THE keynote of the seventeenth century was revolt against
authority. Modern times as distinct from the middle ages
had begun under the Tudors and were now developing
rapidly. The surviving elements of medievalism were being
viewed with increasing scepticism.

The tide of discontent in England, which began to come in
under James I ( 1603-25), swelled during the reign of Charles I
( 1625-49) and reached its high-water mark at the king's execu-
tion. For eleven uneasy years England was a republic, but as
the commonwealth ( 1649-53) gave way to the protectorate
( 1653-9) the tide turned, became more conservative, and after
a year's ebbing and flowing restored the monarchy. The return
of the Stuarts did not entail setting back the clock to the status
quo of 1603, or even 1642. The legislature might affect to ignore
all that had been accomplished during 1642-60, but the minds
of men had received an ineffaceable impression that can be
traced in many directions.

In the realm of thought there was a definite break with the
past. Scholasticism, after more than three centuries of domi-
nance, was at length challenged by a new philosophy. The
desire to learn the secrets of nature and to banish fear of the un-
known was in conflict with the cosmic interpretation that had
been accepted since the thirteenth century. The age of experi-
ment was treading upon the heels of the age of dogma.

In political thought the sixteenth-century conception of the
monarch as the saviour of society and the theory of the divine
right of kings (which reached its highest exaltation under the
early Stuarts) were violently assailed, and substitutes of almost
infinite variety were offered by theorists. Many of the demo-
cratic, and not a few of the socialistic, doctrines that are com-
monly regarded as modern, or at least of the eighteenth century,
were set forth in the seventeenth century. The greatest contri-
bution then made to political theory, Hobbes Leviathan, was
written for all time, but even in a theocratic age its daring
insistence upon a state of nature, a covenant as the basis of
society, and the imperative need for a sovereign power in the
state exercised a real if rather imperceptible influence.

In religion the Reformation had already rent in twain the

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