Civil War and had built up a network of ministerial friends, including John Owen, Thomas Manton, William Bates and John Howe. Wharton, a lay member of the Westminster Assembly in the 1650s, continued an influential dissenting Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire through the Restoration period. He had connections in the United Provinces and France. In 1662 he offered Gale £40 a year as tutor to his sons, a position which enabled Gale to travel to the French Huguenot College at Caen and meet other scholars including Samuel Bochart. Gale's strictness as a teacher offended his patron and he was dismissed in July 1664. After taking the opportunity to travel for a few months, he returned to England in early 1665 and was back at Wharton's Quainton estate before the end of the year. The latter portion of his life Gale passed in London as assistant to John Rowe, an Independent minister who had charge of a church in Holborn, active in the lull of efforts against conventicles after the Great Fire. Gale settled at Newington Green and took pupils: John Ashwood of Peckham, and the two sons of John Rowe, Thomas (who succeeded Gale as minister) and Benoni. Gale succeeded Rowe in 1677, and died in the following year. He is buried in Bunhill Fields burial ground, where his headstone is believed to be the earliest surviving monument. The Court of the Gentiles Gale worked in the 1660s on manuscripts for a large-scale and erudite theoretical work of intellectual history; a hint in Grotius's De Veritate (i. 16) gave him the idea of the derivation of all ancient learning and philosophy from the Hebrew scriptures. He therefore traced European languages to the Hebrew language, and all the theologies, sciences, politics, and literature of pagan antiquity to a Hebrew tradition. In a similar way he dealt with the origin of all philosophies. He also accounted for the errors of pagan philosophy and Catholic divinity by the theory of corruption by successive apostasies from a divine original. Constructively he proposed a reformed Platonism, and tried to rescue the Calvinistic doctrine of predetermination from difficulties. Work left in store escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666. Gale's major work, The Court of the Gentiles, taking its name from the Court of the Gentiles in the Second Temple, appeared in parts in 1669, 1671 and 1676. It takes the form of a storehouse