ertion of a rational method of political inquiry superseded
more and more the older doctrines of a religious and traditional polity.
After Clarendon no English statesman really believed in any divine right
of the sovereign he served; and Charles himself probably believed it
still less than his ministers. The fiction of a contract between
governor and governed, on which Hobbes built up his theory of a state,
passed silently into general acceptance. John Locke, the foremost
political thinker of the Restoration, derived political authority like
Hobbes from the consent of the governed, and adopted the common weal as
the end of government. But the practical temper of the time moulded the
new theory into a form which contrasted strangely with that given to it
by its first inventor. The political philosophy of Locke indeed was
little more than a formal statement of the conclusions which the bulk of
Englishmen had drawn from the great struggle of the Civil War. In his
theory the people remain passively in possession of the power which they
have delegated to the Prince, and have the right to withdraw it if it
be used for purposes inconsistent with the end which society was formed
to promote. To the origin of all power in the people, and the end of all
power for the people's good--the two great doctrines of Hobbes--Locke
added the right of resistance, the responsibility of princes to their
subjects for a due execution of their trust, and the supremacy of
legislative assemblies as expressing the voice of the people itself.

It was in this modified and enlarged form that the new political
philosophy found general acceptance after the Revolution of 1688. But
powerful as was its influence in the thirty years which separated that
event from the Restoration it remained during that period an influence
which told but slowly on the people at large. It is indeed this
severance for the time between the thinking classes and the general bulk
of the nation which makes its history so difficult and perplexing. While
sceptics and divines were drifting to questions which involved the very
being of religion itself the mass of Englishmen were still without a
doubt, and dead to every religious struggle save the old struggle of
Protestantism with the Pope. While statesmen and philosophers were
smiling at Sir Robert Firmer and his "Patriarchal Theory of Government,"
the people remained blind to any notion of an original contract, and
every pulpit resoun