A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. John Locke
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of the Letter. Practically all of the other writings included here remained unpublished during his lifetime. Whereas this edition of the Letter and the Third Letter follows the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the early printed editions, the remaining texts, which are mostly derived from manuscripts, have been modernized, since an exact rendering of Locke’s private drafts and memoranda would give the modern reader a tough time. I have, however, retained some verbal features that alert us to the fact we are reading seventeenth-century texts, such as “hath” and “’tis.” Words in square brackets are editorial interpolations. All references in the following notes to “MS Locke” are to the Locke archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Locke wrote the Letter Concerning Toleration in Latin, and it was first published as the Epistola de Tolerantia at Gouda in Holland in April 1689. In the three centuries since, the anglophone world has known the work from the translation made by William Popple and published in London about October of that year.
The text reproduced here is the second edition, which appeared about March 1690, the title page of which announced it to be “corrected.” It contains some 475 amendments to the first. These mostly comprise changes to punctuation (generally strengthening it), capitalization (generally more capitals), italicization (usually more), and spelling. Just two typographical errors were corrected: both editions were prepared with care. More significantly, there were two dozen changes in wording, which clarify or finesse the meaning. They show Popple’s hand at work, for these are not just printer’s corrections. Some scholars have suggested that Locke was involved in these amendments, but this is unlikely. I have, however, noted a couple of occasions that may justify the claim.
Later editions of the Letter have been evenhanded in their preferences between the first and second editions. The Works (1714), Sherman (1937), Montuori (1963), Horton and Mendus (1991), and Sigmund (2005) follow the first edition; Gough (1946) and Wootton (1993) follow the second, as did most eighteenth-century editions; Hollis (1765), the Works (1777 and later), Tully (1983), and Shapiro (2003) are hybrids.
In reading the English Letter, it is important to realize that it is not of Locke’s composing. Scholars have disputed the reliability of Popple’s translation. In his will, Locke wrote that it was prepared “without my privity,” meaning without his authorization. However, as early as June 1689 he did know a translation was being undertaken, and he was evidently content with the result, for it was the English version that he defended in his subsequent controversy with Jonas Proast. Moreover, in his Second Letter he remarked of one passage that, though it might have been rendered “more literally … yet the translator is not to be blamed, if he chose to express the sense of the author, in words that very lively represented” his meaning. Even so, the reader should be alert to Popple’s style and not take the text for granted as unmediated Locke.
I have footnoted some passages to illustrate the more marked deviations from the Latin; generally I do not supply Locke’s Latin but use the modern English translation published by Klibansky and Gough in 1968. Such notes are indicated by the phrases “alternatively,” “Popple omits,” or “added by Popple.”
Some general characteristics of Popple’s approach are worth noting, since I have made no attempt to footnote all the variants. He used intensifiers to heighten the emotional tone. For example, “vices” becomes “enormous vices,” “superstition” becomes “credulous superstition,” and “immutable right” becomes “fundamental and immutable right”; the cool “magistrate’s favour” becomes the more pointed “Court favour.” He gave literary variety to Locke’s mechanical repetition of “You say” and “I answer” in stating and responding to his imaginary interlocutor’s objections. He gave a topical spin to points that Locke stated more abstractly, and he anglicized some references that originally had a Dutch context. He sometimes omitted, but more often elaborated, a phrase. One (extreme) example may suffice: where the modern translation of Locke’s Latin has “blindly accept the doctrines imposed by their prince, and worship God in the manner laid down by the laws of their country,” Popple has “blindly to resign up themselves to the will of their governors, and to the religion, which either ignorance, ambition, or superstition had chanced to establish in the countries where they were born.”
Popple wrote stylishly, and some of the more memorable phrases are entirely his. The likening of a church, as a voluntary society, to a “club for claret” has no authority in Locke’s Latin. All translation involves interpretation, and Popple is not quite Locke. But Locke broadly approved, and, for us today, Popple’s version has the supreme advantage of being a text that is at once an authentic seventeenth-century voice, both vivid and readable.
The English Letter has two further differences from the Latin Epistola. Popple added a preface of his own, “To the Reader,” which does not make explicit that it is written by the translator rather than the author, so that many generations of readers assumed that the preface was Locke’s own work. Many Enlightenment readers therefore attributed Popple’s ringing phrase about “absolute liberty” to Locke. The other difference is that Popple deleted the perplexing cryptogram that appeared on the title page of the Latin edition: “Epistola de Tolerantia ad Clarissimum Virum T.A.R.P.T.O.L.A. Scripta à P.A.P.O.I.L.A.”
There are two versions of what the abbreviations on the title page stand for. Phillip van Limborch, the Dutch Arminian theologian and friend of Locke who put the Epistola through the press, deciphered them as “Theologiae Apud Remonstrantes Professorem, Tyrannidis Osorem, Libertatis Amantem, a Pacis Amante, Persecutionis Osore, Ioanne Lockio Anglo” (Professor of Theology among the Remonstrants, Enemy of Tyranny, Lover of Liberty, from a Friend of Peace, Enemy of Persecution, John Locke, Englishman). But Jean Le Clerc had a different reading of the medial “L. A.”: “Limburgium Amstelodamensem” (“Limborch of Amsterdam” instead of “Lover of Liberty”). Although Limborch might be expected to know best, Le Clerc’s version seems more plausible: the parallel between the two names of Limborch and Locke seems natural; and Limborch contradicts himself by also saying that Locke “wanted our names to be hidden by the letters of the title.” In offering his explanation, Limborch was probably being modest.
When Locke’s publisher Awnsham Churchill issued the first edition of the Works in 1714, he placed an epigraph (in Latin) on the title page of the Letter, from Cicero, De Officiis, ii.83, saluting Locke: “A wise and outstanding man, he thought that he should consult the interests of all; and it showed the wisdom and extreme reasonableness that befits a good citizen that he did not separate the interests of the citizens, but held everyone together under a single standard of fairness.”
I have taken the opportunity of the present edition to provide a fair amount of information by way of explanatory notes. Oddly, scarcely any of the editions published in the past half-century provide notes, and yet the references and allusions in the text are not always perspicuous. I have also drawn attention to some of the clues that the Letter provides to Locke’s secular politics and hence to connections with his Two Treatises of Government. Although Popple’s text has been reproduced in its original form, the scriptural citations that were awkwardly placed have been moved to appropriate points in the text and the names of biblical books spelled out.
Excerpts from A Third Letter for Toleration
Of the three responses that Locke prepared against his critic Jonas Proast, much the longest is the Third Letter for Toleration, published by Awnsham Churchill in 1692. Anonymous, it is signed “Philanthropus, June 20, 1692,” and fills 350 quarto pages. It is sadly neglected today, though readers can be forgiven for not pursuing Locke through all the thickets of his relentless contradiction of Proast.
The tract is too long to reprint in its entirety here, and I have selected passages that either illuminate themes in the original Letter or pursue new lines of inquiry. In the footnotes I indicate the location of the excerpts in the 1692 edition and in volume 6 of the Works, 1801 and 1823. The topical headings supplied to each excerpt are mine. The first excerpt