important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing
that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
have arrived at in any case.

Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Molière making his
chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation