 The first work he published was an edited collection of sermons by Benjamin Whichcote, in 1698. He wrote an unsigned preface to the sermons in which he praised Whichcote’s belief in the goodness of human beings and urged his readers to use Whichcote’s “good nature” as an antidote to the poisonous egoism of Hobbes and the pessimistic supralapsarianism of the Calvinists.