l's to them; which
was so blamed: "If the King should meet me in battle, I would kill the
King." Why not? These words were spoken to men who stood as before a
Higher than Kings. They had set more than their own lives on the cast.
The Parliament may call it, in official language, a fighting '_for_
the King;' but we, for our share, cannot understand that. To us it is
no dilettante work, no sleek officiality; it is sheer rough death and
earnest. They have brought it to the calling-forth of _War_; horrid
internecine fight, man grappling with man in fire-eyed rage,--the
_infernal_ element in man called forth, to try it by that! _Do_ that
therefore; since that is the thing to be done.--The successes of
Cromwell seem to me a very natural thing! Since he was not shot in
battle, they were an inevitable thing. That such a man, with the eye
to see, with the heart to dare, should advance, from post to post,
from victory to victory, till the Huntingdon Farmer became, by
whatever name you might call him, the acknowledged Strongest Man in
England, virtually the King of England, requires no magic to explain
it!--

Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into
Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know a Sincerity
when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so
fatal? The heart lying dead, the eye cannot see. What intellect
remains is merely the _vulpine_ intellect. That a true _King_ be sent
them is of small use; they do not know him when sent. They say
scornfully, Is this your King? The Hero wastes his heroic faculty in
bootless contradiction from the unworthy; and can accomplish little.
For himself he does accomplish a heroic life, which is much, which is
all; but for the world he accomplishes comparatively nothing. The wild
rude Sincerity, direct from Nature, is not glib in answering from the
witness-box; in your small-debt _pie-powder_ court, he is scouted as a
counterfeit. The vulpine intellect 'detects' him. For being a man
worth any thousand men, the response, your Knox, your Cromwell gets,
is an argument for two centuries, whether he was a man at all. God's
greatest gift to this Earth is sneeringly flung away. The miraculous
talisman is a paltry plated coin, not fit to pass in the shops as a
common guinea.

Lamentable this! I say, this must be remedied. Till this be remedied
in some measure, there is nothing remedied. 'Detect quacks'? Yes do,
for Heaven's sake; but know