and wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could
tell what a day would bring forth: they were 'births of Providence,'
God's finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of
victory, God's Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a
Parliament could assemble together, and say in what manner all this
could be _organised_, reduced into rational feasibility among the
affairs of men. You were to help with your wise counsel in doing that.
"You have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever
had." Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to be in some measure made
the Law of this land. In place of that, you have got into your idle
pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and
questionings about written laws for _my_ coming here;--and would send
the whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary's
parchment, but only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being
President among you! That opportunity is gone; and we know not when it
will return. You have had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law,
not Christ's Law, rules yet in this land. "God be judge between you
and me!" These are his final words to them: Take you your
constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my _in_formal struggles,
purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between you and me!"--

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed
Speeches of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, say
the most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon!
To me they do not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first
glimpses I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into
the possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, search
lovingly what that may be: you will find a real _speech_ lying
imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in the
great heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for the first time,
begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera,
unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories and
Biographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical
generations that could not know or conceive of a deep believing man,
are far more _obscure_ than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them
only into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. 'Heats and
Jealousies,' says Lord Clarendon himself: 'heats and jealousies,' mere
crabbed whims, theories and crochets; the