LIBERTY, TYRANNY AND THE WILL OF GOD

THE PRINCIPLE OF TOLERATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND COLONIAL INDIA

Jakob De Roover, S. N. Balagangadhara

Published in: History of Political Thought, 30(1), 111-139.

Abstract: 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 tolerated? 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 liberty 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.


Jakob De Roover is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)

Flanders; S.N. Balagangadhara is Professor and Director at the Research Centre

Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium.

1
Much is written on the rise of toleration in early modern Europe.1 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 ‘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.

1
C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, J.I. Israel and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., The

Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, 1997); J. Coffey, Persecution and

Toleration in Protestant England, 1588-1689 (London, 2000); O.P. Grell and B.

Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Horton and S. Mendus, eds., John Locke: A

Letter Concerning Toleration in Focus (London and New York, 1991); W. K. Jordan,

The Development of Religious Toleration in England, 4 vols. (1932-40; repr. ed.

Gloucester, MA, 1965); H. Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London, 1967); B.

Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern

Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007); J. Lecler, Histoire de la Tolérance au Siècle de la

Réforme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1955); J. Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early

Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006); R. Po-Chia Hsia and H. van Nierop, eds.,

Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2002); R.

Vernon, The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After (Montreal, 1997).

2
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.2 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 Christianity 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 emphasis, 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 toleration in Europe is

understood.

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

writes:

2
This point is argued in J.C. Laursen and C.J. Nederman, eds., Beyond the

Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia, 1998).

3
 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

profession, 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

constant warfare. In Western liberal democratic societies toleration is now

accepted as a basic condition of life.3

Charles Taylor agrees that the origin point of modern secularism and toleration

lies in the search in battle fatigue and horror for a way out of the Wars of

Religion.4 Or, in the words of a key reference work: ‘It took a good deal of pious

killing before toleration gained widespread acceptance in Europe. Battle fatigue

presented the state with an opportunity to rise above divisive conflict and focus

on the pursuit of shared interests and aims, such as peace, freedom, and material

prosperity’.5 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

3
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),

pp. 3-15, p. 4.
4
C. Taylor, ‘Modes of Secularism’, in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. R. Bhargava

(New Delhi, 1998), pp. 31-53, p. 32.

5
Stephen Macedo, ‘Toleration and Fundamentalism’, in A Companion to

Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. R.E. Goodin and P. Pettit (Oxford and

Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 622-628, p. 622.

4
imposed either through compulsion or through persuasion. 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 Christianity 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 facie violations

of this law?

Besides these two difficulties, other problems emerge if we look at the

cognitive demands put on any account that appeals to battle fatigue. The first

possibility 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 arguments

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 suitably 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

5
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 contrastive explanation,

no account of the emergence of toleration on grounds of battle fatigue is

acceptable.

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 tautology

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

considerations 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

unconditional 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

6
– to be obeyed everywhere and at all times?6 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

expedience 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 forceful conversion.7

During the Reformation, irenic thinkers like Erasmus considered 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 restoration of Christian unity.8

The Politiques in France and elsewhere provided an independent temporal

purpose to the state, which should not be subordinated to the demands of

6
Richard Tuck has shown the connection between skepticism and the rise of

toleration as a moral principle to be untenable. Seventeenth-century skeptics

‘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, ‘Scepticism and Toleration in the

Seventeenth Century’, in Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed.

S. Mendus (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 31-60, p. 35.

7
I. Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia: A Medieval Concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas LVIII

(1997) pp. 365-84.

8
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. 153-161, p. 153.

7
religious unity. 9 None of these groups perceived toleration 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

materialise in this age?

The normative aspect raises an interesting issue. The weights of different

components in the toleration debate were reordered: the prudential and

pragmatic 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 tolerant

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 private

9
H. Butterfield, ‘Toleration in Early Modern Times’, Journal of the History of Ideas

XXXVIII (1977) pp. 573-584.

8
correspondences or letters (which tell us about the psychological motives of the

individual in question), we need to see whether they appeal to normative

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 constitute an

‘evil tyranny’. Both missionaries and Orientalists agreed that the Brahmin priests

cloaked their human fabrications as divine revelations and, to satisfy their own

desires, manipulated the ignorant believers.10 Yet, the Orientalists, 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 the colonial policy.

