to him, with a zeal that put to shame the religious devotion of popes and prelates, for those golden favours that enabled him to occupy the English throne without help of parliaments; while all his other faculties of worship were exhausted on harlots, old and young. Justice, virtue, honesty, and religion, were out of court, if not quite banished from the country. Judge Jeffreys represented the first, the Duke of Buckingham the second, the Duke of Sunderland the third, Bishop Parker the fourth. And the only prospect of a change from this state of things depended on the death of Charles and the succession of his brother James, when to all the social depravity would be added a religious bigotry eclipsing the intolerance then vigorous enough. It is not strange that Locke, who had so often longed for a Utopia, should have gone in search of one at last.

The Utopia that he found was not very far from home, and, faulty as it was, was the best that that age could be expected to produce. The glory of those days when the brave Netherlanders rose up, under the leadership of William the Silent, to save themselves and the world from the thraldom of Philip of Spain, had a good deal faded in the century that followed; but, before the century was ended, their descendants did nearly as great service to Europe in holding at bay the new would-be Cæsar, Louis the Fourteenth; and in proportion to the loathing that Locke and every honest man then felt at the degradation of England, must have been their respect for the heroic action of the United Provinces. Especially welcome, too, to Locke, must have been the close connection, not always recurrent in the world's history, between their zeal for political and religious liberty and their freedom from religious and political intolerance.

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The Earl of Shaftesbury, in spite of his former eagerness in supporting the iniquitous wars of England against Holland, was sheltered by its people when he sought refuge among them in his time of trouble. There can be no doubt that Locke followed his friend's example because he also was in need of a political asylum. Even in Holland, as we shall see, he was for some time not safe, and it became necessary for him to seek temporary shelter elsewhere. But, in his case, no blame could be attached to the political institutions of the country; and it was not possible for him to find fault with its allowance, and even encouragement, of greater freedom of opinion on religious matters than was then tolerated in any other part of Europe. This freedom, of course, implied a good deal of wrangling; but it was no slight improvement upon the arrangements existing elsewhere, that here thinkers of all sorts were allowed to give free utterance to their opinions without meeting any worse resistance than the angry expostulations, and the arguments as outspoken as their own, of those who differed from them. So, at any rate, Locke thought; and if his long sojourn in Holland led to some changes in his opinions, it only strengthened his old convictions in favour of religious and political liberty.

About Locke's movements and occupations during several months after his departure from England in the autumn of 1683 we have very little information. He appears to have gone direct to Amsterdam; but we do not meet with him there until the following January, when he was present, by invitation of Peter Guenellon, the principal physician in the city, at the dissection of a

lioness that had been killed by the intense coldness of the winter. He had made Guenellon's acquaintance six or seven years before in Paris; and this friendship, which seems to have been kept up by letter in the interval, helped him to make many new friends among the doctors, men of letters and theologians in the busy centre of Dutch intelligence and learning as well as of Dutch commerce. Of these new friends, the most important of all, as far as Locke was concerned, at any rate, was Philip van Limborch.

They met first at the gathering of learned men to see the lioness cut up. "When Mr. Locke heard from Dr. Guenellon," Limborch wrote twenty years later, "that I was professor of theology among the remonstrants, he introduced himself to me, and we afterwards had many conversations about religion, in which he acknowledged that he had long attributed to the remonstrants doctrines very different from those which they held, and now that he understood what they really were, he was surprised to find how closely they agreed with many of his own. opinions." 2

That Locke should till now. have been ignorant of the doctrines of the remonstrants is hardly credible, seeing that several of his own friends had for some time past been in occasional correspondence with Limborch and others of their number.

Nearly eighty years before those doctrines had been in part propounded by Arminius, who was made professor of theology at Leyden in 1604; and soon after that date they began to stir up much angry discussion throughout

1 MSS. in the Remonstrants' Library; Limborch to Lady Masham, [13—] 24 March, 1704-5.

2 Ibid.

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Europe, and a bitter theological war of words in Holland. A greater Arminian than Arminius was Episcopius. His teachings on many points-points as important as the personality of the Trinity and the questions of free-will and election-were vague and contradictory; but he boldly maintained that the Gospels contain everything that Christians ought to believe, and that men must be left to use their own free judgment in seeing how much they can believe; in other words, that there should be no appointed creed, and that men should be expected to agree only in imitating as far as they can in their own lives the virtues embodied in the life of Christ. But latitudinarianism, of course, was hateful to the Dutch Calvinists. The remonstrants, so called on account of the remonstrance or petition which they had presented to the statesgeneral in 1610, were formally and fiercely condemned at the protestant synod of Dort in 1619; and during the next ten or twelve years they were subjected to as bitter a persecution as a body of clergymen, with zealous champions in the municipal and other organisations, could bring about. But, though the hatred that grew out of this quarrel lasted long, actual persecution was soon stayed. In 1630 the first church of the remonstrants was founded, at Amsterdam; and the society of remonstrants was established or re-established in an orderly way in 1632. Two years later, the remonstrants' seminary, in connection with the church, was started; and Episcopius was principal and professor of theology in it from 1634 until his death in 1643. Under his guidance, and that of his successors, the movement spread; though, there being no creeds and hardly any system of church government to form bonds of union among the members, it was a movement rather adapted to encourage liberal opinions

among the members of other sects than to build up any formidable sect of its own.1

Limborch was the grand-nephew of Episcopius. Born at Amsterdam in June, 1633, less than a year after Locke, he succeeded to the pastorship of the church in 1668, and to the chief professorship in the seminary in 1669. By his learning and worth he made the small body of the remonstrants famous among all the ablest thinkers in Europe who concerned themselves with theological questions. Already he had formed friendships, personally or by letter, with Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and many other liberal-minded theologians, both foreign and English; and when Locke made his acquaintance he was busy upon his most important work, the Theologia

Christiana,' which proved to be an abler exposition of unsectarian and undogmatic Christianity than had ever before been published.

Of the close and affectionate relations that existed between Locke and Limborch during nearly twenty years we shall have abundant evidence in the course of this volume. Their acquaintance, however, does not seem to

1 There are now about twenty remonstrant churches, and six thousand communicants, in various parts of Holland, as I am informed by the Rev. Dr. J. Tideman, emeritus professor and custodian of the library, as well as minister of the church at Amsterdam. The seminary was removed to Leyden in 1872; but the church and its offices remain almost exactly as they were in Locke's day. I take this opportunity of thanking Dr. Tideman for the kind and zealous way in which he aided me in my researches while I was in Amsterdam, and afterwards. I am also much indebted to Mr. Frederick Muller, the great publisher and collector of old literature in Amsterdam, for his assistance.

2 A great number of their letters are preserved in the Remonstrants' Library at Amsterdam. See some account of them in Van der Hoeven, 'De Philippo a Limborch' (Amsterdam 1843), pp. 36-52, 129–144.