ABSTRACT
There is branch of history to which Thomas Hobbes's discoursing of religion commits him, and this is a history of error and perversion. The history of thought has been too much left in the hands of philosophers, historians of philosophy and scholars who have assumed that the history of thought can be subsumed under the history of successive philosophic systems. Experience and prudence, forms of thought appropriate to the study of natural and civil history, have no part to play in the study of revealed history. Political authority is present from certain moments and it has a history-including a recorded commencement-because the prophetic word has a past, present and future and entails different modes of authority at different times. Prophecy and eschatology formed a device for drawing the process of salvation more fully within the world of time, and so subjecting its outward organization to temporal authority; history was the instrument of the secular power.
