derate Presbyterians to try if, by
reconciliation with their Sovereign, they could gain strength to oppose
the power which openly threatened their destruction and his. The
artifices of Cromwell and his adherents need not be minutely detailed in
a work intended only to give an admonitory picture of those times. In
one point those men differed from the majority of modern Reformers, or
rather the manners of that age were different from ours. Religion was
then the mode; men and women were in general expounders and preachers;
ordinary conversation was interlarded with Scripture phrases; common
events were providences; political misconstructions of the sacred story
were prophecies; and a fluency of cant was inspiration. No man (to
borrow one of their favourite terms) was more _gifted_ this way than
Cromwell; he had discerned the current of the public humour, and could
adopt the disguise which suited his ambition. Every step which led him
to the summit of power was prefaced by what he called seeking the Lord;
that is, attending sermons and prayers, by which the suborned performers
of those profane and solemn farces prepared their congregations to
desire what their employers had previously determined to do; thus giving
an air of divine inspiration to the projects of fraud, murder, and
ambition. By such a perversion of public worship, joined with an
affectation of disinterested purity, that celebrated preparative for
military despotism, the self-denying ordinance was introduced into the
Commons. After numerous prayers and sermons, intreating Providence to
strengthen the hands of the faithful, by choosing new instruments to
carry on the godly work, an agent of Cromwell's inferred, that the Lord
had indeed prompted their counsels, and proposed that henceforth no peer
or member of Parliament should hold any public office. By these means,
every man of rank and eminence who had been distinguished by a
constitutional struggle against arbitrary acts of power, and afterwards
reluctantly led into open rebellion, was cashiered and dismissed from
the army and from all official situations, which were thus left open to
the fanatical party.

Alarmed at the high hand with which this ordinance was carried, the old
commonwealth's men strained every nerve to renew a pacificatory
intercourse with the King, which they effected; but their power extended
no further; the preliminaries were clogged with terms wholly destructive
of the church, and virtu