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tem, or to supplement, or to criticise it. Followers, antagonists, and critics alike seem to assume on the part of the reader a knowledge of the Essay on the Human Understanding, and to make that the starting-point of their own speculations. The office which Bacon assigns to himself with reference to knowledge generally might well have been claimed by Locke with reference to the science of mind. Both of them did far more than merely play the part of a herald, but of both alive it was emphatically true that they 66 rang the bell to call the other wits together."

CHAPTER IX.

LOCKE'S OPINIONS ON RELIGION AND MORALS, AND HIS THEOLOGICAL WRITINGS.

IN the Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. IV., ch. x., Locke attempts to prove the existence of a God, which, though God has given us no innate idea of Himself, he regards as "the most obvious truth that reason discerns," and as resting on evidence equal to mathematical certainty. Morality is, he maintains, entirely based upon the Will of God. If there were no God, there would, for him, be no morality, and this is the reason of his denying to Atheists the protection of the State. In the chapter on the Existence of God he says expressly that this truth is so fundamental that "all genuine morality depends thereon," and almost at the beginning of the Essay (Bk. I., ch. iii., § 6), while acknowledging that several moral rules may receive from mankind a very general approbation, without either knowing or admitting the true ground of morality," he maintains that such true ground "can only be the Will and Law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest offender." Again, "the Rule prescribed by God is the true and only measure of Virtue." But how are we to ascertain this rule? "God has by an inseparable connexion joined Virtue and Public Happiness together," and hence we have only to ascertain, by the use of the natural reason, what on the whole conduces most to the public welfare, in order to know the Divine Will. The rules, when arrived at, have a "moral and eternal obligation," and are enforced by fear of "the Hell God has ordained for the punishment of those that transgress them."

This form of Utilitarianism, resting on a theological basis and enforced by theological sanctions, is precisely that which afterwards became so popular and excited so much attention, when adopted in the well-known work of Paley. According to this system, we do what is right simply because God commands it, and because He will punish us if we disobey His orders. "By the fault is the rod, and with the transgression a fire ready to punish it." But, notwithstanding the divine origin and the divine sanction of morality, its measure and test are purely human. Each man is required by the Law of God to do all the good and prevent all the evil that he can, and, as good and evil are resolved into pleasure and pain, the ultimate test of virtue or moral conduct comes to be its conduciveness

to promote the pleasures and avert the pains of mankind. Bentham, whose ethical system, it may be noticed, differed mainly from that of Locke and Paley by not being based on a theological foundation, extends the scope of morality to all sentient creatures, capable of pleasure and pain.

I shall not here criticise Locke's theory so far as it is common to other utilitarian systems of ethics, but shall simply content myself with pointing out that its influence on subsequent writers has seldom, if ever, been sufficiently recognised. The theological foundation, however, on which it rests, and which is peculiar among the more prominent moralists of modern times to Locke and Paley, is open to an objection so grave and obvious, that it is curious it did not occur to the authors themselves. If what is right and wrong, good and evil, depends solely on the Will of God, how can we speak of God Himself as good? Goodness, as one of the Divine attributes, would then simply mean the conformity of God to His own Will. An elder contemporary of Locke, Ralph Cudworth, so clearly saw the difficulties and contradictions involved in this view of the nature and origin of morality, that he devotes a considerable portion of his Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (which, however, was not published till 1731) to its refutation. And, possibly, Locke himself may have been conscious of some inconsistency between this theory (the ordinary one amongst the vulgar, though a comparatively rare one amongst philosophers) and the atttribution of goodness to God. For, in his chapter on our knowledge of the existence of God, he never expressly mentions the attribute of goodness as pertaining to the Divine Nature, though in other parts of the Essay it must be acknowledged that he incidentally does so. Moralists and philosophical theologians have generally escaped the difficulties of Locke's theory by making right or moral goodness depend not on the Will but on the Nature of God, or else by regarding it as an ultimate fact, incapable of explanation, or, lastly, by resolving it into the idea of happiness or pleasure, which itself is then regarded as an ultimate fact in the constitution of sentient beings.

Two other characteristic doctrines of Locke's ethical system ought here to be mentioned, though it is impossible, within the space at my command, to discuss them. One is that morality is a science capable of demonstration. The other, which is elaborately set out in the chapter on Power in the Essay (Bk. II., ch. xxi.), is that, though the Agent is free to act as he wills, the Will itself is invariably determined by motives. This solution of the well-worn controversy on the Freedom of the Will is almost identical with that offered by Hobbes before and by Hume afterwards, and is usually known as Determinism.

We have seen that the main sanctions of morality, with Locke, are the rewards and punishments of a future state. But how are we assured of future existence? Only by Revelation. "Good and wise men," indeed, "have always been willing to believe that the soul was immortal;" but "though the Light of Nature gave

some obscure glimmering, some uncertain hopes of a future state, yet Human Reason could attain to no clearness, no certainty about it, but it was Jesus Christ alone who brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." (Third Letter to the Bp. of Worcester.) But if the main sanctions of morality are those of a future state, and if it is Christians alone who feel anything approaching to an assurance of such a state, surely morality must come with somewhat weak credentials to the rest of mankind. And Locke doubtless believed this to be the case. But then, if this be so, Christians ought to be prepared to tolerate a much lower morality than their own in dealing with men of other faiths-one of the many inconvenient consequences which result from founding morality on a theological basis.

Under the head of Locke's theological writings may be included the Treatise on the Reasonableness of Christianity with the two Vindications of it-the Essays on Toleration, and the Commentaries on some of the Epistles of St. Paul. The Reasonableness of Christianity was published in 1695, and may be taken as expressing Locke's most matured opinions on the questions of which it treats, though, in reading it, we must always bear in mind the caution and reticence which any writer of that time who diverged from the strict path of orthodoxy was obliged to observe. There can be no doubt that his object in this work was to commend what he regarded as the fundamental truths of Christianity to the attention of reflecting men, and to vindicate to the Christian religion what he conceived to be its legitimate influence over mankind. But, in trying to effect this his main object, he seems also to have wished to correct what he regarded as certain popular errors, and to bring back Christianity to the norm of the Scriptures, instead of implicity following the Fathers, the Councils, and the received theology of the Church and the Schools. He attempted, he tells us, to clear his mind of all preconceived notions, and, following the lead of the Scriptures, of which he assumed the infallibility, to see whither they would lead him. We may certainly trust his own assertion that he had no thoughts of writing in the interest of any particular party, though, at the same time, it was evidently his aim to extract from the Scriptures a theory as much as possible in accordance with the requirements of human reason, or, in other words, to reconcile the divine light with the natural light of man. The main results at which he arrived may be stated very briefly, as follows. Adam had been created immortal, but, by falling from the state of perfect obedience, "he lost paradise, wherein was tranquillity and the tree of life; that is, he lost bliss and immortality." "In Adam all die," and hence all his descendants are mortal. But this sentence is to be taken in its literal sense, and not in the signification that "every one descended of him deserves endless torment in hell-fire." For it seems 66 a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery." Much less can death be interpreted as a

necessity of continual sinning. "Can the righteous God be snpposed, as a punishment of our sin, wherewith He is displeased, to put man under the necessity of sinning continually, and so multiplying the provocation? Here it will be seen Locke strikes at the root of the doctrines of the taint and guilt of original sin, doctrines which had long been stoutly opposed by the Arminians or Remonstrants with whom he had associated in Holland. But though it would have been an injustice to condemn men, for the fault of another, to a state of misery "worse than non-being," it was no wrong to deprive them of that to which they had no right, the exceptional condition of immortality. Adam's sin, then, subjected all men to death. But in Christ they have again been made alive, and "the life which Jesus Christ restores to all men is that life which they receive again at the resurrection." Now the conditions of our obtaining this gift are faith and repentance. But repentance implies the doing works meet for repentance; that is to say, leading a good life. And faith implies a belief not only in the one invisible, eternal, omnipotent God, but also in Jesus as the Messiah, who was born of a virgin, rose again from the grave, and ascended into heaven. When Christ came on earth, the minds of men had become so far blinded by sense and lust and superstition that it required some visible and unmistakable assertion of God's majesty and goodness to bring them back to true notions of Him and of the Divine Law which He had set them. 66 Reason, speaking ever so clearly to the wise and virtuous, had never authority enough to prevail on the multitude." For the multitude were under the dominion of the priests, and the "priests everywhere, to secure their empire, had excluded reason from having anything to do in religion." "In this state of darkness and error, in reference to the true God,' our Saviour found the world. But the clear revelation he brought with him dissipated this darkness, made the ' one invisible true God' known to the world; and that with such evidence and energy, that polytheism and idolatry have nowhere been able to withstand it." And, as he revealed to mankind a clear knowledge of the one true God, so also he revealed to them a clear knowledge of their duty, which was equally wanting.

"Natural religion, in its full extent, was nowhere that I know taken care of by the force of natural reason. It sould seem, by the little that has hitherto been done in it, that it is too hard a task for unassisted reason to establish morality in all its parts, upon its true foundation, with a clear and convincing light. And it is at least a surer and shorter way to the apprehensions of the vulgar and mass of mankind, that one manifestly sent from God, and coming with visible authority from him, should, as a king and law-maker, tell them their duties and require their obedience, than leave it to the long and sometimes intricate deductions of reason to be made out to them. Such trains of reasoning the greater part of mankind have neither leisure to weigh, nor, for want of education and use, skill to judge of. . . . You may as soon hope to have all the day-labourers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairy-maids, perfect mathematicians, as to have them perfect in ethics this way. Hearing plain commands is the