may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more
than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an
integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to
revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the
Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and
State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of
debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among
Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciæ_ and Francis Hotman among the
Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a
trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails
resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must
have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the
details, of the _Discourses on Government_. Even his theory of
toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a
hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the
lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William
Penn.

What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his
writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other.
Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published
until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the
purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had
devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is
Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always
resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to
exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was
to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the
first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular.
Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism;