“John Locke, Heir of Puritan political theorists,”
by Winthrop S. Hudson
from George L. Hunt, John T. McNeill, Calvinism and the Political Order (Philadelphia,1965), 108-129
John Locke was made to order for those who sought to defend the rights of the American colonists in the years preceding the American Revolution. On the one hand, his political thought was thoroughly acceptable in America because it was a restatement of familiar principles— principles forged by the heirs of John Calvin during the English Civil Wars and long the common property of most of colonial America. On the other hand, as the chief apologist of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which brought William and Mary to the English and Scottish thrones, Locke was eminently respectable. The great utility of being able to quote Locke rather than the earlier Puritan political theorists was noted by James Otis. To have cited the Puritan writers, Otis observed, would have given an excuse for the opponents of the colonial cause to raise the cry of rebellion. While the tactic of quoting Locke had obvious propagandist value, few contemporaries either in Britain or America were misled as to the source of Locke’s ideas. Edmund Burke and John Adams were both aware of the pit from whence the political principles of Locke had been dug, and the cartoons of the time made it evident that the general populace was equally clear in its understanding that Locke and Sidney and Calvin were representatives of a single tradition.
If the Revolutionary generation was not misled by the propagandist tactic of appealing to Locke instead of appealing to the Puritan controversialists whose sentiments he reiterated, subsequent generations have been misled. Most modern scholars have tended to regard Burke and Otis and Adams as either ill-informed or not quite bright in attributing Locke’s ideas to the sons of Geneva, and they have pictured. Locke’s political thought as something new, modern, different, “secular.” Having posited this discontinuity, they have then been puzzled by what they could only regard as the strange alliance of “rationalists” and “pietists” in the colonists’ struggle for “liberty both civil and ecclesiastical.”
This misunderstanding of Locke was made possible in part by the fact that Locke also had been careful not to call attention to the source from which he derived his political principles. . . . Further confusion was introduced by a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of Locke’s terminology. Whenever Locke used the word “civil”—as in “civil government’ and “civil order”—the word “civil” was generally interpreted to mean “secular.” And Locke’s references to “natural law” and “natural rights” were interpreted as an appeal to “secular” authority. No one schooled in Puritan political theory would have read this meaning into these terms. . . . For Locke, God was not absent in the civil order. It also was under the rule of God and was to be ordered according to his will. Locke’s difficulty stemmed largely from the poverty of the English language at this point. Other writers had sought to avoid this ambiguity by using “soul causes” and “spiritual’ as antonyms of “civil,” but these terms were frequently awkward and presented other problems of definition.
It is true, of course, that theologically and philosophically Locke was the heir of Puritan rationalism. Those who viewed Locke from the vantage-point of knowing the future course that this tradition was to take may have had some excuse for seeing him as the forerunner of the modern secularist liberal. But this is not an adequate excuse, for Locke must be understood in terms of his own thought and not in terms of what the rationalists of a much later generation were to make of it. Nor is it likely that Locke would have escaped such misinterpretation had he belonged to the more pietistically inclined wing of Puritanism, for even such an unreconstructed pietist as Roger Williams was cut to the pattern of a nineteenth century liberal by Vernon L. Parrington, James Ernst, and other modern interpreters. Nor did A. S. P. Woodhouse, who made such a brilliant analysis of the Puritan contribution to liberty, wholly avoid the temptation to equate references to the “civil order” and “natural law” with secularism. But neither John Milton’s contemporaries nor those of Locke would have made this mistake. And certainly the “pietists” of the Revolutionary generation in America, as the heirs of the older Puritan tradition, would not have read Locke in this way.
Who was John Locke? Locke’s father was an ardent Puritan, a captain of the horse in the parliamentary army. Locke’s early patron, who arranged for him to attend the Westminster School in London, was an equally ardent Puritan, a colonel of the parliamentary forces, and after 1645 a member of the Long Parliament. From 1646 to 1652 Locke was at Westminster within a stone’s throw of the momentous events that culminated in the execution of the king and of the debates that followed over the proper form of government to be adopted. When Locke secured a studentship at Christ Church, Oxford in 1652, John Owen, the noted Independent divine and strong advocate of broad religious toleration, was dean of Christ Church and vice-chancellor of the university ( Oliver Cromwell filled the largely honorary post of chancellor). Locke’s tutor at Oxford was Thomas Cole, another Independent divine, who was later to establish the dissenting academy at which Samuel Wesley received his education and still later was to succeed Philip Nye as minister of an Independent congregation in London. The professor of history at Oxford, whose lectures Locke was compelled to attend, was that “fiery” Independent Louis du Moulin. Du Moulin was the son of Pierre du Moulin, the teacher of Grotius, and he was addicted to notions of popular sovereignty, fundamental law, natural rights, liberty of conscience, government based upon contract and popular consent, simplification of ceremonies, and churches as voluntary associations. None of this, of course, was new or novel. It had become the common stock-in-trade of the Independents as a whole.
By the time of the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, Locke had rejected the party affiliation of his father. He had become an ardent Royalist and an extreme authoritarian. With Thomas Hobbes he believed that any government was better than no government, and that only a strong government could put an end to the conflict and strife that had prevailed. In 1661 he wrote a vigorous answer to The Great Question concerning Things Indifferent (1660), a tract by Edward Bagshaw, Jr. To this plea for toleration, Locke replied that “the magistrate of every nation . . . must necessarily have an absolute and arbitrary power over all the indifferent actions of his people.”
By 1665 Locke had begun to have second thoughts. He had become disenchanted with the fruits of the rigorous policy imposed by the new Stuart regime. In November of that year he went on an embassy to Brandenburg as secretary to Walter Vane, brother of Henry Vane the Younger who had been governor of Massachusetts, Crom well’s key parliamentary lieutenant, and an uncompromis ing republican. At Brandenburg Locke found a broad policy of toleration in operation that included Lutherans, Calvinists, and Roman Catholics. “They quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven,” he wrote, “and I cannot observe any quarrels or animosities amongst them on account of religion.” They entertain different opinions without any secret hatred or rancor.”
When Locke returned to England he began to jot down his ideas on toleration, putting them together in 1667 in an unpublished essay. Here one finds the basic ideas and frequently the language of his famous Letter concerning Toleration, written in 1685 and published in 1689. . . .
In 1675, Locke retired to France “for his health.” During this four-year period in France, Locke was in intimate contact with many French Calvinists. Locke returned to England. In 1683 . . . Locke again sought refuge on the Continent and remained there until William and Mary came to the throne. This time he spent his exile in the Netherlands, where he found a kindred spirit and close friend in the person of the “Remonstrant” theologian, Philip van Limborch, who represented the liberal Calvinism of Jacobus Arminius.
Where did Locke derive his political ideas? With regard to his general political principles one need not look far. They were being shouted from the housetops during the years he was at Westminster and Oxford, and they had been explicated again and again by the sons of Geneva with whom he was in contact throughout his life. Even a conservative Presbyterian like Samuel Rutherford, in Lex rex (1644), invoked almost every argument that was later used by Locke, including an appeal to the law of nature, the ultimate sovereignty of the people, the origin of government in a contract between the governor and the governed, and the right of resistance when that contract is broken. The question of religious toleration, however, is more complex and needs more detailed attention.
At least three principles were involved in the development of Puritan thought concerning toleration. For convenience we may call them the principle of fallibility, the principle of segregation, and the principle of consent.
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