The first of Locke's writings on politics which remain extant derive a single normative conclusion from a theological axiom. The axiom is simply that there exists a benevolent God who provides a set of sufficient rules for the direction of human beings throughout their lives. The pieces in question are assured and a little insensitive, almost glib—the work of a clever and slightly shallow young man. From this confident beginning Locke's literary career travels a long and subtle journey and its development is rich and sophisticated. It was a career which ended in an extraordinary eminence, which left him in his own lifetime as one of the luminaries of the European intellectual scene and, after his death, as the symbolic forerunner and philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment and of what it has become fashionable to call the Age of the Democratic Revolution. It was a glittering trajectory in social as well as intellectual terms and it made him a figure of substance in the political as well as the learned world, a friend of Pembroke, to whom he dedicated his greatest work, and of Somers and Peterborough, as well as of Sydenham, Boyle and Newton. It was not a smooth ascent, though, and we mistake its meaning when we look upon it too readily from the standpoint of those honoured last years in what John Edwards inimitably called ‘the Seraglio’ at Oates, surrounded by the adulation of brilliant young men and the flattery of the great.