"A Letter Considering Toleration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Locke John)

their duty are exhortations, admonitions, and advices. If by these
means the offenders will not be reclaimed, and the erroneous
convinced, there remains nothing further to be done but that such
stubborn and obstinate persons, who give no ground to hope for their
reformation, should be cast out and separated from the society. This
is the last and utmost force of ecclesiastical authority. No other
punishment can thereby be inflicted than that, the relation ceasing
between the body and the member which is cut off. The person so
condemned ceases to be a part of that church.

These things being thus determined, let us inquire, in the next
place: How far the duty of toleration extends, and what is required
from everyone by it?

And, first, I hold that no church is bound, by the duty of
toleration, to retain any such person in her bosom as, after
admonition, continues obstinately to offend against the laws of the
society. For, these being the condition of communion and the bond of
the society, if the breach of them were permitted without any
animadversion the society would immediately be thereby dissolved. But,
nevertheless, in all such cases care is to be taken that the
sentence of excommunication, and the execution thereof, carry with
it no rough usage of word or action whereby the ejected person may any
wise be damnified in body or estate. For all force (as has often
been said) belongs only to the magistrate, nor ought any private
persons at any time to use force, unless it be in self-defence against
unjust violence. Excommunication neither does, nor can, deprive the
excommunicated person of any of those civil goods that he formerly
possessed. All those things belong to the civil government and are
under the magistrate's protection. The whole force of
excommunication consists only in this: that, the resolution of the
society in that respect being declared, the union that was between the
body and some member comes thereby to be dissolved; and, that relation
ceasing, the participation of some certain things which the society
communicated to its members, and unto which no man has any civil
right, comes also to cease. For there is no civil injury done unto the
excommunicated person by the church minister's refusing him that bread
and wine, in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, which was not
bought with his but other men's money.

Secondly, no private person has any right in any manner to prejudice
another person in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church
or religion. All the rights and franchises that belong to him as a
man, or as a denizen, are inviolably to be preserved to him. These are
not the business of religion. No violence nor injury is to be
offered him, whether he be Christian or Pagan. Nay, we must not
content ourselves with the narrow measures of bare justice; charity,
bounty, and liberality must be added to it. This the Gospel enjoins,
this reason directs, and this that natural fellowship we are born into
requires of us. If any man err from the right way, it is his own