concise but pertinent 'Animadversions,' showed the worthlessness of Edwards's attack.2 His anger was aroused, however, by the taunts and aggravated misrepresentations contained in Edwards's next work, The Socinian Creed,' and he wrote a long and convincing, though hardly requisite and somewhat tedious, Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity."'

1 The Second Vindication of "The Reasonableness of Christianity (1736), p. 1. I refer to this, the fifth, edition, not having the first at hund. 2 Some 'Passages in "The Reasonableness of Christianity" and its "Vindication," with some Animadversions on Mr. Edwards's "Reflections on 'The Reasonableness of Christianity," and on his "Socinianism Unmasked”’ (1697), pp. 17-52.