ions
are supposed to have been employed to blind men to his ambitious
projects, to shelter him from the jealous scrutiny of rivals and
superiors. Such a purpose they may have sometimes answered, and been
intended to answer; but in the main they are nothing more nor less than
the dialect of the tribe. Because is a Christian virtue, certain
religious people have thought fit to indulge in a false vituperation of
themselves. Striving avariciously after _all_ virtues, however
incompatible the one with the other, they counterfeit vice and meanness,
that, good men as they are, they may have abundance of contrition. How
far there can be Christianity or piety in an abuse and degradation of
ourselves, when that abuse and degradation must be felt all along to be
untrue--if any reflection whatever accompanies such language--we leave
such people to settle amongst themselves. Certain it is that the
Puritans excelled in this as in every other kindred extravagance. The
elect of the Lord were fond of describing themselves as the most
contemptible of sinners; the salt of the earth as being rottenness and
corruption. It is to this habit of unmeaning self-disparagement that we
are to attribute many of those phrases which have been thought in
Cromwell to be studied artifices to cloak ambitious designs.

They are rife on all occasions, and their frequency and energy bear no
relation to the supposed exigencies of his political career. Take the
following instance. No man surely knew better than he, that at the
conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could
sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with
the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on
him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in
the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle.
As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:--"I
had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of
England, Scotland, and Ireland. I say of the officers: I had that by
their express remonstrances, and under signature. But there went along
with that express consent of theirs, an implied consent also of a body
of persons who had had somewhat to do in the world; who had been
instrumental, by God, to fight down the enemies of God, and his people,
in the three nations. And truly, until my hands were bound, and I was
limited, (to my own great satisfactio