appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the
latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English
situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics,
Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights
they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance
in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European
civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the
only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and
State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is
thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of
persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the
magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use
force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal
conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be
mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would
have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of
truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of
heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe
not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of
the Church an institution radically different from the ruling
conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which
can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies,
but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is
alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the
limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the
advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it
there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him
modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a
vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.