"Lastly, Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all." The practical result of Locke's exceptions, at the time at which he wrote, would have been to exclude from toleration Roman Catholics, Atheists, and perhaps certain sects of Antinomians. Roman Catholics, however, would not have been excluded on the ground of their belief in Transubstantiation, as was actually the case, but because of those tenets which, in Locke's judgment, made them bad or impossible subjects. Locke was not by any means the first of English writers who had advocated a wide toleration in religion. Bacon, in his remarkable _Essay on Unity in Religion_, had laid down, in passing, a position which is almost identical with that developed at length in the _Letters on Toleration_. During the Civil Wars, the Independents, as a body, had been led on by their theories of Church Government and of individual inspiration to maintain, on principle, and accord, in practice, a large measure of religious toleration. Amongst divines of the Church of England, Hales of Eton, Chillingworth, and Jeremy Taylor, had honourably distinguished themselves above the mass of their brethren by expressly advocating, or unmistakably suggesting, the same humane doctrines. The practical conclusions at which Taylor arrives, in his noble work on the _Liberty of Prophesying_, bear a close resemblance to those of Locke's _Letters on Toleration_, while the theoretical considerations on which he mainly founds them, namely, the difficulty of discovering religious truth, and the small number of theological propositions of which we can entertain anything like certainty, might be regarded as anticipating, to no small extent, some of the views expressed in the _Reasonableness of Christianity_. Locke's attention had been turned to these questions at an early period of his life by the religious dissensions which accompanied the Civil Wars, and, during the years immediately preceding the publication of the first _Letter on Toleration_, his interest in them must have been sustained not only by the events which were then happening in England, but by the common topics of conversation amongst his Arminian or Remonstrant friends in Holland. The peculiarities of their position and the tendencies of their doctrines had, at an early date, forced on the Dutch Remonstrants, just as on the English Independents, the necessity of claiming and defending a wide toleration. What, perhaps, mainly distinguishes Locke's pamphlets is their thorough outspokenness, the political rather than the theological character of the argument, and the fact that they are expressly dedicated to the subject of Toleration, instead of treating of it incidentally.