Its corollary is the right of revolution.  It is interesting that he should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the thought that not even the demands of conscience[3] can justify rebellion.  That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the subversion of all constitutional government.  To deny the right of revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power.  “The true remedy,” he says, “of force without authority is to oppose force to it.”  Let the sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract and resistance becomes a natural right.  But how define such invasion of powers?  The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he was following the events of 1688.  The substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince’s instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of Parliament—­all these are a perversion of the trust imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract.  The state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with one more fitted to observe it.  Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny the central position of Hobbes’ thesis.  Power, the latter had argued, must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation.  But Locke retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character of power.  It lacks the essential element of consent without which the binding force of law is absent.  All government is a moral trust, and the idea of limitation is therein implied.  But a limitation without the means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the reserve power in society.  The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke suggests is that of number.  Revolution should not, he urges, be the act of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of the covenant.

[Footnote 3:  King, Life of Locke, pp. 62, 63.]

The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it is difficult not to feel that the great Letter on Toleration is the noblest of all his utterances.  It came as the climax to a long evolution of opinion; and, in the light of William’s own conviction, it may be said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought.  Already in the sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief.  Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its validity.  Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth