LIBERTY, TYRANNY AND THE WILL OF GOD: THE PRINCIPLE OF TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND COLONIAL INDIA Jakob De Roover1 & S.N. Balagangadhara2Abstract: Early modern political thought transformed toleration from a prudential
consideration into a moral obligation. Three questions need to be answered by any
explanation of this transition: Did religious toleration really become an obligation of
the state in this period? If this was the case, how could tolerating heresy and idolatry
possibly become a moral duty to Christians? How could Europeans both condemn
practices as idolatrous and immoral, and yet insist that these practices ought to be tol-
erated? To answer these questions, the article shows how the early policy of toleration
in British India was constituted by a Protestant theological framework. Toleration
turned into a moral obligation, it is argued, because the Reformation had identified lib-
erty in the religious realm as God’s will for humanity. This gave rise to a dynamic in
which Christian states and churches were continuously challenged for their violations
of religious liberty. The principle of toleration developed as a part of this dynamic.
Much is written on the rise of toleration in early modern Europe.3 This vast
body of scholarship raises an important issue: Did religious toleration become
a moral value during this period and, if yes, why? After all, one could and did
defend the attitude of toleration as a modus vivendi on various pragmatic
grounds. However, this pragmatic stance attained the status of a normative
value during this period. How did this transition come into being? Why did
people start arguing that toleration is a universal duty of all states? How could
it become a moral obligation of even those colonial states which ruled over
1 Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO), Flanders. Email:
2 Research Centre, Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Apotheek-
3 The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic, ed. C. Berkvens-Stevelinck,
J.I. Israel and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden, 1997); J. Coffey, Persecution andToleration in Protestant England, 1588–1689 (London, 2000); Tolerance and Intoler-ance in the European Reformation, ed. O.P. Grell and B. Scribner (Cambridge, 1996);
John Locke: A Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus, ed. J. Horton and S. Mendus
(London and New York, 1991); W.K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Tolerationin England (4 vols., 1932–40; repr. Gloucester, MA, 1965); H. Kamen, The Rise of Tol-eration (London, 1967); B. Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Prac-tice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007); J. Lecler, Histoirede la Tolérance au Siècle de la Réforme (2 vols., Paris, 1955); J. Marshall, John Locke,Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006); Calvinism and Reli-gious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. van Nierop (Cam-
bridge, 2002); R. Vernon, The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and AfterHISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXX. No. 1. Spring 2009
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
‘devil worshippers’ elsewhere? We shall address the last question with the
hope that, in the process, some light can be shed on the first two. The Birth of Toleration: Problems and Puzzles
The rise of the modern theories of toleration is a puzzle for students of history.
The puzzle is about the nature of toleration in these theories: toleration is a
moral value and cultivating tolerance in society is a moral duty on the part of
both citizens and state. Before the rise of this normative conception, it is not as
though tolerance did not exist, either in the West or elsewhere.4 In Ancient
Rome, for instance, religious tolerance was a matter of prudence. Because of
the uncertainty in affairs human, many felt it was wise to allow different
religiones to flourish in the Roman Empire. With the emergence of Christian-
ity as the state religion, toleration of certain practices gradually became a
modus vivendi because the stability of civil society was at stake.
The modern theories of toleration add a new dimension to the debate: the
moral obligation to tolerate things different. Quite obviously, we are not
claiming that prudential considerations and modus vivendi arguments are
absent. But the additional normative component in this debate needs empha-
sis, because it is not in evidence before the Protestant Reformation. The need
for such an emphasis becomes obvious if we look at how the rise of liberal tol-
The textbook histories advance the claim that the principle of toleration
arose from a discovery made during the Wars of Religion: it was irrational to
impose one religion on a society. A respected historian of Western philosophy
The centuries of warfare following the Reformation that split Western
Christianity into Catholic and Protestant versions taught a harsh lesson.
Without compulsion there will never be uniformity in public religious pro-
fession, and even with compulsion there will never be agreement in belief.
Persuasion never convinces everyone, and compulsion, it seems, does not
work in the long run. Toleration . . . seems to be the only way to avoid con-
stant warfare. In Western liberal democratic societies toleration is now
Charles Taylor agrees that the origin point of modern secularism and toler-
ation lies in the search in battle fatigue and horror for a way out of the Wars of
4 This point is argued in Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious TolerationBefore the Enlightenment, ed. J.C. Laursen and C.J. Nederman (Philadelphia, 1998).
5 J.B. Schneewind, ‘Bayle, Locke, and the Concept of Toleration’, in Philosophy,Religion, and the Question of Intolerance, ed. M. Razavi and D. Ambuel (Albany, 1997),
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Religion.6 Or, in the words of a key reference work: ‘It took a good deal of
pious killing before toleration gained widespread acceptance in Europe. Bat-
tle fatigue presented the state with an opportunity to rise above divisive con-
flict and focus on the pursuit of shared interests and aims, such as peace,
freedom, and material prosperity.’7 The suggestion is that intellectuals and
rulers in early modern Europe were horrified and exhausted by decades of
religious warfare. This brought them to the conclusion that uniformity in
belief could no longer be imposed either through compulsion or through per-
suasion. Hence, the principle of toleration was born.
This explanation contains several difficulties. First, it is tricky to maintain
that the duration of a religious conflict generally has a salutary effect on its
future course. Contemporary cases like the Middle East and Northern Ireland
suggest the contrary. Second, even if true, this account does not answer the
following questions: How could the Christian societies of Europe conclude
that toleration was a normative value or moral obligation? Given that Chris-
tianity saw heresy and idolatry as violations of God’s will, how could some of
the brightest Christian minds argue that religious dissent ought to be tolerated
universally? As believers held that human beings lived to obey the divine law,
how did they justify the claim that it was a moral duty to accommodate prima
Besides these two difficulties, other problems emerge if we look at the cog-
nitive demands put on any account that appeals to battle fatigue. The first pos-
sibility is to treat this account as a contingent argument: in this era, in this
place, battle fatigue resulted in the emergence of toleration. If ad hoc argu-
ments are inadmissible in historical explanations, the only choice open to us is
to treat it as a contrastive explanation: in this place and era, battle fatigue led
to toleration whereas the same did not do so elsewhere because . . . The suit-
ably filled out ellipsis would be the contrastive explanation that one looks for.
Unfortunately, we do not know what constitutes historical evidence for battle
fatigue. The evidence could consist of explicit claims from some period that
people are tired of wars, or of multiple sermons preaching the need for peace,
or various meetings and demonstrations of people petitioning for the end of
war. If we accept these ‘facts’ as evidence, we should also say that the battle in
Northern Ireland, the involvement of Britain in the Iraqi war, and the struggle
between Palestinians and Israelis have generated ‘battle fatigue’ in their
respective populace. Despite this fatigue, wars have persisted in all these
places. If one wants to avoid being ad hoc, one has to explain why in one era
battle fatigue led to toleration but fails to do so in another. Without such a
6 C. Taylor, ‘Modes of Secularism’, in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. R. Bhargava
(New Delhi, 1998), pp. 31–53, p. 32.
7 Stephen Macedo, ‘Toleration and Fundamentalism’, in A Companion to Contempo-rary Political Philosophy, ed. R.E. Goodin and P. Pettit (Oxford and Cambridge, MA,
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
contrastive explanation, no account of the emergence of toleration on grounds
The second possibility is to take these explanations as enunciations of a
general law: when battle fatigue emerges, then religious wars end. Such an
explanation is either trivial or false. It becomes trivial: ‘people stop fighting
because they do not fight anymore’. People do not fight anymore because
people do not want to fight any more; and the refusal to fight gets dubbed as
‘battle fatigue’. This is no explanation, but almost a tautology. Not quite a tau-
tology either, because it presupposes the following psychological ‘law’ as
true: when people do not do something, then this is because they do not feel
like doing that any more. This law is trivially false. Therefore, no matter how
we look at this explanation, we cannot trace toleration to battle fatigue.
Political or economic considerations also fail to explain the emergence of
tolerance as a moral value. Some Christians did argue that it was more prudent
to tolerate heretics and idolaters than to face civil strife. Such prudential con-
siderations provide us with hypothetical imperatives of the following form: if
one desires x then one should do y. However, toleration as a value is an uncon-
ditional moral obligation; it is not just prudential. In fact, one might use any
number of pragmatic strategies to put an end to religious conflicts. Why
should one invent the unconditional norm of toleration — a categorical
imperative — to be obeyed everywhere and at all times?8 Here, battle fatigue
or political and economic causes will not do as answers.
Right up to the sixteenth century, toleration of heretics was a temporary
expedient at best. Catholic theologians and canon lawyers conceived
tolerantia as non-interference in certain immoral acts (like prostitution) and
with Judaic worship in order to prevent greater evils: adultery, rape and force-
ful conversion.9 During the Reformation, irenic thinkers like Erasmus consid-
ered that granting civil tolerance to the different Christian ‘sects’ was a
judicious step in avoiding civil war. This was to be a transient phase in the res-
toration of Christian unity.10 The Politiques in France and elsewhere provided
an independent temporal purpose to the state, which should not be subordi-
8 Richard Tuck has shown the connection between scepticism and the rise of tolera-
tion as a moral principle to be untenable. Seventeenth-century sceptics ‘would have
agreed that there are not, and could not be, grounds for enforcing one’s own beliefs upon
another simply because of the nature of those beliefs’, but would add that ‘beliefs could
be enforced upon unwilling subjects for pragmatic or political reasons’. R. Tuck, ‘Scepti-
cism and Toleration in the Seventeenth Century’, in Justifying Toleration: Conceptualand Historical Perspectives, ed. S. Mendus (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 31–60, p. 35.
