burg, and it may be that, on the present occasion, no fitter person occurred to him. Any way, the employment was one which would have advanced Locke in riches and honour; but as such, glad as he might have been to serve his country disinterestedly to the best of his power, it had no attractions for him. "He must have a heart strongly touched with wealth or honours who, at my age, and labouring for breath, can find any great relish for either of them."

On one occasion Locke accompanied the king, the latter going incognito to a meeting of the Society of Friends, where they listened to the famous Quaker preacheress, Rebecca Collier. Locke afterwards sent her a parcel of sweetmeats, with a very complimentary letter, and is said to have found the meeting so agreeable that it removed his objections to a female ministry.

With his resignation of the Commissionership of the Board of Trade, in the summer of 1700, Locke's public life comes to an end. His friend Somers had been sacrificed to the incessant and malignant attacks of the Tories, and dismissed from the Chancellorship in the previous spring; and to those statesmen who were inspired by a sincere and simple desire for the well-being of their country the political outlook had become anything but cheerful. The condition of Locke's health was quite a sufficient reason for his desiring to be relieved of the anxieties of office; but we can hardly doubt that, on other grounds as well, he was glad to escape from so intricate a maze as the field of politics bade fair soon to become.

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CHAPTER VII.

CONTROVERSY WITH STILLINGFLEET.-OTHER LITERARY OCCUPA TIONS.- DOMESTIC LIFE. PETER KING. LATTER YEARS.DEATH.

In order to resume the thread of Locke's literary and domestic life, it is now necessary to go back two or three years. I have already spoken of no less than three literary controversies in which he found himself engaged, one on fianancial, and two on religious questions. Of the latter, one was occasioned by the publication of the Letter on Toleration, the other by that of the Reasonableness of Christianity. The Essay also had been attacked by Norris and other writers, including one very acute antagonist, John Serjeant, or Sergeant, a Roman Catholic priest; but to these critics Locke did not see fit to reply. The strictures on Norris only appear among his posthumous works. But in the autumn of 1696 Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, in his Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, pointedly drew attention to the principles of the Essay, as favouring anti-Trinitarian doctrine. Stillingfleet's position and reputation appeared to demand an answer, and before the year, according to the old style, was out, Locke's Letter to the Bishop of Worcester was published. The Bishop's Answer, Locke's Reply to the Answer, and the Bishop's "Answer to Mr. Locke's Second Letter, wherein his notion of ideas is proved to be inconsistent with itself, and with the articles of the Christian faith,” all followed, one on the other, within a few months. The last letter of the series is "Mr. Locke's Reply to the Bishop of Worcester's Answer to his Second Letter," published in 1699. Stillingfleet died soon after the publication of this pamphlet, and thus the volu minous controversy came to an end. There can be no doubt that the antagonists were unequally matched. Stillingfleet was clumsy both in handling and argument, and constantly misrepresented or exaggerated the statements of his adversary. On the other hand, Locke, notwithstanding an unnecessary prolixity which wearies the modern reader, shows admirable skill and temper. He deals tenderly with his victim, as if he loved him, but, none the less, never fails to despatch him with a moral stab. Stillingfleet, indeed, was no metaphysician, and not very much of a logician. He did not see at all clearly where the orthodox doctrines were affected, and where they remained unaffected, by Locke's philosophy, and he no doubt considerably exaggerated the bearing of Locke's direct

statements upon them. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that his instincts were perfectly sound in apprehending grave dangers to the current theological opinions, and still more, perhaps, to the established mode of expressing them, from the "new way of ideas." Religious, and even devout, as are those portions of the Essay in which Locke has occasion expressly to mention the leading principles of the Christian faith, yet his handling of many of the metaphysical terms and notions which modern divines, whether Catholic or Protestant, had taken on trust from their predecessors, the fathers and schoolmen, was well calculated to alarm those who had the interest of theological orthodoxy at heart. The playful freedom with which he discusses the idea of substance seemed, not unreasonably, to strike at the terminology of the Athanasian Creed, while, most unreasonably, his resolution of personal identity into present and recollected states of consciousness appeared inconsistent with the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead. A far more powerful solvent, however, of the unreflecting and complacent orthodoxy, into which established churches, and, in fact, all prosperous religious communities, are apt to lapse, was to be found in the general drift and tendency rather than in the individual tenets of Locke's philosophy. And this fact, though only very dimly and confusedly, Stillingfleet appears to have seen. To insist that words shall always stand for determinate ideas, to attempt to trace ideas to their original sources, and to propose to discriminate between the certainty and varying probabilities of our beliefs, according to the nature of the evidence on which they rest, is to encourage a state of mind diametrically the opposite of that which humbly and thankfully accept the words of the religious teacher, without doubt and without inquiry. To the religious teacher whose own beliefs rest on no previous inquiry, who has never acquired a reason for the faith that is in him," such a state of mind must necessarily be not only inconvenient but repulsive; and hence we have no right to feel surprised when an attempt is made to expose it to popular odium, or to fasten on those who entertain it injurious or opprobrious epithets. The old-standing feud, of which Plato speaks, between poetry and philosophy. has in great measure been transferred, in these latter times, to philosophy and theology. But in both cases the antagonism is an unnecessary one. highest art is compatible with the most profound speculation. so we may venture to hope that the simple love of truth, combined with the charity "which never faileth," will lead men not further away from the Divine presence, but nearer to, and into it.

