rituals frequently enough. The state could then increase the number of citizens who
eventually accept the true and saving faith by coercing everyone to read those books and
attend those rituals. Thus, religious intolerance can, under some conditions, be an
effective means to religious ends. As Waldron puts the point, “Since coercion may
therefore be applied to religious ends by this indirect means, it can no longer be
condemned as in all circumstances irrational” (81). His conclusion applies to preserving
citizens from falling into heresy as well as to converting them to orthodoxy. If an alluring
heresy is quite likely to seduce citizens who read its scriptures and celebrate its rites away
from the true and saving religion, banning those scriptures and rites will also be a rational
means to the state's religious end. Hence, this Lockean argument for the irrationality of
religious intolerance fails.
Waldron's other objection is moral. Even if the Lockean argument were successful, it
would, he thinks, recommend toleration for the wrong reason. Its complaint is that
intolerance is irrational for the persecutors to engage in, not that it wrongs the victims.
Waldron objects that “what one misses above all in Locke's argument is a sense that there
is anything morally wrong with intolerance, or a sense of any deep concern for the
victims of persecution or the moral insult that is involved in the attempt to manipulate
their faith” (1988, 85). Opposition to religious intolerance should focus, not on the
frustrations of those who practice it, but on the injuries of those who suffer from it.
An argument that directly addresses Waldron's moral concern may be found in a work
that was published shortly before Locke's “Letter.” It is Pierre Bayle's Philosophical
Commentary on These Words of Jesus Christ “Compel Them to Come In” (1686/1987).
The words of Jesus quoted in Bayle's title come from the Parable of the Great Dinner in
Luke's Gospel. According to this story, when the invited guests make excuses for not
coming to the dinner party and even poor folk from the neighborhood do not fill all the
places, the angry host says to his servant: “Go out into the roads and lanes, and compel
people to come in, so that my house may be filled” (Luke 14:23). Starting at least as far
back as Augustine, Christians used this verse as a proof-text to provide biblical warrant
for forced conversions. Bayle's book contains a battery of arguments against a literal
interpretation of the words “Compel them to come in” that could be used to support this
kind of religious persecution.
One of Bayle's arguments anticipates the Lockean argument we have already examined.
He thinks we know that the worship we owe the supreme being con-sists chiefly of inner
acts of the mind that depend on the will and cannot be compelled.
end p.402
It is evident then that the only legitimate way of inspiring religion is by producing in the
soul certain judgments and certain movements of the will in relation to God. Now since
threats, prisons, fines, exile, beatings, torture, and generally whatever is comprehended
under the literal signification of compelling, are incapable of forming in the soul those
judgments of the will in respect to God which constitute the essence of religion, it is
evident that this is a mistaken way of establishing a religion and, consequently, that Jesus
Christ has not commanded it. (1686/1987, 36)
However, this argument confronts a difficulty that resembles the first objection to Locke's
argument. It may be that people threatened with or subjected to religious persecution