HOBBES AND THE ABSOLUTE STATE 371

comparable style kept his writings alive. Sermons, pamphlets,
and books poured from the press at home and abroad during
his lifetime and long after his death. His contemporaries saw
in him the arch iconoclast, the enemy of tradition and holy
things, the high priest of atheism, the libeller of mankind.
Bishop Burnet dismissed Leviathan as " a very wicked book
with a very strange title." Evelyn records in his diary that
Boyle, the gentle physicist, entertained feelings of antipathy
for only one person in the world and that was Hobbes. The
learned Bentley ascribed to him the decay of morality, and Dr.
Sacheverell, the, rabid High Churchman, classed him with
Spinoza as an atheist monster. He was certainly one of the
main agents in the profound atmospheric change described
by Lecky as the-secukrization of thought, for popular religion
is dismissed as a blend of fanaticism and superstition. Bram-
hall, as we have seen, denounced his determinism. The
Cambridge Platonists attacked his materialism. All his
writings were placed on the Roman Index of Prohibited Books.
The eighteenth century paid homage to the pioneer of the
Axfkldrung) but rejected his pessimism. Shaftesbury, Butler,
and Hutcheson denied his axiom that man is an incorrigible
egoist. Every young churchman militant, wrote Warburton
in 1741, must needs try his arms in thundering upon Hobbes* s
steel cap. Extinct volcanos do not provoke so much attention
as this Nietzsche of the seventeenth century.

Hobbes's philosophical teaching is of significance chiefly as
the key to the theory of the state which keeps his name alive.
Leviathan was burned at Oxford in 1683, but it proved im-
possible to put out the flame. Every serious political thinker
during the last three centuries has grappled with the father of
modern political thinking. Harrington was acritical admirer;
Spinoza and Puffendorf, while rejecting his absolutism, were
saturated with his ideas. The most powerful refutation came
from Locke, who asserted that individuals arid communities
could never give away all their rights and proclaimed the merits
of constitutional monarchy. Leading thinkers of the eigh-
teenth century were particularly severe. Hobbes's politics,
declared the Tory Hume, were fitted only to promote tyranny
and his ethics to encourage licentiousness. The radical
Rousseau vindicated the virtues of primitive man, Moiates-
quieu applied the conception of rektivity to political institutions,
and urged the separation of powers as the secret of ordered
liberty. The gospel of the fundamental Rights of Man, which