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Locke thinks that most people in the past, who thus formulated the tradition we inherit, did not govern their beliefs properly. They foolishly took onboard all sorts of dubious and even pernicious ideas without submitting them to the scrutiny of critical reason. Worse, they then elevated various versions of this mish-mash to the level of dogma, and proceeded to fight religious wars over them.
Locke wants everyone to calm down and take themselves a little more humbly—indeed, a lot more humbly. Locke's view of epistemic (and therefore political) humility shows up in several key respects:
(1) We should, he advises, dispense with tradition and instead we should employ Reason to analyze what our senses tell us. Then we should strictly apportion our assent to whatever we conclude out of such reflections according to the grounds we have for believing them. Rather than a yes/no, all-or-nothing mentality, we should establish a sort of gradient of belief. Thus we recognize that most of what we believe is not certain, but more-or-less probably, and we hold our beliefs therefore with the appropriate firmness and humility.
Wolterstorff asserts that here is the core of Locke's philosophy and of his status in the history of philosophy: "Locke was the first to develop with profundity and defend the thesis that we are all responsible for our believings, and that to do one's duty with respect to one's believings one must, at appropriate junctures and in appropriate ways, listen to the voice of Reason. …Locke, on this issue, is the father of modernity."
(2) We should recognize, however, that Reason can provide us with certainty only on very restricted matters—really, just on the state of our own minds. I think I'm sitting in a chair; I think I'm typing on a keyboard or reading a magazine: We can know that, at least, for certain. But that's pretty much all Reason can approve as certain. Granted, we also have occasional glimpses of the true order of things—what Locke calls "insights."But beyond this very small yield of the rationally or intuitively certain, we have only belief, opinion, judgment, and the like.
Thus, contrary to the stereotype of the Enlightenment thinker subjecting every perception and conception to the gimlet eye of Reason, Locke says that one is obligated to undertake such rigorous inquiry only into issues of maximal "concernment" to one. These, after all, are the issues that drive people to extremes of belief and action, even to civil war. Locke otherwise does not offer such regulations for thought on anything else: "Locke," Wolterstorff contends, "has no general theory of belief-entitlement."
(3) Before God, however, we can humbly do our duty, for God has graciously provided sufficient indications of his will, of the nature of the world and of our selves, of his salvation, and so on that we can indeed live as Christians and please him thus. We do not have certainty about all these things—thus we ought not to act as if we do (in, say, religious wars). What we have instead is sufficient for us to humbly believe and obey.
The correct response, therefore, to a properly deep and wide skepticism about our possibility of getting to "the things themselves" is, Locke says, grateful contentment, and thus Wolterstorff quotes Locke in what could be a rebuke to the postmodern skeptics of our own time:
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