This belief in the moral value of toleration contains a prima facie

inconsistency. Most, if not all, British colonials in this period were Protestant

believers. 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

Christian, it was one’s duty to persuade other human beings to submit themselves

10
R. Gelders and W. Derde, ‘Mantras of Anti-Brahmanism: Colonial Experience

of Indian Intellectuals’, Economic and Political Weekly XXXVIII (2003) pp. 4611-

4617.

9
to the divine law.11 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 follow

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.12 How to understand this situation?

Some writings on the Indian Empire acknowledged this quandary explicitly:

‘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?’13 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

11
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. ed., London and New York, 2000), p. xiii.

W. Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law or, the Ordinances of Menu, ed. M.J. Franklin (1798,

repr. ed., London and New York, 2000), p. xvi.

12
B.S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi, 1997).
13
G.F. Laclear, The Christian Statesman and Our Indian Empire (Cambridge, 1859), p.

56.

10
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

toleration 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 immoral and

idolatrous, and yet make the case that these practices ought to be tolerated.

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.14 This entailed

that one tolerated, studied and even endorsed the beliefs, practices 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.15 On the other hand, this has been

14
P. Spear, The Oxford History of Modern India 1740-1975 (New Delhi, 1965), p. 69.
15
W. Hastings, ‘Minute of Evidence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence—British

Parliamentary Papers, vol. 4 (1812-1813) (Shannon, 1968), pp. 1-8; T. Munro,

‘Minute of Evidence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence—British Parliamentary Papers, vol.

11
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 benefits.16 In other words, political and

economic expediency constitute the main explanation of the British policy of

toleration.

This explanation often takes the following form.17 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

4, pp. 121-134; Teignmouth, ‘Minute of Evidence (1813)’, Minutes of Evidence—

British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 4, pp. 9-20.

16
Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 57-75; N.B. Dirks, The Scandal of

Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 209-

224; 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-Anglicist Controversy,

1781-1843 (Richmond, 1999), pp. 1-72.

17
See Penny Carson, ‘The British Raj and the Awakening of Evangelical

Conscience: 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. 209-224, p. 298. For an

overview of the historical developments, see Sir John W. Kaye, Christianity in

India: An Historical Narrative (London, 1859), pp. 366-396.

12
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.

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’.18 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 respectively’. 19 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 were

under Anglican Church law and not parliamentary law.20

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 development of its

18
Kaye, Christianity in India, pp. 374-5.
19
Ibid., p. 375.
20
J. D. M. Derrett, Religion, Law, and the State in India (London, 1968), pp. 233-37.

R.W. Lariviere, ‘Justices and Panditas: Some Ironies in Contemporary Readings

of the Hindu Legal Past’, The Journal of Asian Studies XLVIII (1989) pp. 757-769.

13
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’.21 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 arguments existed in Europe for centuries on end

without toleration assuming the status of a moral obligation.

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 earlier

Muslim rulers; they tried to identify the Hindu scriptures, codify them and build

laws around them. In other words, scriptural foundations played a normative 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 toleration normatively?

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

21
Jones, Institutes, p. xvi. See also Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, p. xi.

14
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.22

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 purely a 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.23 The same issue would soon be raised by the collectors and

magistrates in Bengal, since it had been claimed that the native religion 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 regards to ‘a practice at which

human nature shudders’ like sati.24

22
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).
23
Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, pp. xlvi-xlvii, pp. 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. 107-139, p. 116.

24
Letter from the Collector of Shahabad (M.H. Brooke), to Charles Earl

Cornwallis, Governor General in Council, Fort William, in British Parliamentary

Papers 1821, vol. 18, p. 22. See pages 22 to 24 for other examples.

15
 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’.25 All agreed that the

practice ‘horrid and revolting even as a voluntary one, should be prohibited and

entirely abolished’.26 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 course 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’.27

In official government discourse, the following was clear: where local

customs deviated from ‘the Shaster’ or the sacred texts, the latter had precedence

and these customs ought to be abolished. Even though awareness of the regional

variations in this matter existed, the colonial state did not systematically 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

25
‘Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, 7th February 1805’, in BPP 1821, vol. 18,

p. 24.
26
‘Extract Bengal Judicial Consultations, 5th December 1812’, in BPP 1821, vol.

18, p. 27.
27
‘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.

16
and what rules prescribed by the Shasters for the manner in which the rite is to

be performed…?’28

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 religion’. 29

Therefore, the practice had to be allowed. On the contrary, 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 immemorial’, it was

abolished by colonial law, because it was ‘not tolerated by the Shaster’.30 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

28
‘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, p. 115, italics added.

29
‘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.
30
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. 126-131.

17
scriptural sanction suggests that one aimed to give a moral foundation to the

policy of toleration.31

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 voluntary

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’.

31
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-

198, which acknowledges the importance of the moral principle of toleration in

the colonial debate.

18
Besides, the practice ‘may be almost called local’ and therefore it could hardly be

part of the Hindu religion and its sacred law.32

Both the government regulations and most replies to Ewer’s letters left no

doubt as to the official adherence to the ‘fundamental’ and ‘invariable principle 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 ceremonies’.33 Those who

agreed with Ewer simply tried to amplify his attack against the normative

arguments for tolerating sati.34 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

32
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. 227-29.
33
‘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 otherwise’, in BPP 1821, vol. 18, p. 126. See pp. 232-240 for the

replies to Ewer.
34
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.

19
also denied the scriptural sanctions.35 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 claims questioned the legitimacy

of the comparison and restated the reasons for toleration with particular vigour:

…[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, therefore,

cognizable by simply civil or temporal laws; but the burning of widows 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 permitted

itself to impose upon India.36

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 abominate’.37

35
J. MacDonald, ‘On the Hindoo Laws Respecting the Burning of Widows’,

Asiatic Journal XIII (March 1822) pp. 220-226.

36
E.A. Kendall, ‘On the Burning of Hindoo Widows’, Asiatic Journal XIII (May

1822) pp. 446-456; italics added.

37
Letter from the Court of Directors to the Bengal Judicial Department, Lower

Provinces, (London, 17th June 1823), in BPP 1824, vol. 24, p. 45.

20
 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

emphasised arguments from expediency: government interference would induce

alienation and disorder and create a potential uprising. But the opponents easily

countered this point: the British government and its legal apparatus 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 created any significant disorder.

The same went for the legal abolition of child sacrifice and other customs.

Besides, the practice was local rather than universal and its popularity limited to

specific groups.38 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’.39

It is not our aim to chronicle the career of the practice or of the colonial

attitudes towards it. Rather, what interests us is the delayed banning of practices

like sati and the public manner in which such practices were banned. 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

38
See British Parliamentary Papers 1825, vol. 24, p. 13, pp. 20-26 and 1826-7, vol.

20, p. 4, pp. 28-30. See also ‘Our Indian Empire’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,

LXXX (1856): 636-659, 649.

39
‘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. ed. New Delhi, 1988), pp. 156-163, p. 156.

21
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’. 40 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’ 41 of the Europeans merely

shifts the question: whence this conception 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

interpretation 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. 42 In his texts, so to

40
Mani, Contentious Traditions, pp. 36-9.
41
Ibid., pp. 36-7.
42
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. 40-45, where it is described how the ‘Banians’ believed that

God communicated religion (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, p. xvi; J. Kaye, The Suppression of Human Sacrifice, Suttee, and Female Infanticide

22
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 identified.

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 tolerate

them. Irrespective of individual motives, the formulation of colonial policies

appealed to these laws. This suggests that the normative dimension had been

added to the public discourse about toleration. It had become a normative

principle to the colonial state in British India. In other words, the colonial

policies provide evidence that toleration had indeed turned into a moral

obligation to this European state.

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 incumbent

upon the colonials, ‘from motives of policy as well as from a principle of justice, to

consult the feelings, and even yield to the prejudices, of the natives, whenever it

can be done with safety to our dominions’.43 The editors of an Anglo-Marathi

missionary periodical argued as follows in 1846: ‘The toleration of the various

systems of religion by the British Government in this country is…not merely

good policy; it is the course which every Christian Government is in duty bound

(London and Madras, 1898), p. 22; MacDonald, ‘On the Hindoo Laws’, p. 222; J.

Peggs, India’s Cries to British Humanity (1830, repr. ed. Delhi, 1984), p. 79.
43
‘Court of Directors’ Public Department dispatch to the governor-general in

council of Fort William in Bengal, dated 3 June 1814’, in The Great Indian

Education Debate, ed. Zastoupil and Moir, pp. 93-97, p. 94.

23
to pursue’.44 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 way’.45

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 violations 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 as to 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 as an

answer.

Instead, we need to look into the early modern European debates on

toleration. 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

44
Anonymous, ‘Toleration of False Religions’, The Dnyanodaya, December 15,

1846.
45
Kaye, Christianity in India, p. 367, p. 375.

24
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

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 therefore neither are they so in the worship of God’. 46

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 punished 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

46
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. 20-21. 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. 14-6.

25
unconditional moral obligation.47 The logical relationship between factual

premises and normative conclusions puts constraints on any explanation 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 normative

claims.

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.48 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

47
This is the consensus in moral philosophy, even though some have tried to

bridge the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. See W.D. Hudson, ed., The Is-Ought

Question: A Collection of Papers on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy (London,

1979).
48
Franklin Baumer, ‘Intellectual History and Its Problems’, Journal of Modern

History XXI(1949) pp. 191-203, p. 195. See J.C. Laursen, ‘Imposters and Liars:

Clandestine 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. Laursen (Leiden, 1995), pp. 73-108, p. 90.

26
accepted over a period of time. We shall show that a background 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 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 religious and which

were not?

In a key document of the early modern debate, the Letter Concerning Toleration

(1689), Locke intended to ‘distinguish exactly the business of civil government

from that of religion, and to settle the just bonds that lie between the one and the

other’.49 He advocated this separation, because men have two separate 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’.50 Where originated this distinction between two

spheres of human existence – the temporal commonwealth and spiritual religion?

49
John Locke, ‘A Letter Concerning Toleration’, in Two Treatises of Government and

a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. I. Shapiro (New Haven, 2003), pp. 211-254, p.

218.
50
Locke, ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’, p. 218, pp. 241-243.

27
 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 spiritual 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. 51 This

spiritual realm was opposed to the temporal carnal realm. Human beings also

have sinful bodies, which live in this realm, ruled by Satan.

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 hierarchy was

to become as spiritual as possible. Naturally, any religious institution 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 criminal activities.

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

equated with the clergy and the laity in the medieval Church, Protestantism

claimed that there was no such hierarchical division of humanity. No spiritual

51
G.B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the

Age of the Fathers (New York, 1967); K.F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion

(Charlottesville, 1992); G. Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time

of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (1936; repr. ed. Toronto, 1991), pp. 4-

5, p. 41.

28
estate of priests could exist as opposed to a temporal estate of laymen.52 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’.53 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 according to His law.54

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 idolatry:

human laws and works chained true faith. The Reformers began to denounce the

Catholic tradition and its canon law as idolatry. An entire chapter of Calvin’s

52
See Luther’s tract ‘To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’ (1520) in

Martin Luther: Three Treatises (Minneapolis, 1970), pp. 1-112.

53
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.

54
See P. Melanchthon, ‘Loci Communes Theologici’ (1521), in Melanchthon and

Bucer, 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

The Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill and trans. F.L. Battles

(Louisville, 1960).

29
Institutes carried the title ‘The power of making laws in which the pope, with his

supporters, has exercised upon souls the most savage tyranny and butchery’.

These laws, Calvin asserted, had violated Christian liberty and invaded the

Kingdom of Christ, ‘thus the freedom given by him to the conscience of the

believers is utterly oppressed and cast down’.55 The main problem, he continued,

was that human laws were prescribed as though they were spiritual laws,

‘enjoining things necessary to salvation’, but ‘our consciences 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’.56

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 political

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

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’.57 Only outward behavior 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

55
Calvin, Institutes, vol. 2, p. 1180.
56
Ibid., pp. 1181-1186.
57
Calvin, Institutes, vol. 1, p. 847.

30
external affairs on earth, for God cannot and will not permit anyone but himself

to rule over the soul’.58

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 authority;

(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 authority 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.59

58
M. Luther, ‘Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed’, in

Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, pp. 655-703, p. 679.

59
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. 961-985. J.C. Davis, ‘Religion and the Struggle

for Freedom in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal XXXV (1992) pp.

507-530; P.J. Kelly, ‘John Locke: Authority, Conscience and Religious

Toleration’, in John Locke, ed. Horton and Mendus, pp. 125-146; Andrew Murphy,

Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern

31
 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 religious belief, and the practice

and propagation of falsehoods. Clear violations 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 religious 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 history

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

England and America (University Park, PA, 2001), pp. 11-16; J. Waldron, God,

Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge,

2002), pp. 208-212.

32
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.60 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 impossible

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 intends for human

beings.

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 normative.

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

60
S.N. Balagangadhara, ‘The Heathen in His Blindness…’: Asia, the West and the

Dynamic of Religion (1994; sec. ed. New Delhi, 2005), pp. 298-307.

33
realise the unity of fact and norm. Hence, first the monasteries and later the

church were continuously reformed according to ever stricter monastic rules and

canon laws.61

The history of medieval and early modern Western Christianity exemplified

this dynamic: certain institutions, embodying the will of God, unite the factual

and the normative; yet, human attempts to realise 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 this divine purpose.

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 freedom had not

yet been realised. Neither church nor society was what it ought to be. In fact, the

Calvinist and Lutheran churches had installed a ‘popish tyranny’. Once more,

men had corrupted religion by building clerical institutions, claiming religious

61
A few overviews are: H.J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the

Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1983); P. King, Western Monasticism: A

History 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; G. Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society.

34
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 any one who refused to give

in.62 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 ‘was in fact a local

manifestation of a much broader struggle between the champions and opponents

of confessionalism’.63 Both anticlerical Protestants like Caspar Coolhaes and

62
R. Bainton, ed. and trans., Concerning Heretics (New York, 1935); Castellio, De

l’Impunité des Hérétiques, ed. M.F. Valkhoff (1555; repr. ed., Genève, 1971); Susan

C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555-1675’,

Journal of Interdisciplinary History XXIV (1994) pp. 615-637; A. Weeks, Valentin

Weigel (1533-1588): German Religious Dissenter, Speculative Theorist, and Advocate of

Tolerance (Albany, NY, 2000).

63
B. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Communion in Utrecht, 1578-1620

(Oxford, 1995), p. 5. See also his ‘‘Remnants of the Papal Yoke’: Apathy and

Opposition in the Dutch Reformation’ Sixteenth Century Journal XXV (1994) pp.

653-669.

35
Dirck V. Coornhert and the later Remonstrants accused the Dutch Reformed

Church of being a ‘Genevan tyranny’ – an imitation 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.64

Naturally, this gave rise to an equally forceful counterattack by the Reformed

theologians, who deplored this antagonism as the work of libertines aspiring to

destroy the order of true religion.65 Ultimately, the Calvinist party would triumph

in the Synod of Dordrecht.

64
J. Arminius, ‘A Declaration of the Sentiments of Arminius’ (1608), in The

Writings 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), Synodus vander Conscientien Vryheidt (1582; repr. ed. Amsterdam, 1630),

Justificatie des Magistraets tot Leyden in Hollant (Amsterdam, 1597); D.V. Coornhert

and J. Lipsius, Proces vant Ketterdoden ende Dwang der Conscientien (Gouda, 1590); S.

Episcopius, Dool-hof der Paus-gesinden (Gorinchem, 1680); S. Episcopius and J.

Uytenbogaert, Belijdenisse ofte Verklaringhe Van ’t ghevoelen der…Remonstranten…over

de voornaemste Articulen der Christelijcke Religie (s.l., 1621); H.C. Rogge, ed., Caspar

Janszoon Coolhaes: De Voorlooper van Arminius en der Remonstranten, 2 vols.

(Amsterdam, 1856-58).
65
H. Arnoldi Vander Linde, Vande Conscientiedwangh (Delft, 1629); R. Donteclock,

Proeve Des Gouschen Catechismu (Delft, 1608); J. Triglandius, Den Recht-gematichden

Christen (Amsterdam, 1615), Verdediging vande Leere end D’eere der Gereformeerde

Kercken ende Leeraren (Amsterdam, 1619); V. Van Drielenburch, Proefken oft Staelken

36
 In these decades, a dynamic emerged in the Protestant world, which

projected the norm of religious liberty as God’s will. This counter-acted the

dynamic of confessionalization, so widely discussed in contemporary

Reformation historiography.66 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 protected

by a clerical authority. The result divided Europe into distinct confessions, each

of which was obsessed with fixing doctrinal boundaries and concerned about the

violation of its church laws. The Protestant confessions allowed Christian liberty

but only if it remained within the confines of church law and doctrine.

