Locke Quote on Toleration: The Care of Souls

Historical Context

John Locke composed the Epistola de Tolerantia while in exile in the Netherlands, following the failure of the Rye House Plot and his flight from England in 1683. The letter was published anonymously in Latin in 1689, the year of the Glorious Revolution, and was translated into English the same year by William Popple. The immediate context was a century of religious warfare that had devastated Europe: the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the persecution of Huguenots following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and the ongoing struggle between Catholic and Protestant monarchs for control of the British throne.

Locke had personal reasons for his concern with toleration. He had witnessed the anti-Puritan policies of Charles II's Clarendon Code, the persecution of dissenting ministers, and the cruel punishments inflicted on those who deviated from the established church. The Letter Concerning Toleration was written not as a theoretical exercise but as a practical political intervention, addressed to the conditions of a society where the care of souls had become a matter of state violence. Locke's friend and patron Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, had been imprisoned for opposing the Catholic succession, and Locke himself had been under surveillance by the Crown.

Meaning

The quote makes a precise jurisdictional argument. The civil magistrate — the state — possesses only the power of outward force: laws, penalties, confiscation, imprisonment, execution. But genuine religion, Locke insists, consists in inward persuasion — the mind's free assent to belief. Since outward force cannot produce inward persuasion (a person may conform outwardly to avoid punishment while inwardly disbelieving), the state's power is categorically unsuited to the care of souls. The conclusion follows: the care of souls does not and cannot belong to the civil magistrate, not because the state chooses not to exercise it, but because the nature of political power makes it constitutionally incapable of doing so. This is an argument from the limits of power, not merely from the desirability of tolerance.

Philosophical Interpretation

Locke's argument became a cornerstone of liberal political philosophy and the modern doctrine of the separation of church and state. The key move is the differentiation of spheres: the state governs civil interests — life, liberty, health, property — while the church is a voluntary association concerned with the salvation of souls. This distinction drew on the broader social contract tradition, in which political authority arises from the consent of free individuals for limited and specific purposes, not from divine commission.

The influence of the Letter was profound and enduring. Through the writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Locke's reasoning shaped the American First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of religion and protects the free exercise thereof. The argument also resonated with Rousseau's distinction between the civil religion and private faith, and with J. S. Mill's later defense of individual liberty in On Liberty.

Locke was not, however, an advocate of unlimited toleration. He explicitly excluded three groups: Catholics, because their allegiance to a foreign sovereign (the Pope) made them politically unreliable; atheists, because those who deny God's existence cannot be trusted to keep oaths; and those whose religious practices threaten civil order. These exclusions — now widely rejected — reveal the limits of Locke's liberalism and the historical conditions under which he wrote. Yet the core principle, that the state has no competence over the inner life of the mind, remains one of the most powerful arguments for religious freedom ever articulated, and its implications extend far beyond religion to encompass freedom of conscience, speech, and thought in general.

Relations

• Thinkers: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill
• Philosophies: Empiricism, Social Contract Theory
• Wisdom: Freedom, Rights, Justice, Belief
• Topics: Philosophy of Life, Good Life
• Collections: Understanding Yourself

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Locke" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "John Locke" — https://iep.utm.edu/locke/