Grotius

And ’tis the excellent observation of Grotius, God has wisely appointed this way of perswading Men the truth of the Gospel, that Faith might be accepted as an act of Obedience from the reasonable Creature.

The likes of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, among others, had a substantial historical bearing on the theory’s development.

People's rights to land have been debated by philosophers since at least John Locke and Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century.

Arguably, Thomas Jefferson, who had based his Declaration of Independence on a genuinely intimate familiarity with Locke, Vattel, Hobbes, Grotius, Rousseau and Montesquieu, was the most learned of all.

That is the lesson of the jurist Grotius and of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an elegant and useful lesson in practical philosophy.