A Letter Concerning Toleration

Notebook

John Locke's Epistola de Tolerantia, written in Latin during his exile in the Netherlands and published anonymously in 1689, argues that the civil magistrate has no authority to coerce religious belief, and that true religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind which force cannot produce. The letter's sharp separation of the ends of the commonwealth (civil interests — life, liberty, estate) from those of the church (salvation of souls) became the foundational statement of religious toleration in the English-speaking world and directly shaped the First Amendment's religion clauses. This edition is William Popple's nearly-contemporaneous 1689 English translation, published the same year as the Latin original and long treated as the authoritative English rendering.

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