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The

And

Here I thankfully take leave of the mass of controversial literature, in the writing of which so much of Locke's latter life was spent. The controversies were not of his own seeking, and, from all that we know of his temper and character, must have been as distasteful to him as they are wearisome to us. But prolonged and reiterated controversy was of the habit of the time, and no man who cared candidly and unreservedly to express his opinions on any important question could hope to escape from it.

In the autumn of 1697, while the controversy with Stillingfleet was at its hottest, Locke wrote to Molyneux:-" I had much rather be at leisure to make some additions to my book of Education and my Essay on Human Understanding, than be employed to defend myself against the groundless, and, as others think, trifling quarrel of the bishop." He was at this time engaged on preparing the fourth edition of the Essay for the press. In addition to this task, or rather as part of it, he was also employing himself on writing the admirable little tract on the Conduct of the Understanding, the contents of which I shall notice in a subsequent chapter. This treatise, which was not published till after his death, was originally intended as an additional chapter to the Essay. Speaking of it in one of his letters to Molyneux, he says:-"I have written several pages on this subject; but the matter, the farther I go, opens the more upon me, and I cannot yet get sight of any end of it. The title of the chapter will be 'Of the Conduct of the Understanding,' which, if I shall pursue as far as I imagine it will reach, and as it deserves, will, I conclude, make the largest chapter of my Essay." It did not, however, appear in the new edition, nor did Locke ever reduce its parts into order, or put the finishing stroke to it. He may, perhaps, have intended to revise it for a subsequent edition of the Essay, but the fourth was the last which appeared during his lifetime.

Before speaking of the literary labours which occupied the last years of Locke's life, I may here conveniently recur to his domestic history. Of his quiet life with the Mashams little more need be said. Had Lady Masham been his daughter, she could not have tended him more carefully or lovingly; and had he been her father, he could not have entertained a more sincere solicitude for the welfare of her and her family. All Locke's friends were welcome at Oates, and seem to have been regarded quite as much as friends of the Meshams as of his own. And Oates appears in every respect to have been as much Locke's home as that of its owners. In the whole of his correspondence, there does not appear the slightest trace of those petty piques and annoyances, those small désagréments, which are so apt to grow up among people who live much together, even when, at bottom, they entertain a deep love and admiration for each other. On the side of the Mashams we know that the tide of affection ran equally smooth. Lady Masham and Esther acted as his nurses, and with one or other of them he seems to have shared all his pursuits. The intimacy and sweetness of these relations surely imply as rare an amount of amiability of temper and power of winning regard on the one side, as of patience and devotion on the other. But then Locke possessed the inestimable gift of cheerfulness, which renders even the invalid's chamber a joy to those who enter it. All the glimpses we obtain of the life at Oates represent it as a gay and pleasant one, none the less gay and pleasant because its enjoyments were modest and rational. After complaining to Molyneux of the persistent asthma which

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confined him a close prisoner to the house during the winter of 1697-98, he adds, "I wish, nevertheless, that you were here with me to see how well I am; for you would find that, sitting by the fireside, I could bear my part in discoursing, laughing, and being merry with you, as well as ever I could in my life. If you were here (and if wishes of more than one could bring you, you would be here to-day) you would find three or four in the parlour after dinner who, you would say, passed their afternoons as agreeably and as jocundly as any people you have this good while met with." Locke's conversation is reported to have been peculiarly fascinating. He had a large stock of stories, and is said to have had a singu larly easy and humorous way of telling them.

Among the more frequent guests at Oates at this time were Edward Clarke and his daughter Betty, Locke's "little wife,” now fast growing up to womanhood, a son of Limborch, and a son of Benjamin Furly, both engaged in mercantile pursuits in London, and a young kinsman of Locke's own, Peter King, of whom I shalĺ have more to say presently. One of the most anxiously expected guests, whose visits had been often promised and often deferred, was the correspondent of whom we have heard so much, William Molyneux. At length, after the rising of the British Parliament in the summer of 1698, the two friends met. Even on this occasion, Molyneux had been obliged to defer his promised visit for some weeks, on account of a recent trouble which he had brought on himself by the publication of a "home-rule pamphlet, protesting against the interference of the English Parliament in Irish affairs. Both houses had joined in an address to the king, praying for punishment on the offender; but the king, possibly through Locke's intervention, had wisely taken no notice of the petition. Any way, after the prorogation, Molyneux seems to have felt sufficiently secure to venture on a journey across the Channel. He and Locke were together for some time both in London and at Oates. The friends, though they had been in such constant and intimate correspondence for six years, had never met before. We may easily imagine how warm was their greeting, how much they had to talk about, and how loath they were to separate. "I will venture to assert to you," wrote Molyneux on his return to Dublin, "that I cannot recollect, through the whole course of my life, such signal instances of real friendship as when I had the happiness of your company for five weeks together in London. That part thereof especially which I passed at Oates has made such an agreeable impression on my mind that nothing can be more pleasing." Shortly after writing this letter, Molyneux died at the early age of fortytwo. "His worth and his friendship to me," writes Locke, in a letter to Burridge, the Latin translator of the Essay, "made him an inestimable treasure, which I must regret the loss of the little remainder of my life, without any hope of repairing it in any way." He then characteristically goes on to ask if there is any service he can render to Molyneux's son. "They who have the care of him cannot do me a greater pleasure than to give me the opportunity