"What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the conscience of another?
That would be far more than the power of life, liberty or prosperity.

Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy.

"The reasons against Kings," he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose the chain.

"Obedience," he said in the _Best of All_, "is due to commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim." The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might seem to warrant.

At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into being.