In an important work just published Mr. R. H. Tawney quotes this passage from Locke to illustrate the conception of itself by which society in England has lived and developed since the seventeenth century. This conception, he points out, is fundamentally opposed to the Catholic conception of society which it displaced. Revelation was displaced by reason; and the criterion of political institutions became expediency, instead of religious authority. The Church of the Middle Ages was a vast commonwealth, including the whole religious, political, social and economic life of its subjects under a single organic system of law—the moral law of Christianity. Already in Tudor times, the State in England had usurped all the functions of a Church, with expediency for its primary law. ‘By the end of the seventeenth century the secular State, separated from the Churches, which are subordinate to it, has emerged from the theory which regarded both as dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the external fabric of the political and social system, which is the concern of the former. . . . The State, first in England, then in France and America, finds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature, in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance.