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Locke: From A Second Letter concerning Toleration (1690)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Richard Vernon
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
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Summary

You will pardon me if I take the same liberty with you that you have done with the author of the Letter Concerning Toleration: to consider your arguments, and endeavour to show you the mistakes of them. For since you have so plainly yielded up the question to him, and do own that ‘the severities he would dissuade Christians from, are utterly unapt and improper to bring men to embrace that truth which must save them’, I am not without some hopes to prevail with you to do that yourself, which you say is the only justifiable aim of men differing about religion, even in the use of the severest methods, viz. carefully and impartially to weigh the whole matter, and thereby to remove that prejudice which makes you yet favour some remains of persecution; promising myself that so ingenious a person will either be convinced by the truth which appears so very clear and evident to me, or else confess that, were either you or I in authority, we should very unreasonably and very unjustly use any force upon the other, which differed from him, upon any pretence of want of examination. And if force be not to be used in your case or mine, because unreasonable or unjust, you will, I hope, think fit that it should be forborne in all others where it will be equally unjust and unreasonable, as I doubt not but to make it appear it will unavoidably be, wherever you will go about to punish men for want of consideration; for the true way to try such speculations as these is to see how they will prove when they are reduced into practice.

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Locke on Toleration , pp. 67 - 107
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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