and its possessions as the property and the asylum of their relatives and favourites.

It was these circumstances which gave strength and attraction to awakened scepticism, and to the teaching of sound reason in opposition to the prevailing positive dogmas of the church and the petrified wisdom of the schools; and there arose a class of writers who directed the whole power of their wit against the prevailing dogmas. We shall indeed see that the first properly decisive attack was made from Paris or Berlin; but we must search for the weapons, armour, materials, and preparations for the battle, in England.

We must besides, in this inquiry, keep in view a wider circle of writers, because it is characteristic of the eighteenth century, that all its writers began to work for a very different public from that of their predecessors. They attempted to make easy, pleasant, and accessible, all that had been previously regarded as serious, difficult, and unattainable; without learned instruction they sported with philosophy, poetry, and history, and the writers of this period gained in grace and the powers of entertainment what they lost in seriousness and depth.

For the illustration of this point we return to Locke; because the system of observation, reflection, and experience which, at the end of the seventeenth century, he set forth in opposition to the pedantic system of the universities, to the visionary and poetical teaching of a Pascal, a Mallebranche (of a perception in God), and to the pantheism of a Spinoza, paved the way for a Bolingbroke and a Shaftesbury. We shall not inquire, in how far Locke drew his materials from Hobbes, but only show in what manner, without knowing or wishing it, he shook the established system to its foundations. Locke himself, like the first commentators on religion in Germany in the eighteenth century, did not entertain the slightest thought of working a revolution; but his very first scholars, as we shall hereafter remark, entered upon the way which Voltaire also took.

What however Locke himself did not perceive, by no means escaped the well-armed-but alas! contemptible-defenders of the orthodoxy of the Anglican church, and of the benefices therewith connected. Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, who held a number of other rich benefices together with his bishopric, scented the tendency of Locke's philosophy, just as correctly as the watchman of Lutheran orthodoxy, Melchior Götz, Pastor in Hamburg, discovered the dangerous views of

our renowned Lessing, from the mere advertisement of the so called Wolfenbuttel Fragments.' Stillingfleet, properly speaking, only contended against a scholar and friend of the philosopher, the Deist Toland; but he took advantage of the opportunity to attack Locke also, concluding with justice, that the whole system of dogmatics which had sprung from the school of the Aristotelian and scholastic Christian divines, must fall together with the metaphysics of Aristotle himself. The Trinity, which the Bishop of Worcester recognises as the foundation of his Anglican scholastic Christianity, must stand or fall together with the play upon the notion expressed by the word substance, which had been invented by the dogmatic Aristotelian school of Byzantium. The bishop therefore buckles on his armour, and takes the field on behalf of the notion substance, and in the truest sense, fights pro aris et focis.

The contest which Locke had to carry on with the learned and well-read bishop, with respect to the greater or less danger with which Christianity was threatened by the new philosophy, became more vehement, especially because Locke neither wished to be reckoned among the opponents of Christianity, nor to be mixed up with those who were dissatisfied with the established church. As we have only to relate facts, it is sufficient to show that such a contest really took place, to state that Locke's answer to the bishop's imputations occupies as great a space in his works, as his Essay on the Human Understanding,' itself. This notice may suffice, in reference to the relation of the new philosophy to the prevailing doctrines of the church.

Locke had no occasion to conceal his opinions with respect to civil constitutions, as he had in relation to Theology. He might boldly and safely affirm in England, that he was opposed to the system prevailing on the Continent. Thereby he secured the friendship of the ministers, to whom an attack upon a church which was so serviceable to them, would have made him an object of hatred. Locke therefore wrote a treatise upon civil government, in opposition to the theological political principles of Filmer. In this treatise he defended the original freedom of man, and maintained, that the union of men in civil societies, and consequently that all government, had its origin in a compact, in opposition to Filmer, and those who were like-minded, who maintained that all government had its foundation in pa

* Locke's Works, London, 1714, 3 v. 4to., Human Understanding, 1-342. Controversy with the Bishop, 343-576.

triarchal power, that consequently absolute monarchy is divine, and no man born free. The whole of the first part of Locke's small book is taken up with the refutation of those theological proofs or alleged proofs, which deduced the sovereign power of princes from the monarchical power of Adam.

However ridiculous this derivation of monarchical power from Adam may appear to us, it had nevertheless, even in England in the beginning of the last century, such an apparent importance, as to lead a man of Locke's eminence to come forward in opposition to Filmer. As to the second part, to which he gave the title of Civil Government,' we can only so far allude to it, as it falls within the scope of our plan. It is important as showing that the originator of the new philosophy, which demanded toleration, and subjected faith to rational conviction, was the first also to publish a theory of civil government which was not founded upon divine right, but upon human compact.

Toleration of differences in religious opinions, was a thing nowhere thought of in the beginning of the last century, except in Turkey and in Holland; and no man, who did not wish to be accused as an Indifferentist or Latitudinarian, durst raise his voice in its behalf: with respect to this principle, Locke took the foreway of Voltaire and Montesquieu, who afterwards wrote with so much zeal in favour of universal toleration. In his treatise upon toleration, Locke claims full liberty of thought and of opinion for every man*-he desires that the Jew, heathen, and Mahometan should stand upon a precisely equal footing with their Christian fellow-subjects in every thing which concerns civil rightst, a principle which, even in our day, still meets with great opposition in various quarters.

