It was not maintained that the contract was an actually written document; it was supposed to be a tacit agreement.

The whole theory seems to have sprung from the study of Roman law and the constitutions of Athens and Sparta.

Nothing was known of primitive man or of the beginnings of civilisation till the nineteenth century.

The Bible and the classical literature of Greece and Rome are all concerned with civilised, not primitive, man, and with slaves and "heathens" who are accounted less than men.

The "sovereign people" of Athens and Sparta became the model of later republican writers, while the choosing of a king by the Israelites recorded in the Old Testament sanctioned the idea, for early Protestant writers, that sovereignty was originally in the people.
The Huguenot Languet, in his _Vindiciae contra Tyrannos_ (1579), maintained on scriptural grounds that kingly power was derived from the will of the people, and that the violation by the king of the mutual compact of king and people to observe the laws absolved the people from all allegiance.[72] The Jesuit writers, Bellarmine and Mariana, argued for the sovereignty of the people as the basis of kingly rule; and when the English divines of the Established Church were upholding the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the Spanish Jesuit, Suarez, was amongst those who attacked that doctrine, quoting a great body of legal opinion in support of the contention that "the prince has that power of law giving which the people have given him." Suarez, too, insists that all men are born equal, and that "no one has a political jurisdiction over another." Milton, in his "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" (1649), had taken a similar line: the people had vested in kings and magistrates the authority and power of self-defence and preservation.