attle
over England in that age; and fought-out their confused controversy to
a certain length, with many results for all of us.

* * * * *

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause
or themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles
Second and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to
judge what the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That
there could be any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these
poor Rochesters, and the age they ushered-in, had forgotten.
Puritanism was hung on gibbets,--like the bones of the leading
Puritans. Its work nevertheless went on accomplishing itself. All true
work of a man, hang the author of it on what gibbet you like, must and
will accomplish itself. We have our _Habeas-Corpus_, our free
Representation of the People; acknowledgment, wide as the world, that
all men are, or else must, shall, and will become, what we call _free_
men;--men with their life grounded on reality and justice, not on
tradition, which has become unjust and a chimera! This in part and
much besides this, was the work of the Puritans.

And indeed, as these things became gradually manifest, the character
of the Puritans began to clear itself. Their memories were, one after
another, taken _down_ from the gibbet; nay a certain portion of them
are now, in these days, as good as canonised. Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay
Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes;
political Conscript Fathers, to whom in no small degree we owe what
makes us a free England: it would not be safe for anybody to designate
these men as wicked now. Few Puritans of note but find their
apologists somewhere, and have a certain reverence paid them by
earnest men. One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor
Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty
apologist anywhere. Him neither saint nor sinner will acquit of great
wickedness. A man of ability, infinite talent, courage, and so forth:
but he betrayed the Cause. Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a
fierce, coarse, hypocritical _Tartufe_; turning all that noble
Struggle for constitutional Liberty into a sorry farce played for his
own benefit: this and worse is the character they give of Cromwell.
And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all,
with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for
himself