9 I. Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas, LVIII
10 Lecler, Histoire de la Tolérance, Vol. 1, p. 138; N.M. Sutherland, ‘Persecution and
Toleration in Reformation Europe’, in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J. Sheils
(Oxford, 1984), pp. 153–61, p. 153.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
nated to the demands of religious unity.11 None of these groups perceived tol-
eration as a moral ideal. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century,
however, several thinkers began to argue that religious toleration was the duty
of all states, and that the liberty of conscience was the right of all individuals.
How could this normative stance materialize in this age?
The normative aspect raises an interesting issue. The weights of different
components in the toleration debate were reordered: the prudential and prag-
matic arguments were cognitively subordinated to the normative component.
That is to say, in the public discourse about toleration, there was a discernible
change: whatever their individual motives, most authors were constrained to
defend toleration on normative grounds. The moral principle has priority over
any other consideration. In this sense, toleration becomes a moral obligation.
Of course, this does not suggest that the Western liberal democracies are
always tolerant; one merely says that they ought to be. This ‘ought’ is a moral
‘ought’ instead of being just a prudential or hypothetical ‘ought’.
How can one show that the liberal states of Europe operated under a moral
obligation of toleration, when all we have to go by is the writings of some
thinkers? Naturally, one could point out the failure of these states to be toler-
ant in some cases; such facts do not prove the absence of a norm of toleration.
Which other facts could prove its presence?
If in their public discourse, state officials take recourse to some or another
normative principle of toleration, then, clearly, they are expressing a moral
obligation to act in some particular way. Whatever they might say in their pri-
vate correspondences or letters (which tell us about the psychological motives
of the individual in question), we need to see whether they appeal to norma-
tive principles in their public defence (where they present their official or
public face to the world) of the attitude of toleration. We will look for such
evidence in British India. Why British India?
By the end of the eighteenth century, the moral stance regarding heresy and
paganism that had emerged among certain groups in Europe also cropped up
in the colonies. The Hindu religion and the caste system were said to consti-
tute an ‘evil tyranny’. Both missionaries and Orientalists agreed that the Brah-
min priests cloaked their human fabrications as divine revelations and, to
satisfy their own desires, manipulated the ignorant believers.12 Yet, the Orien-
talists, much to the dismay of the missionaries, argued that the British ought to
tolerate religious practices of the Hindus. At the dawn of the Raj, the rulers
endorsed this claim. Religious toleration became a guiding moral principle of
11 H. Butterfield, ‘Toleration in Early Modern Times’, Journal of the History ofIdeas, XXXVIII (1977), pp. 573–84.
12 R. Gelders and W. Derde, ‘Mantras of Anti-Brahmanism: Colonial Experience of
Indian Intellectuals’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXXVIII (2003), pp. 4611–17.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
This belief in the moral value of toleration contains a prima facie inconsis-
tency. Most, if not all, British colonials in this period were Protestant believ-
ers. Even though they belonged to different denominations, they shared: (1) a
broadly Protestant interpretation of the Bible that looked at it as the revelation
of God’s will; (2) the belief that this will was the divine law that ought to be
obeyed by all human creatures; (3) therefore, the conviction that, as a Chris-
tian, it was one’s duty to persuade other human beings to submit themselves to
the divine law.13 Minimally, this implied that one should prevent violations of
the law of God, when in a position to do so. The British colonials also agreed
that Hindu practices and beliefs violated God’s law. From this, it seems to fol-
low that, wherever the authorities could do so, they ought to have prevented
idolatry. Given Christian restrictions on forced conversion, the state could
perhaps not eradicate Hindu beliefs; but it ought to have prevented their
practice. Yet, a large group of administrators and scholars not only argued
that the Hindu practices and beliefs ought to be tolerated but even made Hindu
law into the foundation of colonial jurisdiction.14 How to understand this
Some writings on the Indian Empire acknowledged this quandary explic-
itly: ‘Is it impossible to be faithful to our highest obligations, while at the
same time we exhibit perfect toleration towards all systems of religious belief
besides our own?’15 The colonial belief in religious toleration, thus, seems to
entail a prima facie inconsistency. How could these educated minds hold on
to the following two positions at the same time? (a) Christian believers ought
to persuade humanity to comply with God’s will. (b) The colonial state ought
to tolerate violations of His will and its Christian governors and citizens ought
to grant freedom to those who violate the same.
To sum up, any hypothesis about the emergence of the principle of tolera-
tion in modern Europe and its colonies has to answer the questions: (1)
whether religious toleration really became a moral obligation in this period;
(2) if this was the case, how tolerating heresy and idolatry could possibly
become a moral obligation to Christian thinkers and movements; and
(3) how European colonials could both condemn certain religious practices as
13 In the preface to the Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), the Orientalist Nathaniel B.
Halhed writes about the confidential reliance ‘which we put in the Divine Text upon the
authority of its Divine Inspirer himself’; while Sir William Jones describes England as ‘a
country happily enlightened by sound philosophy and the only true revelation’. N.B.
Halhed, A Code of Gentoo Laws or, Ordinations of the Pundits, ed. M.J. Franklin (1776,
repr. London and New York, 2000), p. xiii. W. Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law or, theOrdinances of Menu, ed. M.J. Franklin (1798, repr. London and New York, 2000), p. xvi.
14 B.S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi,
15 G.F. Laclear, The Christian Statesman and Our Indian Empire (Cambridge,
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
immoral and idolatrous, and yet make the case that these practices ought to be
The Liberty of Hindu Tyranny
Was toleration perceived as a moral obligation by the British officials in
India? The first governor-general of Bengal, Warren Hastings, introduced
religious toleration as the official policy and informal temper of British rule.16
This entailed that one tolerated, studied and even endorsed the beliefs, prac-
tices and laws of the Hindu population. The dominant explanations of this
situation run along two lines. On the one hand, the debates about the colonial
policy expressed the concern that the subordinated population would unite
and overthrow British rule if it failed to accept indigenous customs.17 On the
other hand, this has been linked to the power-knowledge nexus in the colonial
state: the British desired to know the Hindu beliefs, laws and customs and
sanctioned the same in order to secure colonial power and its economic bene-
fits.18 In other words, political and economic expediency constitute the main
explanation of the British policy of toleration.
This explanation often takes the following form.19 When the East India
Company became a governing power on the subcontinent, two major policy
decisions were made: (a) to exclude the settlement of British civilians, so as
to avoid antagonizing the natives and creating a troublesome settler power;
and (b) to continue government protection of Indian religions and ban
evangelization by Christian missionaries. With these measures, it is said, the
British intended to placate the natives and prevent rebellion. In doing so, the
Company took on the role of Muslim and Hindu rulers before them.
16 P. Spear, The Oxford History of Modern India 1740–1975 (New Delhi, 1965),
17 W. Hastings, ‘Minute of Evidence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence — British Parlia-mentary Papers, Vol. 4 (1812–13) (Shannon, 1968), pp. 1–8; T. Munro, ‘Minute of Evi-
dence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence — British Parliamentary Papers, Vol. 4,
pp. 121–34; Teignmouth, ‘Minute of Evidence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence — BritishParliamentary Papers, Vol. 4, pp. 9–20.
18 Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 57–75; N.B. Dirks, The Scan-dal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp.
209–24; E.F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795–1895
(Delhi, 1994); L. Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998); Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, ‘Introduction’, in
The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-AnglicistControversy, 1781–1843 (Richmond, 1999), pp. 1–72.
19 See Penny Carson, ‘The British Raj and the Awakening of Evangelical Con-
science: The Ambiguities of Religious Establishment and Toleration, 1698–1833’, in
Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, ed. Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001),
pp. 45–70; Dirks, The Scandal of Empire, pp. 209–24, p. 298. For an overview of the his-
torical developments, see Sir John W. Kaye, Christianity in India: An Historical Narra-tive (London, 1859), pp. 366–96.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
A regulation framed by Lord Cornwallis and Sir George Barlow in 1793
stated that ‘the regulations which may be adopted for the internal government
of the country will be calculated to preserve to [the natives] the laws of the
Shastre and the Koran in matters to which they have been invariably applied’,
and also ‘to protect them in the free exercise of their religion’.20 The domestic
sphere was specifically put off-limits. An Act of Parliament declared that ‘in
order that due regard may be had to the civil and religious usages of the
natives, be it enacted that the rights and authorities of fathers of families and
masters of families, according as the same may be exercised by the Gentoo or
Mahomedan law, shall be preserved to them within their families respec-
tively’.21 Several scholars have noted that the British rulers, in creating a
Hindu and a Muslim family law, were following the English circumstance, in
which marriage and inheritance fell under Anglican Church law and not par-
There are two kinds of problems with this explanation. The first is that it
does not answer the question we raise, which is not about explaining how or
why tolerance had a pragmatic value to the East India Company. Surely, the
sources of the period show that such arguments played a role in the develop-
ment of its policy. The first two Orientalists who compiled the Hindu legal
code, Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones, invoked the many benefits of
allowing the subjects to live by the laws ‘which they have been taught to
believe sacred’.23 Hastings, the patron of these scholars, shared their notions
of expediency. However, this is nothing new. Our question is this: why did
toleration become an unconditional moral obligation during this period?
Here, arguments from political expediency do not help. After all, such argu-
ments existed in Europe for centuries on end without toleration assuming the
Secondly, the above explanation begs the question. The British looked for
justifications for the practices of the Indians in their ‘religious texts’. In fact,
they searched feverishly for scriptural sanctions even for practices that their
own religion condemned. They did not merely follow the practice of the ear-
lier Muslim rulers; they tried to identify the Hindu scriptures, codify them and
build laws around them. In other words, scriptural foundations played a nor-
mative role in justifying colonial toleration. By appealing to the Hindu texts,
the British provided a normative justification for the laws they enacted. Why
resort to such justifications unless they felt that they had to justify their tolera-
20 Kaye, Christianity in India, pp. 374–5.
22 J.D.M. Derrett, Religion, Law, and the State in India (London, 1968), pp. 233–7.
R.W. Lariviere, ‘Justices and Panditas: Some Ironies in Contemporary Readings of the
Hindu Legal Past’, The Journal of Asian Studies, XLVIII (1989), pp. 757–69.
23 Jones, Institutes, p. xvi. See also Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, p. xi.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
We will take the colonial policies with respect to Indian practices like sati,
the self-immolation of widows, in order to demonstrate that toleration had
indeed become a moral obligation. We deliberately focus on this practice,
which was soon to be banned in colonial India, because there was never a
moment of doubt in the British minds that it was inhuman and that it violated
God’s will. Yet, instead of banning it straightaway, the administrators looked
for justifications of this practice in the so-called sacred scriptures of Indian
religion. By the end of the eighteenth century, most colonials thought of sati
as the most detestable precept of the system of Hindu law. Nevertheless, until
Lord William Bentinck, governor-general of India, decided to abolish it in
1829, the colonial government tolerated the practice.24
The question whether or not sati was a religious practice was central to the
British colonial discourse about the burning of widows. Was it a part of the
sacred law of the Hindu religion or was it a purely civil custom? In the second
half of the eighteenth century, Halhed had ridiculed Alexander Dow, author
of an early dissertation on the Hindus, for his denial that sati was a religious
duty of Hindu widows.25 The same issue would soon be raised by the collec-
tors and magistrates in Bengal, since it had been claimed that the native reli-
gion should be tolerated. From 1789 onwards, these officials noted that the
‘rites and superstitions of the Hindoo religion should be allowed with the
most unqualified tolerance’, but asked for special instructions with regard to
‘a practice at which human nature shudders’ like sati.26
The nizamat adalat or provincial court was requested by the government
‘to ascertain . . . by means of a reference to the pundits’, how far the practice
of sati was ‘founded in the religious opinions of the Hindoos’.27 All agreed
that the practice ‘horrid and revolting even as a voluntary one, should be pro-
hibited and entirely abolished’.28 Still, in 1812, the government noted that the
pundits had concluded that sati was part of Hindu law:
The practice, generally speaking, being thus recognized and encouraged by
the doctrines of the Hindoo religion, it appears evident that the course24 For a postcolonial analysis see Mani, Contentious Traditions. Andrea Major
shows greater awareness of the role of the European background in the colonial debate in
her Pious Flames: European Encounters with Sati 1500–1830 (New Delhi, 2006).
25 Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, pp. xlvi–xlvii, lxx–lxxi. A. Dow, ‘A Dissertation
concerning the Customs, Manners, Language, Religion and Philosophy of the Hindoos’,
in The British Discovery of Hinduism, ed. P.J. Marshall (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 107–39,
26 Letter from the Collector of Shahabad (M.H. Brooke), to Charles Earl Cornwallis,
Governor General in Council, Fort William, in British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter
BPP) 1821, Vol. 18, p. 22. See pp. 22–4 for other examples.
27 ‘Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, 7th February 1805’, in BPP 1821, Vol. 18,
28 ‘Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, 5th December 1812’, in BPP 1821, Vol.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
which the British government should follow, according to the principle of
religious toleration already noticed, is to allow the practice in those cases in
which it is countenanced by their religion; and to prevent it in others in
which it is by the same authority prohibited.29
In official government discourse, the following was clear: where local
customs deviated from ‘the Shaster’ or the sacred texts, the latter had prece-
dence and these customs ought to be abolished. Even though awareness of
the regional variations in this matter existed, the colonial state did not system-
atically try to find out whether local Hindus really considered sati to be an
important practice. Some individual magistrates did do so. The official stance,
however, revolved around the issue of scriptural sanctions: the pundits were
asked whether in ‘case of . . . a widow’s burning herself with the corpse of her
deceased husband, are any and what rules prescribed by the Shasters for the
manner in which the rite is to be performed?’.30
Similar questions were raised about other practices, such as the burying
alive of those who suffered from severe leprosy, of which it was determined
that ‘in the case of Hindoos it . . . is countenanced and enjoined by their reli-
gion’.31 Therefore, the practice had to be allowed. However, the same was
denied to infanticide, child sacrifice and the practice of women of the ‘joogee
cast who have buried themselves alive with their husbands’. While the latter
practice appeared to have ‘been established among themselves time immemo-
rial’, it was abolished by colonial law, because it was ‘not tolerated by the
Shaster’.32 In such cases the customs of native subjects were not to be
respected, even if abolition of a practice might lead to dismay. This indicates
how prudence fails to explain the toleration policy of the British, since this
would entail allowing any practice which was established ‘time immemorial’
among the natives. Rather, the search for scriptural sanction suggests that one
aimed to give a moral foundation to the policy of toleration.33
29 ‘To the Register of the Nizamut Adawlut’ (5th December 1812, signed by
G. Dowdeswell, chief secretary to government), in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, p. 31.
30 ‘Translation of certain Questions proposed to the Hindoo Law Officers of the
Sudder Dewanny Adawlut, regarding the burning of Widows, &c. and their Replies in
conformity with the authorities current in Bengal and Benares’, in BPP 1821, Vol. 18,
31 ‘Extract from the Report of the Criminal Cases adjudged by the Court of Nizamut
Adawlut, in the year 1810’, in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, p. 26.
32 Letter from Searman Bird, senior judge and J. Rattray, 2d judge at Dacca to
M.H. Turnbull, esq. Register to the Nizamut Adawlut, Fort William (19th August 1816),
in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, p. 101. See also the regulation on pp. 126–31.
33 See Mani, Contentious Traditions, p. 15 for a typical explanation of the toleration
of sati as a pragmatic measure. As a correction, read Major, Pious Flames, pp. 186–98,
which acknowledges the importance of the moral principle of toleration in the colonial
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Though prudential considerations had a role to play, in the first decades of
the nineteenth century the debate on sati is replete with normative reasoning.
This is equally clear in the writings of those officials who opposed sati. They
shared two major concerns with the advocates of toleration: the scriptural
foundation of the practice and the voluntary nature of the act. The acting
superintendent of police of the Lower Provinces, Walter Ewer, desired to
undermine one of the justifications for toleration when he wrote that ‘there are
many reasons for thinking that such an event, as a voluntary suttee, very rarely
occurs’ and ‘that the widow is scarcely ever a free agent at the performance of
a suttee’. Instead, he suggested, the widow was the victim of ‘the surrounding
crowd of hungry brahmins and interested relations’. Since sati was not a vol-
untary act but a priestly imposition, Ewer suggested, the religious liberty of
Hindu widows was not at stake. Hence, the toleration of this cruel practice
became immoral. Next, Ewer turned to the question of scriptural sanction.
Even though some texts recommend it, he pointed out, Manu and other
authorities of great respectability do not and the act ‘is nowhere enjoined by
any of the Shasters’. Besides, the practice ‘may be almost called local’ and
therefore it could hardly be part of the Hindu religion and its sacred law.34
Both the government regulations and most replies to Ewer’s letters left no
doubt as to the official adherence to the ‘fundamental’ and ‘invariable princi-
ple of the British government to protect the whole of its subjects in the free
exercise of their religion, and in the performance of their religious ceremo-
nies’.35 Those who agreed with Ewer simply tried to amplify his attack against
the normative arguments for tolerating sati.36 Later, the official debate in the
Bombay Presidency invoked more or less the same set of arguments pro and
contra toleration. So did the disputes in popular journals and pamphlets.
In 1822, for instance, sati became the subject of a lively polemic in the
Asiatic Journal. A letter claimed that ‘almost all of the poor females who are
insidiously immolated to promote the views of priestcraft and self-interest,
are previously stupified and intoxicated by drugs, and do not offer themselves
a willing sacrifice’ and also denied the scriptural sanctions.37 Abolition was
the only just policy towards the practice, the author argued, as had been the
case for infanticide and child sacrifice. Another letter written in reply to these
34 Letter from W. Ewer, Acting Superintendent of Police in the Lower Provinces to
W.B. Bayley, esq. Secretary to Government in the Judicial Department (Calcutta,
18th November 1818), in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, pp. 227–9.
35 ‘A Regulation for maintaining an observance of the Restrictions prescribed by the
Shaster in the burning of Hindoo Widows on the Funeral Piles of their Husbands, or oth-
erwise’, in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, p. 126. See pp. 232–40 for the replies to Ewer.
36 See the letter from E. Molony, acting magistrate at Zillah Burdwan, to W. Ewer,
esq. Acting Superintendent of Police, Lower Provinces, Fort William (Zillah Burdwan,
14th December 1818), in BPP 1821, Vol. 18, p. 235.
37 J. MacDonald, ‘On the Hindoo Laws Respecting the Burning of Widows’, AsiaticJournal, XIII (March 1822), pp. 220–6.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
claims questioned the legitimacy of the comparison and restated the reasons
. . . [I]t is solely because the burning of widows has its foundation, whether
erroneously or not, in the religion of the country, that the British laws do not
and ought not to interfere. Infanticide, however, practised in India, has no
sanction from any one of its systems of religion, but, on the contrary, is
abhorred and repudiated by them all. It is simply a civil act, and is, there-
fore, cognizable by simply civil or temporal laws; but the burning of wid-
ows is a spiritual and religious act (however detestable), and therefore only
out of the reach of that code of criminal law which the British nation has
Yet, the normative grounds for the toleration of sati gradually crumbled. In
1823, the Court of Directors of the East India Company wrote from London to
the Bengal Judicial Department that they were ‘averse . . . to the practice of
making British courts expounders and vindicators of the Hindoo religion,
when it leads to acts which, not less as legislators than as Christians, we abom-
From England, the pressure for abolition of sati would grow stronger by the
year. As the moral justifications lost their weight, the advocates of toleration
emphasized arguments from expediency: government interference would
induce alienation and disorder and create a potential uprising. But the oppo-
nents easily countered this point: the British government and its legal appara-
tus had violated a central tenet of the Hindu religion like the sanctity of
Brahmins (by allowing the death penalty for Brahmins) and this had not cre-
ated any significant disorder. The same went for the legal abolition of child
sacrifice and other customs. Besides, the practice was local rather than univer-
sal and its popularity limited to specific groups.40 Eventually, Lord Bentinck
would abolish sati in 1829. By that time, the Bengalis had themselves adopted
the normative language of toleration: a petition objected that the abolition
infringed upon a sacred duty of Hindu widows and was therefore ‘an unjust
and intolerant dictation in matters of conscience’.41
It is not our aim to chronicle the career of the practice or of the colonial atti-
tudes towards it. Rather, what interests us is the delayed banning of practices
like sati and the public manner in which such practices were banned.
38 E.A. Kendall, ‘On the Burning of Hindoo Widows’, Asiatic Journal, XIII (May
39 Letter from the Court of Directors to the Bengal Judicial Department, Lower Prov-
inces (London, 17th June 1823), in BPP 1824, Vol. 24, p. 45.
40 See BPP 1825, Vol. 24, pp. 13, 20–6; and BPP 1826–7, Vol. 20, pp. 4, 28–30. See
also ‘Our Indian Empire’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, LXXX (1856),
41 ‘The Petition of the orthodox Hindu community of Calcutta against the Suttee
Regulation’, in Raja Rammohun Roy and Progressive Movements in India, ed. J.K.
Majumdar (repr. New Delhi, 1988), pp. 156–63, p. 156.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Invariably, the attempt was to locate the ‘sacred law texts’ of the Indians and
to seek either justification or condemnation there. Why? This question cannot
be answered by the claim that ‘the project of the colonial state . . . sought to
develop an exact science of ruling, which was, in turn, dependent on precise
knowledges’ and ‘a uniformly applicable law’.42 Other governments in India
had neither needed such a uniformly applicable law nor looked for it in the
Hindu ‘sacred texts’. To add that this had to do with ‘the conception of
textuality’43 of the Europeans merely shifts the question: whence this concep-
tion which compelled them to identify strict moral laws in Hindu texts?
Though true, the argument from familiarity, which suggests that the British
were familiar with the significance of ecclesiastical law and scriptural inter-
pretation in England, also fails as an answer. What were the British familiar
with? They held the idea of an ‘ancient law giver’ or ‘greatest legislator’ who
prescribed the moral rules that a religious community ought to follow. In
Manu, the British thought they had found such a ‘law giver’ — the Hindu
equivalent of what Moses was to the Jews and Mohammed to the Muslims.44
In his texts, so to speak, they tried to discern the fundamental moral laws that
Indians obeyed or ought to obey. They also codified this text, because the
basic moral obligations of the Hindu religion and its followers had to be
In short, the British argued that, if certain practices belonged to the ancient
religious laws of the Hindus, the colonial state had a moral obligation to toler-
ate them. Irrespective of individual motives, the formulation of colonial poli-
cies appealed to these laws. This suggests that the normative dimension had
been added to the public discourse about toleration. It had become a norma-
tive principle to the colonial state in British India. In other words, the colonial
policies provide evidence that toleration had indeed turned into a moral obli-
Throughout the nineteenth century, sources from colonial India confirmed
that it was seen as such. In 1814, an official government document stated that
the transfer of power from native to European agency had rendered it incum-
bent upon the colonials, ‘from motives of policy as well as from a principle of
42 Mani, Contentious Traditions, pp. 36–9.
44 The Europeans had looked for such an ancient lawgiver long before they learned
about and translated the Manusmrti. At first, they believed to have found him in
‘Bremaw’ or Brahma, e.g. H. Lord, A Discoverie of the Banian Religion (London, 1630),
pp. 40–5, where it is described how the ‘Banians’ believed that God communicated reli-
gion (or His law) to the world by a book delivered to Bremaw, which was named ‘the
Shaster’. A few of the many citations on Manu as the ancient lawgiver: BPP 1823, Vol.
17, p. 103; Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law, pp. iii–iv, xvi; J. Kaye, The Suppression ofHuman Sacrifice, Suttee, and Female Infanticide (London and Madras, 1898), p. 22;
MacDonald, ‘On the Hindoo Laws’, p. 222; J. Peggs, India’s Cries to British Humanity
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
justice, to consult the feelings, and even yield to the prejudices, of the natives,
whenever it can be done with safety to our dominions’.45 The editors of an
Anglo-Marathi missionary periodical argued as follows in 1846: ‘The tolera-
tion of the various systems of religion by the British Government in this coun-
try is . . . not merely good policy; it is the course which every Christian
Government is in duty bound to pursue’.46 In 1859, a historical narrative of
sixty years of colonial rule in India stated: ‘What was held to be the duty of the
Government was the practice of general toleration towards all the religions
professed by the people under their rule, permitting every man, without
restraint and without interference, to worship his God, true or false, in his own
Our answer is incomplete. The analysis of the colonial debate on toleration
underscores the main puzzle: how could Christians insist that it was a moral
duty to tolerate religious practices that, so they believed, constituted viola-
tions of God’s law? How could toleration have become a moral obligation in
Christian Europe? The analysis also puts restrictions on the potential answers,
since these should be able to explain why the colonial state was convinced that
it ought to tolerate a practice if this had its foundations in the Hindu religious
scriptures. For the reasons stated above, the prudential claim that Hindus were
more attached to religious practices and would rebel against interference fails
Instead, we need to look into the early modern European debates on tolera-
tion. A paper published in the Baptist missionary publication Friend of India
of March 1821 acknowledged the European roots of the controversy, when it
suggested that ‘female immolation’ was ‘a practice cognizable by the civil
power, though sheltered beneath the mantle of religion’. It turned to John
Locke’s letters concerning toleration in order to argue that the moment ‘a
purely religious rite . . . infringes on the laws of society, its character is
changed, and is transformed into a civil crime’. Locke was quoted as saying
that the magistrate ‘ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any
speculative opinions in any church, because they have no manner of relation
to the civil rights of the subject; for it does not belong unto the magistrate to
make use of his sword in punishing every thing indifferently which he takes to
be his sin against God’. To the question of whether this allowed child sacrifice
or similar crimes in a religious assembly, Locke answered that such ‘things
are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house, and
45 ‘Court of Directors’ Public Department dispatch to the governor-general in coun-
cil of Fort William in Bengal, dated 3 June 1814’, in The Great Indian Education Debate,
ed. Zastoupil and Moir, pp. 93–7, p. 94.
46 Anonymous, ‘Toleration of False Religions’, The Dnyanodaya, 15 December
47 Kaye, Christianity in India, pp. 367, 375.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
therefore neither are they so in the worship of God’.48 The distinction between
religious and civil practices seemed self-evident to Locke and so did the claim
that the former ought to be allowed freely, while the latter ought to be pun-
ished if immoral. To make sense of this perspective and solve our puzzle, we
need to turn to the background which had shaped Locke’s views on the matter. Religious Liberty and Its Realm
The principle of toleration lays down an unconditional duty that the state or
the individual ought to be tolerant. The conclusion is normative in nature. For
this to happen, a normative premise has to be added to the chain of arguments.
From a purely pragmatic or prudential argument, it is logically impossible to
derive an unconditional moral obligation.49 The logical relationship between
factual premises and normative conclusions puts constraints on any explana-
tion for the emergence of the normative dimension in the toleration debates.
No socio-economic or political explanation, which refers to facts only, can
explain the presence of a normative premise or its acceptance by the parties in
the debate. Instead, one has to look for a background framework containing
One route is to trace this normative dimension in the writings of the chief
thinkers of the Western tradition and argue that it trickled down to other layers
of society. This is a variant of the ‘genius theory’, which portrays the idea of
toleration as the invention of a few enlightened minds. This approach has
rightly been left behind, since it faces the difficulty of explaining what
inspired these individuals to invent the moral principle of toleration.50 In
itself, exceptional intelligence could not account for the radical step of seeing
toleration as a moral obligation. Our claim is not that some genius took this
step, which became accepted over a period of time. We shall show that a back-
ground phenomenon accounts for the genius of Locke and his predecessors.
