But, meanwhile, he was also busy with other pursuits. One of these was the administration, under Ashley, and the other "lords proprietors," of the colony of Carolina. In 1663 this colony had been granted by Charles the Second to eight "lords proprietors," of whom Ashley was one. Locke, when he went to live in Ashley's family, appears to have become, though without any formal appointment, a sort of chief secretary and manager to the association. A vast amount of miscellaneous business seems to have been transacted by him in this capacity; but what to us would be most interesting, if we could determine it, would be the share he took in drawing up the document entitled "The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina," issued on the 1st of March, 1669-70. Many of the articles, embodying, as they do, a sort of modified feudalism, must have been distasteful to Locke, and it is hardly possible to suppose that he was the originator of them. But perhaps we may trace his hand in the articles on religion, between which and his views, as stated in his unpublished papers written before and his published works written after this time, there is a large amount of correspondence. No man was to be permitted to be a freeman of Carolina unless he acknowledged a God, and agreed that God was to be publicly and solemnly worshipped. But within these limits any seven persons might constitute a church, provided that they upheld the duty of every man, if called on, to bear witness to the truth, and agreed on some external symbol by which such witness might be signified. Any one, however, who did not belong to some such communion was to be regarded as outside the protection of the law. The members of one church were not to molest or persecute those of another; and no man was to "use any reproachful, reviling, or abusive language against the religion of any church or profession, that being the certain way of disturbing the peace, and of hindering the conversion of any to the truth." Amongst the miscellaneous provisions in this code is one strictly forbidding any one to plead before a court of justice for money or reward; and another, enacting that "every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever."