ninety-two, only nine years before the Revolution. His ability soon
made itself felt, and in his earlier days he was the secretary of Bacon,
and the friend of Ben Jonson and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. But it was
not till the age of fifty-four, when he withdrew to France on the eve of
the great Rebellion in 1642, that his speculations were made known to
the world in his treatise "De Cive." He joined the exiled Court at
Paris, and became mathematical tutor to Charles the Second, whose love
and regard for him seem to have been real to the end. But his post was
soon forfeited by the appearance of his "Leviathan" in 1651; he was
forbidden to approach the Court, and returned to England, where he
appears to have acquiesced in the rule of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: His political speculations.]

The Restoration brought Hobbes a pension; but both his works were
condemned by Parliament, and "Hobbism" became, ere he died, a popular
synonym for irreligion and immorality. Prejudice of this kind sounded
oddly in the case of a writer who had laid down, as the two things
necessary to salvation, faith in Christ and obedience to the law. But
the prejudice sprang from a true sense of the effect which the Hobbist
philosophy must necessarily have whether on the current religion or on
the current notions of political and social morality. Hobbes was the
first great English writer who dealt with the science of government from
the ground, not of tradition, but of reason. It was in his treatment of
man in the stage of human developement which he supposed to precede that
of society that he came most roughly into conflict with the accepted
beliefs. Men, in his theory, were by nature equal, and their only
natural relation was a state of war. It was no innate virtue of man
himself which created human society out of this chaos of warring
strengths. Hobbes in fact denied the existence of the more spiritual
sides of man's nature. His hard and narrow logic dissected every human
custom and desire, and reduced even the most sacred to demonstrations of
a prudent selfishness. Friendship was simply a sense of social utility
to one another. The so-called laws of nature, such as gratitude or the
love of our neighbour, were in fact contrary to the natural passions of
man, and powerless to restrain them. Nor had religion rescued man by
the interposition of a Divine will. Nothing better illustrates the
daring with which the new scepticism was to break through the
theo