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and horses, "so that his wife cannot serve God with the congregation but in frosty weather,"--when Vicars in "Jehovah Jireh" exults over the horrible maiming and butchery wrought by the troopers upon the officers' wives and female camp-followers at Naseby,--it is useless to attribute exaggeration to the other side. In civil war, even the humanest, there is seldom much opening for exaggeration,--the actual horrors being usually quite as vivid as any imaginations of the sufferers, especially when, as in this case, the spiritual instructors preach, on the one side, from "Curse ye Meroz," and, on the other side, from "Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood." We mention these things, not because they are deliberately denied by anybody, but because they are apt to be overlooked by those who take their facts at secondhand. All this does not show that the Puritans had, even at the outset, worse men or a cause no better; it simply shows that war demoralizes, and that right-thinking men may easily, under its influence, slide into rather reprehensible practices. At a later period the evil worked its own cure, among the Puritans, and the army of Cromwell was a moral triumph almost incredible; but at the time of which we write, the distinction was but lightly drawn. It would be easy to go farther and show that among the leading Parliamentary statesmen there were gay and witty debauchees,--that Harry Marten deserved the epithet with which Cromwell saluted him,--that Pym succeeded to the regards of Stafford's bewitching mistress,--that Warwick was truly, as Clarendon describes him, a profuse and generous profligate, tolerated by the Puritans for the sake of his earldom and his bounty, at a time when bounty was convenient and peers scarce. But it is hardly worth while farther to demonstrate the simple and intelligible fact, that there were faults on both sides. Neither war nor any other social phenomenon can divide infallibly the sheep from the goats, or collect all the saints under one set of staff-officers and all the sinners under another. But, on the other hand, the strength of both sides, at this early day, was in a class of serious and devoted men, who took up the sword so sadly, in view of civil strife, that victory seemed to them almost as terrible as defeat. In some, the scale of loyalty slightly inclined, and they held with the King; in others, the scale of liberty, and they served the Parliament; in both cas
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