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; not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible.  But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors.  He is attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as such.  The central problem is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to it.  Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals.  Church and State have become transposed in their significance.  The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.

The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior to organized society.  The problem, as we now know, is far more complex than the older thinkers imagined.  Yet Locke’s insistence on consent and natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of history since he wrote.  The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their will.  Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled.  The concept of natural right is most closely related to this position.  For so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation.  A merely legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of political philosophy.