AS USUAL, the great John Locke got it right. The world ought to be more tolerant but some things remain intolerable. Locke, the 17th-century philosopher of liberalism, comes down to us through his great works on human understanding, politics and education, through the American Declaration of Independence, and through the American and French revolutions. Lockean revolutions were more benign than the Marxist revolutions of the 20th century, though the French Revolution led to the Terror and to Napoleon, two very un-Lockean deviations.

Locke’s first major publication was A Letter Concerning Toleration; it is one of those rare short books that changed the world. He originally wrote it in Latin, the language of European intellectuals. I have a copy of the 1690 second edition of the English translation. It is smaller than my pocket diary and by my calculation runs to no more than 17,000 words.

I have been reading it because it so directly addresses the most difficult question of the moment: how can people with different beliefs live with one another in peace? Locke’s first translator sums up the situation as it was in the 1690s: “This narrowness of spirit on all sides has undoubtedly been the principal occasion of our miseries and confusions. But whatever has been the occasion, it is now high time to seek for a thorough cure. We have need for more generous remedies than have yet been made use of . . . absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty, is the thing we stand in need of.”

This last sentence was much quoted in the American Revolution, as though the precis had been written by Locke himself. But it was not, and it goes beyond what Locke himself believed. The criticism of “narrowness of spirit” is certainly Lockean, and so is the call for “generous remedies”, but he was a physician and not a fanatic, even in the cause of liberty. He calls for liberty restrained by reason and law, rather than absolute liberty in all kinds and circumstances. That makes him more helpful to our age of contradiction.

Locke argues that religion is a matter for the individual not the State. “The care of every man’s soul belongs unto himself, and is to be left unto himself.” The State ought to give equal protection to all churches and religious opinions. There should be no persecution on religious grounds, indeed: “We must not content ourselves with the narrow measures of bare justice. Charity, bounty and liberality must be added to it. This the Gospel enjoins; this reason directs; and this the natural fellowship we are born into requires of us.”

Locke did not believe in using force but in “the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. Such is the nature of the understanding that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force”. His liberalism is based on the natural independence of the human mind. It is ultimately a psychological theory.

So far, it looks as though Locke may indeed be establishing a theory of absolute liberty, if with the qualification that individuals and churches owe each other obligations of goodwill, based on their human fellowship. Yet he is also careful to specify when toleration becomes impossible.

In recent years governments have repeatedly come up against these limits. Locke did not believe that governments could always tolerate “opinions contrary to human society, such as manifestly undermine the foundations of society”. It is not clear what Locke had specifically in mind, but terrorism would surely be covered. In the 20th century both Nazism and Leninism were “opinions contrary to human society” in this sense — they were simply intolerable.

He also warned against trying to tolerate certain doctrines that 17th-century Protestants attributed to the Jesuits. These included the teaching that “faith is not to be kept with heretics”, and that “kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms”. Locke thought that “a Church has no right to be tolerated” whose members have to obey a foreign prince because that would mean that the ruler allowed “his own people to be listed, as it were, as soldiers against his own Government”.

Seventeenth-century Islam was included in the criticism. “It is ridiculous for anyone to profess himself to be a Mohametan (sic) only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, while at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor.” Fortunately, the Papacy no longer claims the right to excommunicate and depose monarchs, there is no Ottoman Emperor, and if there still is a Mufti of Constantinople he certainly has no universal authority in Islam. But Osama bin Laden really is a dangerous man who does claim obedience of his followers.

Modern liberals may be shocked at John Locke’s final exception to the rule of toleration. “Lastly,” he writes, “those are not to be tolerated who deny the being of a 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.” Modern liberals do not much worry about oaths or atheism.

Locke would not have wished to be read as though he were infallible, since he believed in reason, not authority. But his doctrine of general toleration is the more persuasive because he recognises that some things are not tolerable. These are views that are too destructive for society; one only has to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf to recognise the possibility of that.

Conflicts of loyalty can turn people into traitors; Guy Fawkes was one example, and the July bombers another. Liberalism itself does not work as an absolute or authoritarian doctrine. There should always be charity and goodwill between different beliefs; toleration must be the norm, but even toleration has its limits. Locke would not have believed in insulting publications or in violent response.

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