In several of the colonies the want of orderly government became so serious that, in 1775, the Continental Congress advised them to form temporary governments until the trouble with Great Britain had been settled. When independence was declared Congress recommended to all the States that they should adopt governments of their own. In accordance with that recommendation, in the course of a very few years each State established an independent government and adopted a written constitution. It was a time when men believed in the social contract or the "compact theory of the state," that states originated through agreement, as the case might be, between king and nobles, between king and people, or among the people themselves. In support of this doctrine no less an authority than the Bible was often quoted, such a passage for example as II Samuel v, 3: "So all the elders of Israel came to the King to Hebron; and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord; and they anointed David King over Israel." As a philosophical speculation to explain why people were governed or consented to be governed, this theory went back at least to the Greeks, and doubtless much earlier; and, though of some significance in medieval thought, it became of greater importance in British political philosophy, especially through the works of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. A very practical application of the compact theory was made in the English Revolution of 1688, when in order to avoid the embarrassment of deposing the king, the convention of the Parliament adopted the resolution: "That King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the Constitution of the Kingdom, by breaking the original Contract between King and People, and having, by the advice of Jesuits, and other wicked persons, violated the fundamental Laws, and withdrawn himself out of this Kingdom, has abdicated the Government, and that the throne is hereby vacant." These theories were developed by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his "Contrat Social"--a book so attractively written that it eclipsed all other works upon the subject and resulted in his being regarded as the author of the doctrine--and through him they spread all over Europe.