of the Scottish army fled to Stirling. The approach
of the winter season, and an ague which seized Cromwell, kept him from
pushing the victory any further.

The clergy made great lamentations, and told the Lord that to them it
was little to sacrifice their lives and estates, but to him it was a
great loss to suffer his elect to be destroyed.[*] They published
a declaration containing the cause of their late misfortunes. These
visitations they ascribed to the manifold provocations of the king's
house, of which, they feared, he had not yet thoroughly repented; the
secret intrusion of malignants into the king's family, and even into the
camp; the leaving of a most malignant and profane guard of horse, who,
being sent for to be purged, came two days before the defeat, and were
allowed to fight with the army; the owning of the king's quarrel by
many without subordination to religion and liberty; and the carnal
self-seeking of some, together with the neglect of family prayers by
others.

Cromwell, having been so successful in the war of the sword, took up
the pen against the Scottish ecclesiastics. He wrote them some polemical
letters, in which he maintained the chief points of the Independent
theology. He took care likewise, to retort on them their favorite
argument of providence; and asked them, whether the Lord had not
declared against them. But the ministers thought that the same events
which to their enemies were judgments, to them were trials, and they
replied, that the Lord had only hid his face for a time from Jacob.
But Cromwell insisted that the appeal had been made to God in the
most express and solemn manner; and that, in the fields of Dunbar, an
irrevocable decision had been awarded in favor of the English army.[**]

* Sir Edward Walker.

* This is the best of Cromwell's wretched compositions that
remains, and we shall here extract a passage out of it. "You
say you have not so learned Christ as to hang the equity of
your cause upon events. We could wish that blindness had not
been upon your eyes to all those marvellous dispensations
which God hath wrought lately in England. But did not you
solemnly appeal and pray? Did not we do so too? And ought
not we and you to think, with fear and trembling, of the
hand of the great God, in this mighty and strange appearance
of his, but can slightly call it an event? Were not both
your and our expectations rene