“If,” so Locke reasoned, “the State has the right to dictate to the people concerning the future weal of their souls, then one-half of the people are foreordained to perdition, for since both religions cannot possibly be true (according to article I of their own catechisms) it follows that those who are born on one side of a boundary line are bound for Heaven and those who are born on the other side are bound for Hell and in this way the geographical accident of birth decides one’s future salvation.” That Locke did not include Catholics in his scheme of tolerance is regrettable, but understandable. To the average Britisher of the seventeenth century Catholicism was not a form of religious conviction but a political party which had never ceased to plot against the safety of the English state, which had built Armadas and had bought barrels of gun-powder with which to destroy the parliament of a supposedly friendly nation. Hence Locke refused to his Catholic opponents those rights which he was willing to grant to the heathen in his colonies and asked that they continue to be excluded from His Majesty’s domains, but solely on the ground of their dangerous political activities and not because they professed a different faith. One had to go back almost sixteen centuries to hear such sentiments. Then a Roman emperor had laid down the famous principle that religion was an affair between the individual man and his God and that God was quite capable of taking care of himself whenever he felt that his dignity had been injured. The English people who had lived and prospered through four changes of government within less than sixty years were inclined to see the fundamental truth of such an ideal of tolerance based upon common sense. When William of Orange crossed the North Sea in the year 1688, Locke followed him on the next ship, which carried the new Queen of England. Henceforth he lived a quiet and uneventful existence and when he died at the ripe old age of seventy-two he was known as a respectable author and no longer feared as a heretic. Civil war is a terrible thing but it has one great advantage. It clears the atmosphere.