igious not
less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and
Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas
they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In the
_Letters on Toleration_[4] Locke did but expand the principles upon
which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new
State. The Record Office has no more precious document than the
draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the
handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration
statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers
of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is
traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the
citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed
or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God." Algernon
Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and
their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions"
of Locke and Shaftesbury.

Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position
analogous to their position in politics, already delineated. In
politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government,
and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion
they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later
centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they
turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg,
consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the
Imperialism of to-day.

If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the
roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and
civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the
intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be
found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the
eighteenth--intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or
religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in
the days of Descartes and Spinoza--the refuge of the oppressed, the
home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the
asylum of Voltaire.[5] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and
the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed
as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The on