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a fixed rule as equally applicable to all past and present cases, is to sin against the first principles of sound political reasoning. But this doctrine, true or false, was not perceptible from Locke's point of view. Some absolute rule must be discovered to serve as a definite bound to the encroachments of the state. Locke, of course, found it, where he found all other principles, in the social compact. The social compact has long been obsolete, but the doctrines which it covered became the permanent creed of the Whigs, and were accepted more systematically both by the English utilitarians and the French revolutionists.

24. The doctrine may be summarily exhibited. The state rests upon the voluntary consent of mankind to trust the magistrate with powers necessary for the protection of their civil interests, that is to say, their 'life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, land, houses, furniture, and the like.' A Church is a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge to be acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.' The magistrate alone may use force, the Church ruler must confine himself to moral suasion. The last possible spiritual weapon must be excommunication,3 which is simply a separation from the society of the man who refuses to obey its laws. This obviously is to assert expressly the modern principle of a free church in a free state.' It seems to be fatal to any establishment of a Church. Locke argues at great length that the use of any force against dissenters logically implies the use of all the force necessary for their conversion. The same argument would seem to tell equally against all disqualification, and therefore against all privilege. If Locke never drew this conclusion explicitly, he was restrained, not by logic, but by policy or by ignorance.

His antagonist accused him, not unnaturally, of begging the question. Nothing is easier than to infer any conclusion from this elastic social compact. You have only to make its terms, and it may sanction anything. Locke replies by

1 Locke's Works, v. 10.

2 Ib. v. 13.

3 Ib. v. 16.

Ib. v. 262 &c.

substantially bringing forwards the utilitarian ground. The compact, according to his version,' amounts to an agreement of men not to hurt each other; a man is not hurt by my being of a different religion; therefore the compact does not include a clause for a common form of worship.

25. If Locke escapes from the charge of arguing in a circle, it is clearly by making an assumption. The assumption is that which is common to all his party. It is substantially that a church, like a 'club for claret,'2 has no bearing upon men's duties as members of a state. Macaulay, in our own day, argued against Mr. Gladstone that it was as irrelevant to exact religious tests from members of a political body as from members of a canal company. So Locke tells his antagonist that it does not follow that the state is bound to protect religion any more than the East India Company.3 Locke, indeed, sees the difficulty more distinctly than his successor. The government, like the church, is bound to encourage 'a good life, in which consists not the least part of religion and true piety '-indeed, on Locke's showing, nearly the whole of true religion. Thus, as moral actions come within both provinces, there is a danger of conflict. Locke thinks, however, that, so long as the state confines itself to its true duty, the promotion of the temporal good and outward prosperity of the society,' there is little danger of collision. His doctrine is, in fact, based on the assumption that men were in fact sufficiently agreed upon all moral questions to be able to submit to a common rule in regard to all the matters actually regulated by legislative authority. We can, therefore, pass over the difficult problems which arise in cases where men's views about the fate of their souls make them adopt inconsistent modes of providing for their bodies, or in which the action of the legislators obviously affects more than the body. This assumption, moreover, was sufficiently accurate in regard to the state of things actually contemplated. Religious distinctions had little influence upon practice for generations to come, and Locke's doctrine did well enough for the quiet times of the eighteenth century, though its theoretical basis might be defective. If the social

1 Locke's Works, v. 212.

2 Ib. v. 50.

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compact was a fiction, men were, in fact, agreed as to what they wanted from government; and they did not want any interference with their religious practices nor any interference with practices indirectly affected by religious beliefs. So long as this remained true, the social compact did well enough, and when the compact was forgotten the doctrine that religious controversies were controversies about words was equally favourable to the old solution. Let parsons quarrel about creeds, so long as they support the police, is the true Whig doctrine, and one which answers very fairly in practice. But it does not give a scientific solution of the problem as to the limits of state interference.

