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John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. and introd. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010. Pp. xlvii + 208. $14.50 (paper).
Although Locke was by no means the first person to argue in favor of religious toleration, he seems to have been the first to base his argument on a general theory about the functions and limits of political authority. At the time of the Restoration he had given the civil magistrate a qualified power to impose forms of religious worship, but from 1667 onwards he insisted that the magistrate's powers are limited to protecting civil goods. The essential role of the state, he thought, was to settle disputes, the existence of an impartial umpire being the defining characteristic of civil society.
No such umpire is needed, he thought, in religious disputes. God has not created one, and it is not for us to authorize a Hobbesian mortal god to act in his place. For Locke, religion is concerned with salvation in the next world and is only a matter of concern to the individual, which means that there is no need to empower an umpire to resolve disputes about doctrine or worship. The state therefore has no authority to require uniform worship or to impose religious tests for civil office, and there is little or no room for any kind of established church. Individual believers can, and...