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 disruption,

division and destruction of true spiritual faith undertaken by the priesthood and

its doctrinal fabrications. The rise of a principle of toleration was the result of

this anti-confessional movement. Its proponents perceived the failure 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 hierarchical laws and human

Van Iohanis Wtenbogaerts ende Iacobi Taurini Onderlinghe Verdraeghsaemheyt

(Amsterdam, 1616).
66
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 Valentin Weigel.

37
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 supporters had cast

the church ‘into a mould half Popish halfe Protestant’, as Roger Williams put it.67

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’.68 Once the Presbyterian church was established, internal dissenters

like the Baptists, the Quakers and radical Puritans 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’.69 After migrating to the new world, the radical Puritans built their

67
R. Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (London, 1644), 64.
68
Anonymous, Old Popery as Good as New (s.l., 1688), 16-17.
69
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, 1909-1914).

38
congregations in early America, only to see these attacked by dissenters as a

violation of God’s will in much the same way.

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 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 Expedient for Peace (1688)

argued:

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, confounded the

World with their Policy, and so jumbled things together, that Christianity is

almost lost in the Composition, so that men know not where to find it.70

Christianity must return to its primitive spiritual purity.71 Then, Christians could

unite again around the essence of God’s revelation without human accretions.

The seventeenth-century advocates of toleration emphasised the point repeatedly:

70
Anonymous, An Expedient for Peace: Perswading an Agreement amongst Christians

from the Impossibility of their Agreement in the Matters of Religion (London, 1688), p. 17.
71
L. Busher, ‘Religions Peace: or a Plea for Liberty of Conscience’ (1614), in

Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, 1614-1661, ed. E.B. Underhill (New

York, 1966), pp. 14-81, pp. 18-19.

39
false religion mixed the spiritual and political realms together. Thus, the true

spiritual order was lost and ‘a Carnal, Worldly, Politick, Ecclesiastical Church-

State’ was erected in its stead.72

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’.73

The anticlerical point returns in the tract of a fellow Baptist, Samuel

Richardson, 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 the

Presbyterian divines, Richardson had the former denounce the latter as follows:

72
The phrase is from R. Gordon’s Spiritual Order and Christian Liberty Proved to be

Consistent in the Churches of Christ (s.l., 1675), pp. 7-9, pp. 11-13. The point is also

made in Coornhert, Justificatie des Magistraets; Coornhert and Lipsius, Proces vant

Ketterdoden, pp. 61-63; J. Croope, Conscience-Oppression (London, 1656), pp. 9-10; J.

Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (London, 1659), pp. 37-38;

Williams, Bloudy Tenent, pp. 79-80.

73
Busher, ‘Religions Peace’, pp. 19-20.

40
‘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’.74 One should merely browse through the pages of the early modern

tracts on toleration to encounter many such attacks against the priests, presbyters

and other prelates.75 As it was put in Zeal Examined (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 furnished with the temptations of profit and

worldly power’.76

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

74
S. Richardson, ‘The Necessity of Toleration in Matters of Religion’, in Tracts on

Liberty of Conscience, ed. Underhill, pp. 235-285, pp. 279-282.

75
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); R. Gordon, Spiritual Order and Christian Liberty,

pp. 10-13; R. Overton, The Araignement of Mr. Persecution (Europe, 1645), p. 1, p.

14; C. Wolseley, Liberty of Conscience, the Magistrates Interest (London, 1668).

76
Anonymous, Zeal Examined: Or, a Discourse for Liberty of Conscience in Matters of

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 of

Ecclesiastical History XXXVIII (1987) pp. 569-581, p. 578.

41
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, having 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’.77 The idea that discord in religion emerged because

of the imposition of human fabrications was widespread in early modern

Europe.78

The theological framework of toleration lent coherence to these claims:

Christian liberty was the will of God and anything that went against it was

tyranny. 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

77
E. Synge, A Gentleman’s Religion in Three Parts (London, 1698), p. 6, pp. 100-101.
78
See J. Arminius, ‘On Reconciling Religious Dissensions Among Christians’

(1606), in Writings of James Arminius, pp. 146-192; C. Coolhaes, ‘Apologia’ (1580),

in Caspar Coolhaes, vol. 1, pp. 165-166; Coolhaes, ‘Christelijcke Vermaninghe’, pp.