26. The sceptical side of such theories is more explicitly given in Tindal's 'Rights of the Christian Church'a book which earned for its author a foretaste of the indignation afterwards produced by 'Christianity as Old as the Creation.' The social compact, according to Tindal, gives the right to punish the wicked and protect the good. The legislator may, therefore, punish atheists, blasphemers, and profane persons,' whose principles or practice encourage crime. He may, further, appoint persons to instruct his subjects to fulfil the duty which he is bound to enforce ; but, on the other hand, he has no right to enforce opinions not conducive to this purpose, or to tax his subjects to support those who teach them.3 Speculative opinions, which apparently means all opinions except the opinion that God will punish murderers and thieves, must be left to individuals and voluntary societies. This amounts to saying that the clergy ought to be state officials, paid to teach the religion of nature. Tindal, if he had spoken out with perfect frankness, would have endowed his own creed, given it state support, and left men to squabble about the Trinity or Transubstantiation as much as they pleased. His theory strongly resembles that afterwards set forth with greater vigour by Rousseau. The greater part of the book, however, is an attack upon the claims of the highchurchmen to supernatural privileges in the Church. To admit such a doctrine is, as he argues with much vigour, to allow the contradiction of two supreme powers in the state, and has practically led to all the evils generally attributed by 1 Tindal, p. 12. 2 Ib. p. 12. Ib. p. 22.

the deists to priestcraft. Toleration, therefore, in Tindal's mouth, meant simply that priests should not be allowed to burn heretics, because priests were impostors. It is needless to add that priests did not love Tindal. This book and the 'Independent Whig' (1720, &c.), a series of essays in the 'Spectator' shape, devoted to the abuse of the clergy, are the best illustration of that antipathy to sacerdotalism, generated during the struggles of the seventeenth century, which survived into the eighteenth, and is not yet upon its deathbed. Toleration, however, softened its bitterness considerably after the early years of the Hanoverian dynasty. The best illustration of the prevailing theories is that Bangorian controversy which was once celebrated, if only as an instance of confusion worse confounded.

III. THE BANGORIAN CONTROVERSY.

27. Benjamin Hoadly was probably the best hated clergyman of the century amongst his own order. His titles to the antipathy of his brethren were many and indisputable. A clergyman who opposes sacerdotal privileges is naturally the object of a sentiment such as would be provoked by a tradesunionist who should defend the masters, or a country squire who should protect poachers. In Hoadly's day the feeling was specially intense. Dissenters had extorted toleration. without obtaining equality, and the old persecuting sentiment survived, though compelled to satisfy itself by comparatively impotent legislation or by exhibitions of social insolence. The advocates of the Church still brooded over the memories of the Great Rebellion, and grudged the claims of the sects which had once trampled them under foot. Hoadly again not only supported the political pretensions of the dissenters, but occupied a very questionable theological position. To attack the exclusive privileges of the Church was, of course, to attack the divine law; but Hoadly was also suspected, and with good apparent reason, of extreme laxity in his theology. The intimate friend and admirer of Clarke, he was probably further from orthodoxy than the great latitudinarian leader. Add to this that Hoadly was not merely a traitor, but a successful traitor; that Convocation, for attempting to silence

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him, was itself doomed to silence; and that, according to the system of the day, he rose by several minor preferments to the great bishopric of Winchester. There he remained for more than a quarter of a century, till the controversies of his early life had become a dim tradition with the existing generation, and died in his eighty-fifth year, in 1761. Hoadly, hated for all these reasons, had not the manner to conciliate antagonists. His style is the style of a bore; he is slovenly, awkward, intensely pertinacious, often indistinct, and, apparently at least, evasive; and occasionally (I am thinking especially of his arguments with his old enemy Atterbury) not free from a tinge of personal rancour. He preached his first lectureship down to 30%. a year, as he candidly reports, and then thought it time to resign. A perusal of his writings renders the statement easily credible. The three huge folios which contain his ponderous wranglings are a dreary wilderness of now profitless discussion. We owe, however, a vast debt of gratitude to the bores who have defended good causes, and in his pachydermatous fashion Hoadly did some service, by helping to trample down certain relics of the old spirit of bigotry.

28. Before the controversy to which his fame is chiefly due Hoadly had written some political treatises. The most elaborate are the 'Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate,' and 'The Original and Institution of Civil Government discussed.' In them he once more slays the slain. Following in the steps of Locke, to whom, however, he makes but a grudging reference,' he argues that Adam's paternal authority over Cain had not been transferred to the King of England, and would not entitle him, if it had been transferred, to burn Protestants in Smithfield. He attacks the Anglican doctrine of non-resistance, which had become obsolete when Anglicans found resistance convenient. He opposes to the patriarchal theory the alternative and equally flimsy theory of a social compact, and labours hard to show that the historical reality of such a compact, though not necessary to the validity of his theory, may be reconciled with the narrow chronological limits of the Book of Genesis. The details of such a discussion may well be swept to the dustheaps. The general tendency needs Hoadly, Works, ii. 190.

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