Ironically — given that Locke is now considered a major Enlightenment thinker — the Second Treatise was not widely read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and while many intellectuals saw his theories as important, many others dismissed them

John Locke was one of the most influential philosophers and political theorists of seventeenth-century England.

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls.

He began writing the Spiritual Exercises in 1522 and later founded the Society of Jesus, or Jesuit Order.

This idea of our great knowledge opened the way to us for sowing the seed of religion in their minds.

All of these sects observe a wonderful silence about the creation of the world and of souls. They all speak of abodes of the virtuous and of the wicked; but not one gives any explanation of the nature of the place assigned to the good, nor by whose power it is that the souls of the wicked are cast down to hell.

And they say women are as badly off if they neglect the five precepts. For they say that each woman, on account of her monthly courses, is covered with more sins than all men put together, and that thus so foul a creature can hardly be saved. They go on to say that there is some hope even for women of escaping from the prison of hell, if they give a great deal more than the men to the bonzes.

They prize and honour all that has to do with war, and all such things, and there is nothing of which they are so proud as of weapons adorned with gold and silver.

Many of these rules are rejections of “evangelical” (Protestant) theological positions as well as the recent moral failings of the medieval Church.

For Ignatius, the battle between God and the Devil is an interior struggle for the soul of the believer.

On May 25, 1521, the Diet of Worms issued the Edict of Worms, declaring Luther a heretic and an outlaw.

Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses called for religious reform and unintentionally sparked a powder keg that led to the Protestant Reformation, the sixteenth-century movement that rejected many of the teachings of Catholicism.

Luther maintains that when people die, they are released from all earthly penalties as embodied in canon law. The penalty of purgatory is imposed not by earthly law but by the person’s own fear, even despair, brought about by

According to this view, salvation in heaven is an unconditional gift of God’s love and grace. A person receives it through faith alone and acceptance of Jesus Christ as the source of salvation; it cannot be “earned” through the performance of good works, for that would imply that a well-behaved, charitable atheist could be admitted to heaven.

Religious wars erupted that were not to cease until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

One traditional arrangement that enlightened thinkers usually did not question was male domination.

Although some were priests or monks themselves, enlightened thinkers also questioned the moral ideas of Christianity.

succour