If Locke had been ambitious, his path to political advancement was now open. William offered him the ambassadorship to the Imperial Court, or to that of Brandenburg. He refused both these high appointments; but accepted a Commissionership of Appeals from his friend Lord Mordaunt, afterwards Earl of Peterborough. This office was worth only £200 a year. His friends Sir Francis and Lady Masham (a daughter of the celebrated Cudworth) prevailed on him to take apartments in their house at Oates in Essex; between which place and his office in London he spent the remainder of his life. In 1690 Locke published his Treatise on Civil Government. The folio edition of his Essay, and a Letter on Education, appeared in the latter part of the same year. In 1692 he produced a third Letter on Toleration. The state of the coinage being a subject of great importance at that time, he took it into consideration, and published ‘Certain Thoughts on the State of English Silver Money, &c.,’ in a letter to a member of parliament. This treatise was thought so good, that when the matter was inquired into by the government, Locke was consulted, and his advice taken with respect to the new coinage. In consequence of this important assistance, he received from William III. a Commissionership of Foreign Trade and Plantations, the value of which was £1000 a year. The King was exceedingly desirous of a comprehension with the dissenters, and to forward his views Locke wrote his ‘Reasonableness of Christianity.’ This book involved him in a religious controversy with Dr. Edwards, who attacked its opinions in his ‘Socinian Unmasked,’ to which Locke replied by two vindications, each of them longer than the original work. No sooner had he finished this labour than he was called upon to encounter a fresh and more able antagonist. Toland and some other Unitarians having turned to their own use some of the arguments in Locke’s Essay, Dr. Stillingfleet, the learned Bishop of Worcester, confounded Locke with that party. In his defence of the doctrine of the Trinity the Bishop severely censured various passages of Locke’s great work, as tending to subvert some of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; Locke replied, and there was an alternation of answers between them till the Bishop’s death. That event took place soon after Locke’s third answer, which was the last thing he ever published. These replies of Locke are reputed to be most finished specimens of a grave and subtle irony, too refined perhaps to be generally perceived by the uninitiated eye.