Locke's view of Christianity and of its reasonableness was first adopted by the German theologians; in his time, the one party reproached him with being too much attached to the old forms of belief, whilst the other calumniated him, as if he were altogether an enemy to Christianity. Locke drew his proofs in favour of Christianity as a divine revelation, from the nature and effects of its teaching, and rejected the proof which rests upon

"Absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty, is the thing that we stand in need of. Now, though this has indeed been much talked of, I doubt it has not been much understood, I am sure not at all practised, either by our governors towards the people in general, or by any dissenting parties of the people towards one another."-Toleration, p. 249.

"

I would not have so much as a pagan, Jew, or Mahometan excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion."-Locke's Works, vol. ii. p. 259.

miracles and supernatural operations, because he regarded it as unnecessary, and as an historical proof liable to attack on historical and critical grounds. This supposition of Locke's was as much opposed to the views of his disciples, the so-called Deists, as to those of Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke and the philosophers of the school of Voltaire. Locke besides carefully drew a distinction between the Evangelists and the letters of the Apostles, and again between the history of their actions, and what was properly only a legend of their miracles. He distinguishes even between those doctrines in the Apostolic Epistles, which were only calculated for the moment and for the particular circumstances of the persons addressed, and those universal and eternal truths, which were veiled to a generation whose eyes were blinded by the dross of Judaism*. These assertions immediately gave rise to a great outcry against him. What would have been the consequence had he gone further?

We believe that it will be sufficiently evident from these few words of introduction to the history of all the following attacks which were made at this time by the wits of the age, by all persons of talent and knowledge, upon a system which had outlived itself, and which was altogether unsuited to the new condition and relations of society, that Locke, with all his discretion, opened up and led the way; we shall merely add, that he insisted earnestly upon a reformation in education and the means of instruction. In this respect also he showed himself prudent and anxious, and may be said rather to have collected the materials and sharpened the weapons for the struggle against all that which, in the course of time, had become either useless or hurtful in monarchical and hierarchical government, than himself to have entered upon the contest. Locke's immediate followers and scholars, Shaftesbury and still more the numerous deists, who were reproachfully called atheists, wielded the weapons which he had forged, against the system upon which the European states of the middle ages were built, as upon a rock.

*" And as for the General Epistles, they, we may see, regard the state and exigencies and some peculiarities of those times. These holy writers, inspired from above, wrote nothing but truth; but yet every sentence of theirs must not be taken up and looked on as a fundamental article necessary to salvation, without an explicit belief whereof, nobody could be a member of Christ's Church here, or be admitted into his eternal kingdom hereafter. If all or most of the truths declared in the Epistles, were to be received and believed as fundamental articles, what then becomes of those Christians who were fallen asleep? (as St. Paul witnesses, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians,'many were.)"-Reasonableness of Christianity, vol. ii. p. 519.

§ II.

ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF ENLIGHTENMENT IN RELIGION.OPPONENTS AND SCOFFERS OF THE PREVAILING DOCTRINES.-SHAFTESBURY AND SOME OF THE DEISTS.

Locke's follower and disciple, Shaftesbury, so much the more deserves to be first mentioned among the creators of a new literature, which was altogether opposed to that which was existing and had prevailed, because his manner and style were calculated to induce the higher classes, who shrink from every thing requiring effort, and who do not bring much knowledge to the work, to read his writings. In these respects he was superior to Bolingbroke, who, however, was much wittier and more splendid than he. He guards himself carefully from exhausting his subject or going too deep for his readers; and he became therefore immediately the favourite writer of the fashionable world*.

Shaftesbury deserves here also to be first named; because he was in some measure, and against his will, drawn forth as a freethinking writer, in the very beginning of the eighteenth century. He was first educated by his grandfather, who has gained a name in history on account of his prudence, and a bad renown for the way in which he proved and exercised it; he was afterwards trained by Locke according to a new method, or in other words, like Voltaire, he had gained an earlier acquaintance with the world so-called, than with science; like Montaigne, he had learned the ancient languages by the easy and superficial method of practice, and was therefore, by his intercourse, education, and improvement of mind altogether free from the prejudices of his age, and found nobody in England who satisfied him as an instructor. He sought out Bayle, Le Clerc and others in the Low Countries, maintained his connexion with them during his life, and turned from Locke's doctrine of virtue and reason to the scoffing and ridicule of Bayle. He was confessedly much less anxious for truth than the applause of the world. He had been drawn forth, as we have remarked, by Toland, who published his treatise upon Virtue and Merit,' and by numerous interpolated sentences made it approximate closely to his own

* See Schlosser and Bercht's Archiv. für Geschichte und Literatur, 2 Band,' 7-52. p. 22, of Shaftesbury.