John Locke A Letter Concerning Toleration & Other Writings

Annotation

"A" "Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings" brings together the principal writings on religious toleration and freedom of expression by one of the greatest philosophers in the Anglophone tradition: John Locke. The son of Puritans, Locke (16321704) became an Oxford academic, a physician, and, through the patronage of the Earl of Shaftesbury, secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. A colleague of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton and a member of the English Royal Society, Locke lived and wrote at the dawn of the Enlightenment, a period during which traditional mores, values, and customs were being questioned. This volume opens with Locke's "Letter Concerning Toleration" (1689) and also contains his earlier "Essay Concerning Toleration "(1667), extracts from the "Third Letter for Toleration "(1692), and a large body of his briefer essaysand memoranda on this theme. As editor Mark Goldie writes inthe introduction, "A Letter Concerning Toleration""was one of the seventeenth century's most eloquent pleas to Christians to renounce religious persecution." Locke's contention, fleshed out in the "Essay" and in the "Third Letter," that men should enjoy a perfect and "uncontrollable liberty" in matters of religion was shocking to many in seventeenth-century England. Still more shocking, perhaps, was its corollary, that the magistrate had no standing in matters of religion. Taken together, these works forcefully present Locke's belief in the necessary interrelation between limited government and religious freedom. At a time when the world is again having to come to terms with profound tensions among diverse religions and cultures, they are a canonical statement of the case for religious and intellectual freedom.