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The world of science honours this famous Christ Church, Oxford don as the very epitome of the modern outlook, and in some ways he was. He loathed anything resembling brainwashing, religious or otherwise. He crusaded for the simple, but then unpopular idea that conviction must be the result of a process of reasoned evaluation of the facts without harassment or duress. Thus he is regarded as a champion of human rights and civil liberties.

His intellectual brilliance no one questions -- he took a medical degree not to become a doctor but simply so as to be able to write authoritatively on medical topics! However, John Locke had a little-understood but key role in the transmission and preservation of the Truth as Christadelphians understand it at a very critical time in its history. He was probably the most vital link between the Polish Brethren -- scattered to the four winds after 1660 -- and later developments in the English language.

Avid reader of the Latin works of the Polish Brethren, he distilled their doctrines through his own religious writings such as The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).164 These influenced countless later students of the Bible both in Britain and America towards accepting the gospel of the Kingdom.

When Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worcester, complained that if Plato's ideas were challenged popular faith in the immortality of the soul would be undermined, Locke retorted quite courteously that eternal life is a gift of God based on faith in His revealed Promises not on the sophistries of Plato. ''An error is not the better for being common, nor truth the worse for having lain neglected''.163 Locke was, despite entries under his name in popular encyclopaedias, not a humanist but a devout believer in the Word of God. Of the Bible he declared: "It has God for its Author, Salvation for its end, and Truth without any mixture of error for its matter.''