Of course, the English “Libertines” enjoyed one enormous advantage. They lived close to the sea. Only thirty-six hours of sickness separated them from the safe asylum of the Dutch cities. As the printing shops of these cities were turning out most of the contraband literature of southern and western Europe, a trip across the North Sea really meant a voyage to one’s publisher and gave the enterprising traveler a chance to gather in his royalties and see what were the latest additions to the literature of intellectual protest. Among those who at one time or another availed themselves of this convenient opportunity for quiet study and peaceful reflection, no one has gained a more deserving fame than John Locke. He was born in the same year as Spinoza. And like Spinoza (indeed like most independent thinkers) he was the product of an essentially pious household. The parents of Baruch were orthodox Jews. The parents of John were orthodox Christians. Undoubtedly they both meant well by their children when they trained them in the strict doctrines of their own respective creeds. But such an education either breaks a boy’s spirit or it turns him into a rebel. Baruch and John, not being the sort that ever surrenders, gritted their teeth, left home and struck out for themselves. At the age of twenty Locke went to Oxford and there for the first time heard of Descartes. But among the dusty book-stalls of St. Catherine Street he found certain other volumes that were much to his taste. For example, there were the works of Thomas Hobbes. An interesting figure, this former student of Magdalen College, a restless person who had visited Italy and had held converse with Galileo, who had exchanged letters with the great Descartes himself and who had spent the greater part of his life on the continent, an exile from the fury of the Puritans. Between times he had composed an enormous book which contained all his ideas upon every conceivable subject and which bore the inviting title of “Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil.” This learned tome made its appearance when Locke was in his Sophomore year. It was so outspoken upon the nature of princes, their rights and most especially their duties, that even the most thorough going Cromwellian must approve of it, and that many of Cromwell’s partisans felt inclined to pardon this doubting Thomas who was a full-fledged royalist yet exposed the royalist pretensions in a volume that weighed not less than five pounds. Of course Hobbes was the sort of person whom it has never been easy to classify. His contemporaries called him a Latitudinarian. That meant that he was more interested in the ethics of the Christian religion than in the discipline and the dogmas of the Christian church and believed in allowing people a fair degree of “latitude” in their attitude upon those questions which they regarded as non-essential.