23-24; J. Corbet, A Second Discourse of the Religion of England (London, 1668), 10; J.

Sturgion, ‘A Plea for Toleration of Opinions and Persuasions in Matters of

Religion’, in Tracts on Liberty of Conscience, ed. Underhill, pp. 309-341, p. 333; J.

Taylor, The Liberty of Prophesying (London, 1648); W. Walwyn, A Still and Soft Voice

From the Scriptures (London, 1647), p. 4.

42
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 Tyranny’.79

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 Spiritual and relating to

Eternity’.80

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 argument

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

79
Penn, The Reasonableness of Toleration, p. 5. See also his ‘The Great Case of

Liberty of Conscience’ (1670), in The Select Works of William Penn, vol. 2 (New

York, 1971), pp. 128-164, and Considerations Moving to a Toleration and Liberty of

Conscience (London, 1685).

80
Penn, The Reasonableness of Toleration, pp. 10-11.

43
permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish or Antichristian consciences

and worships, bee granted to all men in all Nations and Countries’.81

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 principle willed by God.

Toleration became a moral value because of the constant effort to realise His will

on earth. Viewed as the divine order, the model of Christian liberty gave rise to a

normative approach towards heresy and idolatry.

The question as to how this principle of toleration spread in modern

societies 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.

81
The quote is from the table of contents of Williams’s 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 and Intolerance, ed. Grell and Scribner, pp. 216-230 and Coffey,

‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited’.

44
COLONIAL POLICY AND CHRISTIAN LIBERTY

Why was it so important to know whether the ‘sacred laws of the Hindu religion’

sanctioned sati and other practices? To make sense of this question, we can now

draw on certain notions shared by the different varieties of Reformation

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 commandments 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’.82 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 Hindus.83

Charles Grant agreed: ‘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

82
Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws, pp. xiii-xv.
83
Jones, Institutes of Hindu Law, p. xvi.

45
veneration, which institutions avowedly of human origin do not produce’.84

James Mill in his History of British India confirmed the same: ‘From the opinion of

the Hindus that the Divine Being dictated all their laws, they acknowledge

nothing as law but what is found in some one or other of their sacred books’.85

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 colonials,

as it also had in Protestant Europe.86

Both Evangelicals and Orientalists conceived of paganism as the equivalent

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

84
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.

85
J. Mill, The History of British India in 6 Vols., vol. 1 (London, 1826), p. 169.
86
An interesting way to test our hypothesis would be to examine the policies of

colonial 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.

46
law’ of Manu’s Code: ‘Nothing is more plain, than that this whole fabric is the

work of a crafty and imperious priesthood, who feigned a divine revelation 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’.87 William

Jones, the rationalist Christian and gifted Orientalist, called the same work ‘a

system of despotism and priestcraft’.88According to the British, Hindu religion

revolved around demonic priests, who imposed a corrupt body of rites and rules

on the believers as though these were necessary to salvation. Still, the normative

stances towards this false religion ranged between the following two limits.

On the one hand, the view that Christian liberty was God’s will for humanity

could be interpreted in a minimal way: it allowed for freedom of conscience 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 religious 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 evangelical reformers in India

intended to educate the Hindu subjects and prepare them to accept Christian

truth by ‘liberating the individual conscience from the tyranny of the priests’.89 In

this case, ‘Hindu tyranny’ ought to be replaced by ‘Christian liberty’.

87
Grant, ‘Observations on the State of Society’, pp. 34-5.
88
Jones, Institutes, p. xv.
89
E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959, repr. ed. 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.

47
 On the other hand, one’s attitude could draw on the maximal principle of

liberty of conscience, which also included the toleration of idolatry. According 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 interpretation of His revelation.

In the words of Dnyanodaya, the Anglo-Marathi Missionary Periodical:

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.90

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 secularised 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 toleration into sharp relief.

90
‘Toleration of False Religions’, The Dnyanodaya, December 15, 1846.

48
 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 differently, 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

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

framework.91

91
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’,

Political Theory XXXVI(2008) pp. 523-549.

49