other is willing to come: in resistance to a public grievance. I
mean, in that matter of the Bedford Fens. No one else will go to law
with Authority; therefore he will. That matter once settled, he returns
back into obscurity, to his Bible and his Plough. "Gain influence"? His
influence is the most legitimate; derived from personal knowledge of
him, as a just, religious, reasonable and determined man. In this way
he has lived till past forty; old age is now in view of him, and the
earnest portal of Death and Eternity; it was at this point that he
suddenly became "ambitious"! I do not interpret his Parliamentary
mission in that way!

His successes in Parliament, his successes through the war, are honest
successes of a brave man; who has more resolution in the heart of him,
more light in the head of him than other men. His prayers to God; his
spoken thanks to the God of Victory, who had preserved him safe, and
carried him forward so far, through the furious clash of a world all set
in conflict, through desperate-looking envelopments at Dunbar; through
the death-hail of so many battles; mercy after mercy; to the "crowning
mercy" of Worcester Fight: all this is good and genuine for a
deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers,
worshipping not God but their own "love-locks," frivolities and
formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living
_without_ God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in
condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if
you once go to war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else lies
there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to
die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or,
far more likely, is impossible. It is now pretty generally admitted that
the Parliament, having vanquished Charles First, had no way of making
any tenable arrangement with him. The large Presbyterian party,
apprehensive now of the Independents, were most anxious to do so;
anxious indeed as for their own existence; but it could not be. The
unhappy Charles, in those final Hampton-Court negotiations, shows
himself as a man fatally incapable of being dealt with. A man who, once
for all, could not and would not _understand_:--whose thought did not
in any measure represent to him the real fact of the matter; nay worse,
whose _word_ did not at all represent hi