enjoined by Calvinist piety. Far from treating riches as the visible sign of salvation, Locke took the position that "the rich are mostly corrupt," in Dunn's words, and the virtuous "likely to stay poor." "Virtue and prosperity," Locke declared, "do not often accompany one another"—hardly an aphorism likely to justify "unlimited appropriation," as Macpherson calls it. ^*

In his eagerness to identify Locke with the "political theory of appropriation," Macpherson dismisses his religion as a disposable wrapping that can be discarded without doing violence to the texture of his thought. Not only does he underestimate the strength of Locke's religious convictions; he misunderstands their political import. When Locke extolled enterprise and productivity, "he seems to have had in mind not large manufacturers," as Neal Wood puts it, "but petty producers, small and middling craftsmen-merchants." According to Wood, Locke should be seen as an advocate of "agrarian capitalism" as opposed to mercantile or industrial capitalism. "His fondness for the petty craftsman, the producer who sold his own wares," together with "his objections to the unproductive role of the broker," makes it impossible to consider his theory of property a bourgeois theory in Macpherson's sense.

Macpherson claims that Locke regarded the laboring classes as subhuman and proposed to exclude them from political life. It is by no means clear, however, that Locke's strictures against idleness were directed chiefly against the poor. In the seventeenth century, the "industrious" part of the British nation—against which Locke played off his criticism of the unproductive aristocracy—could still be viewed as a majority or at least as a sizable minority of the population, and the suffrage require-

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*

John Marshall's doctoral thesis on Locke, parts of which have already been published, makes it clear that although Locke was raised as a Calvinist, his mature views were those of an Arminian and eventually those of a closet Unitarian. This does not mean, however, that when Locke spoke of "callings," he used the term purely to refer to occupations, as Marshall contends. Even those who came to reject Calvinist theology continued to believe in the spiritual value of work. For those who had imbibed the atmosphere of the Calvinist Reformation, the concept of a "calling" could not easily be divested of its moral overtones. It referred not merely to occupations but to the moral duty to find work that was suited to one's abilities, useful to one's neighbors, and pleasing to God.

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