Locke and other advocates of the principle of toleration share the concern
to separate the sphere of religion from politics. Despite the centuries that
divide them, there is a striking convergence between this concern of political
48 The paper in question was reprinted in the Parliamentary Papers, see ‘Extract from
a Paper “On Female Immolation”; published in the Quarterly Series of the “Friend of
India”, for March 1821’, BPP 1824, Vol. 23, pp. 20–1. Both the argument and the quotes
from Locke were also adopted in a speech (presented to the Courts of Proprietors of East
India Stock) by J. Poynder, Human Sacrifices in India (London, 1827), pp. 14–16.
49 This is the consensus in moral philosophy, even though some have tried to bridge
the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. See The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers onthe Central Problem in Moral Philosophy, ed. W.D. Hudson (London, 1979).
50 Franklin Baumer, ‘Intellectual History and Its Problems’, Journal of Modern His-tory, XXI (1949), pp. 191–203, p. 195. See J.C. Laursen, ‘Imposters and Liars: Clandes-
tine Manuscripts and the Limits of Freedom of the Press in the Huguenot Netherlands’, in
New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge, ed. J.C. Laursen
(Leiden, 1995), pp. 73–108, p. 90.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
thinkers in seventeenth-century Europe and that of British colonials in
nineteenth-century India. Both called on the distinction between the religious
and the secular political realm: which beliefs, practices, justifications were
In a key document of the early modern debate, the Letter Concerning Toler-ation (1689), Locke intended to ‘distinguish exactly the business of civil gov-
ernment from that of religion, and to settle the just bonds that lie between the
one and the other’.51 He advocated this separation because men have two sep-
arate sets of interests in life: on the one hand, they strive for salvation; on the
other, they have civil interests in the temporal world. If the business of the
civil government were not separated from religion, he feared, both would be
disturbed by controversies. That is, Locke said, every individual should be
free to worship God as his conscience dictates. On the other hand, a part of
human life is subject to the coercive laws of ‘public justice’.52 Where origi-
nated this distinction between two spheres of human existence — the tempo-
Early in the history of Christianity, it was believed that the world is split
into two different realms, the spiritual and the temporal. Each human soul
should turn away from ‘the carnal world’ or ‘the earthly city’ in which we
live, and turn towards ‘the spiritual world’ or ‘the City of God’. In this spirit-
ual realm, the Holy Spirit converts the human soul. The more one seeks the
spiritual realm, the more one submits oneself to God’s will and gradually
becomes a true Christian.53 This spiritual realm was opposed to the temporal
carnal realm. Human beings also have sinful bodies, which live in this realm,
From Augustine to Aquinas, the dominant political thought in Europe took
this two-fold division of human existence as its starting-point. On the one
hand, the aim of religious institutions like the monastery and the clerical hier-
archy was to become as spiritual as possible. Naturally, any religious institu-
tion such as the monastery or the church could at best be a feeble reflection of
the one true spiritual community. On the other hand, secular institutions of
human authority existed to restrain the corrupt human body from indulging in
During the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the earlier
Christian relationship between the spiritual and the temporal worlds was
transformed dramatically. Whereas the spiritual and the temporal had been
51 John Locke, ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’, in Two Treatises of Governmentand a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. I. Shapiro (New Haven, 2003), pp. 211–54,
53 G.B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action inthe Age of the Fathers (New York, 1967); K.F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion
(Charlottesville, 1992); G. Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Timeof the Investiture Contest, trans. R.F. Bennett (1936; repr. Toronto, 1991), pp. 4–5, 41.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
equated with the clergy and the laity in the medieval church, Protestantism
claimed that there was no such hierarchical division of humanity. No spiritual
estate of priests could exist as opposed to a temporal estate of laymen.54 All
human beings lived in these two worlds simultaneously. All believers were
priests. All human souls ought to be free so that they might be ‘regenerated’
by the Holy Spirit. This was the core idea of ‘Christian liberty’.55 As sinners,
we fail to submit ourselves to the will of God. Therefore, the divine will has to
act in each one of us and instil true faith in our hearts. In short, the Holy Spirit
enables ‘new birth’ or conversion: once regenerated, we cannot but live
This notion implied that all human laws imposed upon the believer in the
spiritual realm were violations of true religion. The belief that one could serve
God by following the laws prescribed by the priestly hierarchy became idola-
try: human laws and works chained true faith. The Reformers began to
denounce the Catholic tradition and its canon law as idolatry. An entire chap-
ter of Calvin’s Institutes carried the title ‘The power of making laws in which
the pope, with his supporters, has exercised upon souls the most savage tyr-
anny and butchery’. These laws, Calvin asserted, had violated Christian lib-
erty and invaded the Kingdom of Christ, ‘thus the freedom given by him to the
conscience of the believers is utterly oppressed and cast down’.57 The main
problem, he continued, was that human laws were prescribed as though they
were spiritual laws, ‘enjoining things necessary to salvation’, but ‘our con-
sciences do not have to do with men but with God alone’. Calvin concluded
that ‘if God is the sole lawgiver, men are not permitted to usurp this honor’.58
Christian liberty was God’s gift to humanity, the Reformation asserted, and
anything that opposed it was a violation of His will. This gave rise to a politi-
cal theology, viz. the theory of the two kingdoms. One aspect of government is
spiritual, ‘whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God;
the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and
54 See Luther’s tract ‘To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’ (1520), in
Martin Luther: Three Treatises (Minneapolis, 1970), pp. 1–112.
55 There were many different positions within the Protestant Reformation — not a
monolithic phenomenon. However, we are identifying a common pattern in the views on
Christian liberty. This concerns the theological ideals of the early Reformers, which
would be revived by radical Protestants. The magisterial Reformation often failed to
practice the Christian liberty that it preached.
56 See P. Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes Theologici’ (1521), in Melanchthon andBucer, ed. W. Pauck (Philadelphia, 1969), pp. 3–150, p. 123. See also Luther’s ‘The
Freedom of a Christian’ (1520), in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. T.F.
Lull (Minneapolis, 1989), pp. 585–629; and Calvin’s chapter on Christian liberty in TheInstitutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill, trans. F.L. Battles (Louisville,
57 Calvin, Institutes, Vol. 2, p. 1180.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
citizenship that must be maintained among men’. The former has to do with
the life of the soul and the latter with the concerns of the present life and the
laws. ‘For the former resides in the inner mind, while the latter regulates only
outward behavior. The one we may call the spiritual kingdom, the other, the
political kingdom.’59 Only outward behaviour could be regulated by human
authorities, while the inner mind was left to God’s omnipotence. Luther had
already stressed the point in his polemical tract on Temporal Government
(1523): ‘The temporal government has laws which extend no further than to
life and property and external affairs on earth, for God cannot and will not
permit anyone but himself to rule over the soul.’60
In sum, this model of Christian liberty claimed the following: (a) all human
beings live in two realms — the kingdom of Christ and that of human author-
ity; (b) in the spiritual sphere, they strive for the salvation of their souls, which
is a purely individual affair over which God alone has authority; (c) in the
temporal sphere, they are sinful bodies who pursue the preservation of their
earthly interests and must always obey the laws of the secular powers. The
two kingdoms should never be mixed up — the state should never prescribe
laws in the spiritual realm — for this was equivalent to ranking human author-
ity above that of God. In short, it was the will of God that human souls be free
in His spiritual kingdom. Therefore, toleration of heresy became a moral duty
of all states and spiritual liberty the basic right of all human beings.61
Two difficulties arise at this point. Firstly, given its own intolerance, how
could the Reformation tradition lie at the root of the principle of toleration?
The fact that early Reformers proclaimed Christian freedom as God’s gift to
humanity does not tell us anything about its scope. Both Luther and Calvin
argued that this freedom was limited to the spiritual realm. Many types of
blasphemy, heresy and idolatry, they added, extended beyond that realm and
could not be tolerated. Often, a distinction was made between private reli-
gious belief and the practice and propagation of falsehoods. Clear violations
60 M. Luther, ‘Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed’, in MartinLuther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Lull, pp. 655–703, p. 679.
61 Others have noted this link between theology and toleration. In 1938, A.S.P.
Woodhouse argued that the ideas of Christian liberty and the priesthood of all believers
were transferred to the political sphere. See Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty
(London, 1938), pp. 60–100. For recent sources, see J. Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty
Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal,
XLI (1998), pp. 961–85. J.C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the Eng-
lish Revolution’, The Historical Journal, XXXV (1992), pp. 507–30; P.J. Kelly, ‘John
Locke: Authority, Conscience and Religious Toleration’, in John Locke, ed. Horton and
Mendus, pp. 125–46; Andrew Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Tolera-tion and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (University Park, PA,
2001), pp. 11–16; J. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations inLocke’s Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 208–12.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
of faith could not be tolerated, as the famous case of Servetus testified. So,
even though spiritual liberty was proclaimed to be God’s gift to humanity, this
normative principle could be interpreted in various ways. The value of reli-
gious toleration changed accordingly as the scope of the principle expanded.
