e signs of having studied his
works and followed more or less his line of thought. Nothing can exceed
the warmth of esteem and love which Locke expresses for his young friend
Collins, and the touching confidence which he reposes in him.[168] Nor
was it only Collins' moral worth which won Locke's admiration; he looked
upon him as belonging to the same school of intellectual thought as
himself, and was of opinion that Collins would appreciate his 'Essay on
the Human Understanding' better than anybody. Shaftesbury was grandson
of Locke's patron and friend. Locke was tutor to his father, for whom
he had been commissioned to choose a wife; and the author of 'The
Characteristics' was brought up according to Locke's principles.[169]
Both Toland's and Tindal's views about reason show them to have been
followers of Locke's system; while traces of Locke's influence are
constantly found in Lord Bolingbroke's philosophical works. Add to all
this that the progress and zenith of Deism followed in direct
chronological order after the publication of Locke's two great works,
and that in consequence of these works he was distinctly identified by
several obscure and at least one very distinguished writer with 'the
gentlemen of the new way of thinking.'

But there is another side of the picture to which we must now turn.
Though Locke died before the works of his two personal friends, Collins
and Shaftesbury, saw the light, Deism had already caused a great
sensation before his death, and Locke has not left us in the dark as to
his sentiments on the subject, so far as it had been developed in his
day. Toland used several arguments from Locke's essay in support of his
position that there was nothing in Christianity contrary to reason or
above it. Bishop Stillingfleet, in his 'Defence of the Mysteries of the
Trinity,' maintained that these arguments of Toland's were legitimate
deductions from Locke's premisses. This Locke explicitly denied, and
moreover disavowed any agreement with the main position of Toland in a
noble passage, in which he regretted that he could not find, and feared
he never should find, that perfect plainness and want of mystery in
Christianity which the author maintained.[170] He also declared his
implicit belief in the doctrines of revelation in the most express
terms.[171]

It was not, however, his essay, but his treatise on the 'Reasonableness
of Christianity,' published in 1695 (the year before the publication of
Tol