754 LOCKE
from Holland, ready for the press except a few last touches. It was the first book in which his name appeared, for the other two were published anonymously.
Locke's asthma and other ailments had increased in the latter part of 1690. The air of London always aggravated them. The course of public affairs also disappointed him, for the settlement at the Revolution in many ways fell short of his ideal. It was then that the home of his old age, the brightest of all his homes, opened to receive him. This was the manor house of Oates in Essex, pleasantly situated midway between Ongar and Harlow, the country seat of Sir Francis Masham. Lady Masham was the accomplished daughter of Cudworth, and Locke had known her before he went to Holland. In the course of the two years after his return, she told Le Clerc, "by some considerably long visits Mr Locke made trial of the air of this place, which is some 20 miles from London, and he thought that none would be so suitable for him. His company could not but be very desirable for us, and he had all the assurances we could give him of being always welcome; but, to make him easy in living with us, it was necessary he should do so on his own terms, which Sir Francis at last assenting to, he then believed himself at home with us, and resolved, if it pleased God, here to end his days – as he did." It was in the spring of 1691 that this idyllic life at Oates began. There, among the green lanes of rural England, he enjoyed for fourteen years as much domestic peace and literary leisure as was consistent with broken health and sometimes anxious visits to London on public affairs. Oates was in every way his home. In his letters and otherwise we have charming pictures of its inmates and its internal economy, as well as of occasional visits of friends who went there to see him, among others Lord Peterborough and the Lord Shaftesbury who wrote the Characteristics, Isaac Newton, William Molyneux, and Anthony Collins.
At Oates he was always busy with his pen. The Letter on Toleration had already involved him in controversy. The Answer of a certain Jonas Proast of Queen's College, Oxford, had drawn forth in 1690 his Second Letter on Toleration. A rejoinder in 1691 was followed by Locke's Third Letter in the summer of the following year. And other questions divided his interest with this one. In 1691 those of currency and finance were much in his thoughts; in the year after he addressed a letter to Sir John Somers on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money. It happened too that when he was in Holland he had written letters to his friend Clarke of Chipley about the education of his children. These letters formed the substance of the little volume that appeared in 1693, entitled Thoughts on Education, which still holds its place among the classics in that department. Nor were the "principles of revealed religion" forgotten, which a quarter of a century before were partly the occasion of the Essay. The circumstances of the time now made him desire to show how few and simple all the essential points held in common by the religious community of England were, and to bring men if possible to agree to differ as individuals regarding all beyond. The issue was an anonymous essay on the Reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the Scriptures, which appeared in 1695, in which Locke tried to separate the divine essence of Christianity from accidental accretions of dogma, and verbal reasoning of professional theologians, ignorant of the limits within which the conclusions of human beings on such subjects must be confined. This irenicon involved him in controversies that lasted for years. A host of angry polemics assailed the book. A now forgotten John Edwards was conspicuous among them. Locke produced a Vindication which added fuel to the fire, and was followed by a Second Vindication in 1697. Notes of opposition to the Essay too had been heard almost as soon as it appeared. John Norris, the metaphysical rector of Bemerton, an English disciple of Malebranche, criticized it in certain Cursory Reflexions in 1690. Locke took no notice of this at the time, but his second winter at Oates was partly employed in writing what appeared after his death as an Examination of Malebranche's Opinion of Seeing all Things in God, and as Remarks upon some of Mr Norris's Books, tracts which throw important light upon his own theory, or rather want of theory, as to perception through the senses. When he was examining Malebranche he was also preparing the Essay for a second edition, and corresponding with his friend William Molyneux at Dublin about amendments in it. This edition, with a chapter added on "Personal Identity," and numerous alterations in the chapter on "Power," appeared in 1695. It was followed by a third, which was only a reprint, later in the same year. Wynne's well-known abridgment in that year helped to make the book known in Oxford, and Molyneux had years before introduced it in Dublin. In 1695 a return to questions about the currency diverted Locke's attention for a little from metaphysics and theology. Circumstances in that year gave occasion to his tract entitled Observations on Silver Money and also to his Further Considerations on Raising the Value of Money.
In 1696 Locke was induced to accept a commissionership on the Board of Trade, which made frequent visits to London needful in the four following years, and involved him considerably in the cares of office. Meantime the Essay on Human Understanding and the Reasonableness of Christianity were both becoming more involved in the wordy warfare between dogmatists and latitudinarians, trinitarians and Unitarians, of which England was the scene in the last decade of the 17th century. The controversy with Edwards was followed by another with Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester, which takes its place among the memorable philosophical controversies of the modern world. It arose in this way. John Toland, an Irishman, in his Christianity not Mysterious, had exaggerated some passages in the Essay, and then adopted the opinions as his own. In the autumn of 1696, Stillingfleet, who was a learned and argumentative ecclesiastic more than a religious philosopher, in a Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity wrote some pages on Locke, condemning him especially for eliminating mystery from human knowledge in his account of what is meant by "substance." Locke replied in a Letter dated January 1697. Stillingfleet's rejoinder appeared in May, followed by a Second Letter from Locke in August, to which the bishop replied in the following year. Locke's elaborate Third Letter, in which the ramifications of the controversy are pursued with a tedious expenditure of acute reasoning and polished irony, was delayed till 1699. The death of Stillingfleet in that year brought this famous trial of strength to an end. (The interesting episode of Molyneux's visit to Oates, followed by his death a few days after his return to Dublin, occurred in 1698, when the Stillingfleet controversy was at its height.) Other critics were now entering the lists against the Essay. One of the ablest was John Sergeant, a, Catholic priest, in his Solid Philosophy Asserted Against the Fancies of the Ideists, in 1697. He was followed by Thomas Burnet and Dean Sherlock. Henry Lee, rector of Tichmarch, produced in 1702 a folio volume of notes on each chapter in the Essay, under the title of Anti-Scepticism; John Broughton dealt another blow in his Psychologia in the following year. About the same time too John Norris returned to the attack, in various passages in his Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World. Locke was defended with vigour by Samuel Bolde, a Dorsetshire