Secondly, how can theology explain a social transformation as important as
the rise of a moral principle of toleration? How could it shape the attitudes of
Christian dissenters in the seventeenth century? How could it propel the his-
tory of toleration? To answer these questions, we need to figure out the role
which the notion of ‘the will of God’ plays in the Christian religion. Reformation, Toleration and God’s Will
What does it mean to say that religious liberty was viewed as God’s will for
humanity? How is this related to the introduction of a normative dimension in
the idea of toleration? An answer to these questions requires appreciating that
the historical development of Christianity revolves around its notion of divine
providence. This religion tells us the world — everything that was, is and will
be — embodies the will of the Creator.62 It also claims that His will is ‘factual’
and ‘normative’ at the same time. That is to say, His will produces the world
and this world becomes the best of all possible worlds. The factual and the
normative — the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ — are united in the will of God.
However, human beings are unable to comprehend this unity because, in
our limited understanding, the factual and the normative fall apart. It is impos-
sible for human beings to make sense of the unity between the ‘is’ and the
‘ought’. Therefore, on our own, we can never understand either the Sovereign
or His will. At the same time, Christianity has also professed that God’s will
operates in human history. History is the unfolding of divine providence.
Therefore, to understand historical events, one has to decipher what God
From the early middle Ages, certain institutions — first the monastery and
later the church — were seen as the embodiments of the divine will. This
implied that these institutions exemplified the unity of the factual and the nor-
mative. However, human beings failed in expressing this unity. They noted
the disjunction between the ‘ought’ and the ‘is’ in the monastery or the
church: corruption prevailed; injustice existed; there was the frailty of the
flesh. From the human point of view, the factual and the normative always
fell apart in these institutions: the factual became testaments of human sins;
the normative took the form of ideals that one had to live up to. This situation
led to new attempts to realize the unity of fact and norm. Hence, first the
62 S.N. Balagangadhara, ‘The Heathen in His Blindness . . .’: Asia, the West and theDynamic of Religion (1994; 2nd edn. New Delhi, 2005), pp. 298–307.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
monasteries and later the church were continuously reformed according to
ever stricter monastic rules and canon laws.63
The history of medieval and early modern Western Christianity exempli-
fied this dynamic: certain institutions, embodying the will of God, unite the
factual and the normative; yet, human attempts to realize this unity could not
but fail to do so. In the subsequent phase, this failure generated new attempts,
which failed yet again, and so on. In this sense, in Christian Europe, the will of
God was not a concern of theologians alone: the strong sense of the unfolding
of such a will in human history generated a particular attitude towards society
and its development. The existing social institutions were never what they
ought to be. Hence the widespread tendency in the Western societies to
reform the church or society according to a normative image, which specified
When the Reformation singled out religious liberty as God’s will for
humanity, it provided a powerful impetus to the history of toleration. In all
parts of Protestant Europe, certain groups began to accuse the authorities of
having taken away this liberty yet again. They pointed out that spiritual free-
dom had not yet been realized. Neither church nor society was what it ought to
be. In fact, the Calvinist and Lutheran churches had installed a ‘popish tyr-
anny’. Once more, men had corrupted religion by building clerical institu-
tions, claiming religious authority and imposing human laws in the spiritual
realm. Therefore, the churches had to be reformed. The first of these voices
appeared in the German and Swiss territories. Both silent dissenters like
Valentin Weigel and outspoken rebels like Sebastian Castellio charged the
churches with the sin of placing human precepts above the Word of God and
persecuting anyone who refused to give in.64 Thus, they argued, these
Protestant churches were no better than papal tyranny.
In the Dutch Republic, similar criticisms of the Reformed Church would
emerge soon after. In the lively period from the 1580s to the Synod of
Dordrecht in 1618, this nation became the arena of a battle between strict
confessional Calvinists and anti-confessional Protestants that would culminate
in the clash between Remonstrants and Contraremonstrants. As Benjamin
Kaplan argues, this was not an isolated phenomenon unique to the Dutch, but
63 A few overviews are: H.J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of theWestern Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983); P. King, Western Monasticism: A His-tory of the Monastic Movement in the Latin Church (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999); S. Kuttner,
The History of Ideas and Doctrines of Canon Law in the Middle Ages (London, 1980),
pp. 1–16; Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society.
64 Concerning Heretics, ed. and trans. R. Bainton (New York, 1935); Castellio, Del’Impunité des Hérétiques, ed. M.F. Valkhoff (1555; repr. Geneva, 1971); Susan C.
Karant-Nunn, ‘Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555–1675’, Journal ofInterdisciplinary History, XXIV (1994), pp. 615–37; A. Weeks, Valentin Weigel(1533–1588): German Religious Dissenter, Speculative Theorist, and Advocate of Tol-
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
‘was in fact a local manifestation of a much broader struggle between the
champions and opponents of confessionalism’.65 Both anticlerical Protestants
like Caspar Coolhaes and Dirck V. Coornhert and the later Remonstrants
accused the Dutch Reformed Church of being a ‘Genevan tyranny’ — an imi-
tation of the ‘popish tyranny of conscience’. Its consistory and classis were
likened to the institutions of the Roman hierarchy. Its confessions, catechisms
and church discipline were human inventions inspired by the papacy and the
canon law. The Calvinist clerics were hauled over the coals as corrupt priests
whose true aim was worldly power.66 Naturally, this gave rise to an equally
forceful counterattack by the Reformed theologians, who deplored this antag-
onism as the work of libertines aspiring to destroy the order of true religion.67
Ultimately, the Calvinist party would triumph in the Synod of Dordrecht.
In these decades, a dynamic emerged in the Protestant world, which pro-
jected the norm of religious liberty as God’s will. This counteracted the
dynamic of confessionalization, so widely discussed in contemporary Refor-
mation historiography.68 We would like to suggest that the tension between
confessionalization and its anti-confessional counterpart in early modern
Europe resulted from two distinct ways of imagining God’s will for humanity.
On the one hand, the confessional party identified the divine purpose with a
particular confessional system of doctrine and discipline imposed and pro-
tected by a clerical authority. The result divided Europe into distinct confes-
sions, each of which was obsessed with fixing doctrinal boundaries and
65 B. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Communion in Utrecht,1578–1620 (Oxford, 1995), p. 5. See also B. Kaplan, ‘ “Remnants of the Papal Yoke”:
Apathy and Opposition in the Dutch Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXV
66 J. Arminius, ‘A Declaration of the Sentiments of Arminius’ (1608), in The Writ-ings of James Arminius, ed. J. Nichols and W.R. Bagnall (Grand Rapids, 1956),
pp. 193–275; D.V. Coornhert, Proeve vande Nederlandtsche Catechismo (Haarlem,
1582); D.V. Coornhert, Synodus vander Conscientien Vryheidt (1582; repr. Amsterdam,
1630); D.V. Coornhert, Justificatie des Magistraets tot Leyden in Hollant (Amsterdam,
1597); D.V. Coornhert and J. Lipsius, Proces vant Ketterdoden ende Dwang derConscientien (Gouda, 1590); S. Episcopius, Dool-hof der Paus-gesinden (Gorinchem,
1680); S. Episcopius and J. Uytenbogaert, Belijdenisse ofte Verklaringhe Van ’tghevoelen der . . . Remonstranten . . . over de voornaemste Articulen der ChristelijckeReligie (s.l., 1621); Caspar Janszoon Coolhaes: De Voorlooper van Arminius en derRemonstranten, ed. H.C. Rogge (2 vols., Amsterdam, 1856–8).
67 H. Arnoldi Vander Linde, Vande Conscientiedwangh (Delft, 1629); R. Donteclock,
Proeve Des Gouschen Catechismu (Delft, 1608); J. Triglandius, Den Recht-gematichdenChristen (Amsterdam, 1615); J. Triglandius, Verdediging vande Leere end D’eere derGereformeerde Kercken ende Leeraren (Amsterdam, 1619); V. Van Drielenburch,
Proefken oft Staelken Van Iohanis Wtenbogaerts ende Iacobi Taurini OnderlingheVerdraeghsaemheyt (Amsterdam, 1616).
68 In his Calvinists and Libertines, Kaplan gives an insightful analysis of this anti-
confessional movement in the Dutch Republic. Weeks also notices it in his work on
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
concerned about the violation of its church laws. The Protestant confessions
allowed Christian liberty, but only if it remained within the confines of church
The anti-confessional opposition, on the other hand, equated God’s will
with the universality of toleration and liberty of conscience. This entailed an
attack on the clerical structures: they became instances of the worldly disrup-
tion, division and destruction of true spiritual faith undertaken by the priest-
hood and its doctrinal fabrications. The rise of a principle of toleration was the
result of this anti-confessional movement. Its proponents perceived the fail-
ure to abide by God’s will in the Christian churches and societies of their time.
Everywhere, they espied the religious tyranny of an evil priesthood, its hierar-
chical laws and human additions to divine revelation. Consequently, they
never ceased in their attempts to achieve the normative goal of liberty.
Given local exigencies, this process took various forms in different parts of
Europe. The English Reformation had a pattern different from its German,
Swiss and Dutch counterparts. To begin with, the Anglicans accused the
Roman Church of imposing idolatry upon the English people. According to
them, Catholic priests had misguided the monarch and usurped secular power.
Soon, the Puritans called for a further Reformation and pointed out that the
Anglicans had failed in achieving Christian liberty. Henry VIII and his sup-
porters had cast the church ‘into a mould half Popish halfe Protestant’, as
Roger Williams put it.69 An observer told his fellow members of the Church of
England: ‘We are for a Popery of our own, a Yoke of our own making that we
would have the slavish Laity to wear.’70 Once the Presbyterian church was
established, internal dissenters like the Baptists, the Quakers and radical Puri-
tans challenged this on the grounds that it was not as God desired it to be:
instead, it was tyranny over the minds and souls of men. In John Milton’s
famous phrase: ‘New Presbyter is but Old Priest Writ Large’.71 After migrat-
ing to the new world, the radical Puritans built their congregations in early
America, only to see these attacked by dissenters as a violation of God’s will
The advocacy of toleration in the English Reformation shared three
elements with the anti-confessional dynamic in other parts of Europe. Firstly,
the abhorrence towards the ‘tyranny’ of the dominant Christian churches
was rooted in the theological belief that the two realms of the world should not
be inter-mixed. Tyranny was the result of confusing the temporal with the
69 R. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), p. 64.
70 Anonymous, Old Popery as Good as New (s.l., 1688), pp. 16–17.
71 Milton accused the Puritan divines of being ‘the new forcers of conscience’ in this
poem. He wrote: ‘Dare you for this adjure the civil sword; To force our consciences that
Christ set free; And ride us with a Classic Hierarchy; New Presbyter is but Old Priest Writ
Large.’ John Milton, ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’
(1646), in The Complete Poems of John Milton, ed. C.W. Elliot (New York, 1909–14).
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
spiritual, the sphere of law with that of liberty, and the realm of politics with
faith. This made a travesty of true religion, the anonymous author of An Expe-
Christs Kingdom is of another World, and requires none of the Policy of this
to manage it; it ought to be kept pure and unmixt, being clear of another
nature: We see Oyl in a Vessel of Water will not mix, but keep its Body
intire to itself, no more ought Spirituals to be mixt with Temporals. But
these Spiritual Politicians have mixt Heaven and Earth together, con-
founded the World with their Policy, and so jumbled things together, that
Christianity is almost lost in the Composition, so that men know not where
Christianity must return to its primitive spiritual purity.73 Then, Christians
could unite again around the essence of God’s revelation without human
accretions. The seventeenth-century advocates of toleration emphasized the
point repeatedly: false religion mixed the spiritual and political realms
together. Thus, the true spiritual order was lost and ‘a Carnal, Worldly, Poli-
tick, Ecclesiastical Church-State’ was erected in its stead.74
The second element was the offensive against ‘the priests of the devil’, who
were held responsible for the imposition of fictitious laws as though these
were God’s own law. The advocacy of toleration went hand in hand with
assaults on clerics of all stripes and colours. This anticlericalism had its roots
in the conviction that the individual believers ought to be free to subject their
souls to God’s will. Leonard Busher castigated the Anglican episcopacy for
forcing people by persecution: ‘Which showeth that the bishops and ministers
of Rome and England are of one spirit, in gathering people to their faith and
church, which is the spirit of Satan, who knoweth well that his kingdom, the
false church, would greatly decay, if persecution were laid down.’75
The anticlerical point returns in the tract of a fellow Baptist, Samuel Rich-
ardson, who argued The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion (1647)
with this motto: ‘Where Romish Tyrannie hath the upper hand, Darkness of
minde, and superstition stand.’ In a debate between the nonconformists and
72 Anonymous, An Expedient for Peace: Perswading an Agreement amongst Chris-tians from the Impossibility of their Agreement in the Matters of Religion (London,
73 L. Busher, ‘Religions Peace: or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience’ (1614), in Tractson Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614–1661, ed. E.B. Underhill (New York,
74 The phrase is from R. Gordon’s Spiritual Order and Christian Liberty Proved to beConsistent in the Churches of Christ (s.l., 1675), pp. 7–9, 11–13. The point is also made in
Coornhert, Justificatie des Magistraets; Coornhert and Lipsius, Proces vant Ketterdoden,
pp. 61–3; J. Croope, Conscience-Oppression (London, 1656), pp. 9–10; J. Milton, ATreatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (London, 1659), pp. 37–8; Williams,
75 Busher, ‘Religions Peace’, pp. 19–20.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
the Presbyterian divines, Richardson had the former denounce the latter as
follows: ‘You appear to us to be carnal, in that you are so full of strife, and
envy against others, in seeking their destruction, who do differ from you.
Also, you serve not the Lord Jesus, but your own bellies.’ The nonconformists
refused to submit to the Presbytery, for this was ‘false and antichristian’ and
‘a branch of the hierarchy and popery’.76 One can merely browse through the
pages of the early modern tracts on toleration to encounter many such attacks
against the priests, presbyters and other prelates.77 As it was put in Zeal Exam-ined (1652), the devil ‘having once leaped out of Heathenism into a form of
Christianitie, he can easily passe from Popery to Prelacy, and from thence to
Presbytery, and so to any other most refined form, when ever it shall be fur-
nished with the temptations of profit and worldly power’.78
A third common element was the claim that the blending of the political and
spiritual realms was the cause behind the division and conflict among the
believers. At the end of the seventeenth century, a consensus had emerged
among the British Protestants that persecution and religious strife were rooted
not in religion but in the human corruption of religion. Worldly interests
brought coercion, conflict and confusion in matters of religion. By contrast,
‘if every Man were left to himself, to follow what Religion he pleases’, the
latitudinarian Edward Synge stated, ‘it is very probable that most Men, hav-
ing no Worldly Interest to serve by this or that Religion, would in time, be
brought to agree in all the great and necessary Truths of Religion; which are
plain and evident to every sober and inquisitive Person’.79 The idea that dis-
cord in religion emerged because of the imposition of human fabrications was
76 S. Richardson, ‘The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion’, in Tracts onLiberty of Conscience, ed. Underhill, pp. 235–85, pp. 279–82.
77 A few examples from the British Isles and the Dutch Republic: C. Coolhaes,
‘Christelijcke Vermaninghe’ (1584), in Caspar Coolhaes, Vol. 2, ed. Rogge, pp. 7–31;
Coornhert, Justificatie des Magistraets; Croope, Conscience-Oppression, pp. 3–4;
W. Dell, Right Reformation (London, 1646); Gordon, Spiritual Order and Christian Lib-erty, pp. 10–13; R. Overton, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (Europe, 1645), pp. 1,
14; C. Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience, the Magistrates Interest (London, 1668).
78 Anonymous, Zeal Examined: Or, a Discourse for Liberty of Conscience in Mattersof Religion (London, 1652), p. 22. The tract was probably authored by H. Vane; see
C. Polizzotto, ‘The Campaign against “The Humble Proposals” of 1652’, Journal ofEcclesiastical History, XXXVIII (1987), pp. 569–81, p. 578.
79 E. Synge, A Gentleman’s Religion in Three Parts (London, 1698), pp. 6, 100–1.
80 See J. Arminius, ‘On Reconciling Religious Dissensions Among Christians’
(1606), in Writings of James Arminius, ed. Nichols and Bagnall, pp. 146–92; C. Coolhaes,
‘Apologia’ (1580), in Caspar Coolhaes, Vol. 1, pp. 165–6; Coolhaes, ‘Christelijcke
Vermaninghe’, pp. 23–4; J. Corbet, A Second Discourse of the Religion of England (Lon-
don, 1668), p. 10; J. Sturgion, ‘A Plea for Toleration of Opinions and Persuasions in Mat-
ters of Religion’, in Tracts on Liberty of Conscience, ed. Underhill, pp. 309–41, p. 333;
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
The theological framework of toleration lent coherence to these claims:
Christian liberty was the will of God and anything that went against it was tyr-
anny. This is most striking in the work of the founding father of Pennsylvania.
William Penn suggested that many had the tendency ‘to disclaim the Popes
Supremacy, and usurp it to themselves; to Preach down one Antichrist, and
set up six and twenty’. If ‘Meekness, Mildness, Unity, Peace, and Concord,
are the Vertues that embellish Christian Jurisdiction’, he added, ‘Cruelty,
Rigor, Persecution and Violence, must be the marks of Antichristian Tyr-
The story of Christian liberty again provided an argument for the freedom
of conscience. Clerical coercion of religion was wrong, Penn said, because
this violent and rigorous Proceeding and tyrannizing over the Consciences
of Men, is contrary to the purpose of God in the Order of the Creation, who
made and ordain’d all Man-kind free from Bondage, and never advanc’d
him over all the Works of his Creation, to be a contemptible Slave to the
Will of his fellow Creature, even in things Temporal; much less in matters
God’s purpose was to free humanity from religious oppression by providing
equal freedom to all consciences. Hence, when a faction of priests imposed a
particular form of religion, it defied divine purpose. This sin was a disruption
of the order, which the Lord expressed in His creation. Ultimately, this argu-
ment guided radical Protestants such as Penn, Thomas Helwys, William
Walwyn, Henry Robinson or Roger Williams to the following conclusion: ‘It
is the will and command of God, that since the coming of his Sonne the Lord
Iesus a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian
consciences and worships, bee granted to all men in all Nations and Coun-
Early modern thinkers could consistently argue that the duty of a Christian
was to tolerate heresy, idolatry and other violations of the will of God because
they held universal liberty of conscience to be God’s gift to humanity.
According to these Protestants, Christian liberty was the supreme principleJ. Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying (London, 1648); W. Walwyn, A Still and SoftVoice From the Scriptures (London, 1647), p. 4.
81 Penn, The Reasonableness of Toleration, p. 5. See also William Penn, ‘The Great
Case of Liberty of Conscience’ (1670), in The Select Works of William Penn, Vol. 2 (New
York, 1971), pp. 128–64; and William Penn, Considerations Moving to a Toleration andLiberty of Conscience (London, 1685).
82 Penn, The Reasonableness of Toleration, pp. 10–11.
83 The quote is from the table of contents of Williams’ The Bloudy Tenent (1646). See
T. Helwys, A Shorte Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (Amsterdam, 1612);
W. Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane (London, 1644). See also two remarkable
articles: N. Carlin, ‘Toleration for Catholics in the Puritan Revolution’, in Tolerance andIntolerance, ed. Grell and Scribner, pp. 216–30 and Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
willed by God. Toleration became a moral value because of the constant effort
to realize His will on earth. Viewed as the divine order, the model of Christian
liberty gave rise to a normative approach towards the toleration of heresy and
The question as to how this principle of toleration spread in modern societ-
ies lies beyond the confines of this article. Here, we merely propose that the
theological framework of Christian liberty added God’s will as the normative
premise which transformed the practice of toleration into a moral obligation.
Many were convinced that one had no right to interfere in others’ worship of
the Lord, that one ought not to bind others to one’s own fallible understanding
of His will, and that the realm of politics must steer clear of faith. This was the
case because the norms reflected God’s eternal law. One’s basic duty as a
Christian was to live up to that law. Colonial Policy and Christian Liberty
Why was it so important to know whether the ‘sacred laws of the Hindu reli-
gion’ sanctioned sati and other practices? To make sense of this question, we
can now draw on certain notions shared by the different varieties of Reforma-
tion Christianity. According to this religion, all human souls had access to
God’s law. They lived on earth to obey this law. Nevertheless, the devil and
his priests, who imposed their own fabrications as divinely revealed com-
mandments on innocent believers, had corrupted this sense. Therefore, in
order to understand such people and go about with them, one should find out
what they believed to be the will of God for humanity. Which specific set of
laws did the Hindus mistake for God’s revelation?
This was the obsession of the early colonial scholars. Thus, Halhed stated
that the Hindu’s ‘allegiance to his own supposed revelations of the Divine
Will’ is as firm as that of the Christian and that the Hindu scriptures were seen
‘as the immediate Revelations of the Almighty’.84 William Jones believed
that, in ‘the Ordinances of Menu’, he had found the original sacred laws of the
Hindus, supposedly revealed by God to Manu. It ‘must be remembered’, he
said, ‘that those laws are actually revered, as the word of the Most High’ by
The Hindoo law stands upon the same authority as the Hindoo religion; both
are parts of one system, which they believe to have been divinely revealed.
That law is regarded by them therefore with a superstitious veneration,
which institutions avowedly of human origin do not produce.86
84 Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, pp. xiii–xv.
85 Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law, p. xvi.
86 C. Grant, ‘Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of
Great Britain (1792)’, in British Parliamentary Papers — Colonies East India, Vol. 5:1831–1832 (Shannon, 1970), p. 34.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
James Mill in his History of British India confirmed the same: ‘From the opin-
ion of the Hindus that the Divine Being dictated all their laws, they acknowl-
edge nothing as law but what is found in some one or other of their sacred
books.’87 Therefore, it was of utmost significance to find out whether sati or
any other practice belonged to the Hindu religion and its scriptures. If it did,
the Hindus would believe it to be one of the duties prescribed by God.
Why ought sati to be tolerated if this was the case? This is where Christian
liberty and its model of the two kingdoms come in. According to this model,
human authority could rule only over the secular realm — that is, the body and
its material interests. In the religious realm, God alone could know, judge and
rule. Abstracting from the role of prudential considerations, this theological
background defined the limits of the normative attitudes of the British colo-
nials, as it also had in Protestant Europe.88
Both Evangelicals and Orientalists conceived of paganism as the equiva-
lent of popish idolatry: it could not but be a religious tyranny that usurped
God’s authority. As the Evangelical Charles Grant put it, commenting on the
‘Hindu law’ of Manu’s Code: ‘Nothing is more plain, than that this whole fab-
ric is the work of a crafty and imperious priesthood, who feigned a divine rev-
elation and appointment, to invest their own order, in perpetuity, with the
most absolute empire over the civil state of the Hindoos, as well as over their
minds.’89 William Jones, the rationalist Christian and gifted Orientalist, called
the same work ‘a system of despotism and priestcraft’.90According to the Brit-
ish, Hindu religion revolved around demonic priests, who imposed a corrupt
body of rites and rules on the believers as though these were necessary to sal-
vation. Still, the normative stances towards this false religion ranged between
On the one hand, the view that Christian liberty was God’s will for human-
ity could be interpreted in a minimal way: it allowed for freedom of con-
science to the individual Protestant believers but did not include the toleration
of heresy and idolatry. This stance pointed out that the false religion of the
Hindus was a spiritual tyranny. As such, the Hindu religion mixed up the reli-
gious and political realms; the priests of that religion assumed the authority of
divine revelation and ruled over the innocent souls. The task was to save such
souls from the yoke of tyranny and grant them spiritual liberty. The evangeli-
cal reformers in India intended to educate the Hindu subjects and prepare
them to accept Christian truth by ‘liberating the individual conscience from
87 J. Mill, The History of British India in 6 Vols., Vol. 1 (London, 1826), p. 169.
88 An interesting way to test our hypothesis would be to examine the policies of colo-
nial states from Catholic countries in the same period. As an anonymous referee points
out, these often accommodated the religious practices of the native population to some
extent. Our future research will have to address this issue.
89 Grant, ‘Observations on the State of Society’, pp. 34–5.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
the tyranny of the priests’.91 In this case, ‘Hindu tyranny’ ought to be replaced
On the other hand, one’s attitude could draw on the maximal principle of
liberty of conscience, which also included the toleration of idolatry. Accord-
ing to this view, it is the will of God that every human being should always be
free to follow what he or she believes to be His will. Among its justifications
was the belief that no one could know God’s will with certainty. Therefore,
even though one’s conscience might be confident that something was God’s
truth, one ought never to bind any other conscience to one’s own interpreta-
tion of His revelation. In the words of Dnyanodaya, the Anglo-Marathi Mis-
So long as men do not interfere with the rights and privileges of others, they
are responsible for their religious opinions and their modes of worship, not
to the civil Government, but to the Majesty on high. The Government that
interferes with the religious opinions of its subjects may justly be charged
with tyranny. Instead of protecting them in the enjoyment of their natural
rights, it becomes an oppressor. Such a course, whether it be regarded as
good or bad policy, would certainly be most anti-christian and unjust.92
Conclusion
In conclusion, we locate the emergence of toleration as an unconditional
moral obligation in the internal dialectic of Reformation Christianity. From
here on, this religious value secularized itself and received its characteristic
expressions in the post-Enlightenment political theories. This article did not
intend to analyse either debates about sati or the role played by the Indian
intellectuals in the abolition of the practice. Its primary interest has been to
show that the early debates on sati throw the issue of the ‘norming’ of tolera-
Even though the proponents of tolerating sati were considered as ‘atheists’
by their evangelical opponents, this historical opposition should not blind us
to their shared normative framework, which is religious in nature. This is not
to say that the early colonial officials lived in a mental world identical to that
of the seventeenth-century Reformation, but rather that the same background
framework constrained their thinking on the question of toleration. Naturally,
many variables within this conceptual framework were interpreted differ-
ently, but this article has focused on the constants. This framework is still
unmistakably present in the liberal theories of toleration to this date.
If toleration could become a normative principle in Christian Europe and its
colonies only because it was regarded as God’s will for humanity, how to
91 E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959; repr. Oxford, 1963), p. 32.
W.J. Glover, ‘Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial
India’, The Journal of Asian Studies, LXIV (2005), pp. 539–66.
92 ‘Toleration of False Religions’, The Dnyanodaya, 15 December 1846.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
interpret the fact that modern political theory still preaches it to all nations?
Given the deep theological roots of the principle of toleration, one wonders to
what extent contemporary liberalism has freed itself from this religious
93 For a detailed analysis of this issue, see J. De Roover and S.N. Balagangadhara,
‘John Locke, Christian Liberty and the Predicament of Liberal Toleration’, PoliticalTheory, XXXVI (2008), pp. 523–49.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
CVUA Karlsruhe | Arzneimittelfälschungen a. http://www.ua-bw.de/pub/beitrag.asp?subid=2&Thema_ID=13&ID=1. Globalisierung und Internet beflügeln den Handel mit gefälschten und illegalen Arzneimitteln in immer stärkerem Sogenannte „Lifestyle-Medikamente" dienen nicht primär der Bekämpfung von Krankheiten, sondern sollen vor allem diekörperliche Leistungsfähigkeit oder das
geneesmiddelen bulletin november 2009 101 redactieadres: Geneesmiddelenbulletin, Mercatorlaan 1200, 3528 bL Utrecht P . r . i . k . b . o . r . d Het redactiebureau van het Geneesmiddelen- bulletin is nu gehuisvest in de domus Medica in Utrecht. de nieuwe contactgegevens vindt u in Let op! Exenatide en nierinsufficiëntie het colofon op pagina 110. Nieuwe onderzoeken dr.