ament worth being a member
of? Cromwell threw down his plow, and hastened thither.

He spoke there,--rugged bursts of earnestness, of a self-seen truth,
where we get a glimpse of them. He worked there; he fought and strove,
like a strong true giant of a man, through cannon-tumult and all
else,--on and on, till the Cause _triumphed_, its once so formidable
enemies all swept from before it, and the dawn of hope had become
clear light of victory and certainty. That _he_ stood there as the
strongest soul of England, the undisputed Hero of all England,--what
of this? It was possible that the Law of Christ's Gospel could now
establish itself in the world! The Theocracy which John Knox in his
pulpit might dream of as a "devout imagination," this practical man,
experienced in the whole chaos of most rough practice, dared to
consider as capable of being _realized_. Those that were highest in
Christ's Church, the devoutest wisest men, were to rule the land: in
some considerable degree, it might be so and should be so. Was it not
_true_, God's truth? And if _true_, was it not then the very thing to
do? The strongest practical intellect in England dared to answer, Yes!
This I call a noble true purpose; is it not, in its own dialect, the
noblest that could enter into the heart of Statesman or man? For a
Knox to take it up was something; but for a Cromwell, with his great
sound sense and experience of what our world _was_,--History, I think,
shows it only this once in such a degree. I account it the culminating
point of Protestantism; the most heroic phasis that "Faith in the
Bible" was appointed to exhibit here below. Fancy it: that it were
made manifest to one of us, how we could make the Right supremely
victorious over Wrong, and all that we had longed and prayed for, as
the highest good to England and all lands, an attainable fact!

Well, I must say, the _vulpine_ intellect, with its knowingness, its
alertness and expertness in "detecting hypocrites," seems to me a
rather sorry business. We have had but one such Statesman in England;
one man, that I can get sight of, who ever had in the heart of him any
such purpose at all. One man, in the course of fifteen hundred years;
and this was his welcome. He had adherents by the hundred or the ten;
opponents by the million. Had England rallied all round him,--why,
then, England might have been a _Christian_ land! As it is, vulpine
knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, "Given a w