ncerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a
notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with
prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he
used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some
definite resolution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they
would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent
prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make His
light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt
themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who had drawn
the sword against a great black devouring world not Christian, but
Mammonish, Devilish,--they cried to God in their straits, in their
extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His. The light which
now rose upon them,--how could a human soul, by any means at all, get
better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the
best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more? To
them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the
waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide
them on their desolate perilous way. _Was_ it not such? Can a man's
soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than
intrinsically by that same,--devout prostration of the earnest
struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such
_prayer_ a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one?
There is no other method. "Hypocrisy?" One begins to be weary of all
that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters.
They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went
about balancing expediencies, plausibilities; gathering votes,
advices; they never were alone with the _truth_ of a thing at
all.--Cromwell's prayers were likely to be "eloquent," and much more
than that. His was the heart of a man who _could_ pray.

But indeed his actual Speeches, I apprehend, were not nearly so
ineloquent, incondite, as they look. We find he was, what all speakers
aim to be, an impressive speaker, even in Parliament; one who, from
the first, had weight. With that rude passionate voice of his, he was
always understood to _mean_ something, and men wished to know what. He
disregarded eloquence, nay despised and disliked it; spoke always
without premeditation of the words he was to use. The Reporters, too,
in those days seem to have been sing