Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among Catholics, the author of the _Vindiciae_ 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; 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.