eve,
that the members of the high court of justice expressed such convictions
upon a simulated religious confidence? Do we think that, in the clear
line of action which Cromwell especially had laid down for his guidance,
he cloaked his worldly ambition under the guise of being moved by some
higher impulse than that of taking the lead in a political revolution?
Certainly we do not. The infinite mischiefs of assuming that the finger
of God directly points out the way to believers when they are walking in
dangerous and devious paths may be perfectly clear to us who calmly look
back upon the instant events which followed upon Cromwell's confidence
in his solemn call to a fearful duty. But we are not the more to
believe, because the events have a character of guilt in the views of
most persons, that such a declared conviction was altogether, or in any
degree, a lie.

Those were times in which, more for good than for evil, men believed in
the immediate direction of a special providence in great undertakings.
The words "God hath given us the victory" were not with them a mere
form. If we trace amid these solemn impulses the workings of a deep
sagacity--the union of the fierce resolves of a terrible enthusiasm
with the foresight and energy of an ever-present common-sense--we are
not the more to conclude that their spiritualism or fanaticism or
whatever we please to call their ruling principle was less sincere by
being mixed up with the ordinary motives through which the affairs of
the world are carried on. Indeed, when we look to the future course of
English history, and see--as those who have no belief in a higher
direction of the destiny of nations than that of human wisdom can alone
turn away from seeing--that the inscrutable workings of a supreme power
led our country in the fulness of time to internal peace and security
after these storms, and in a great degree in consequence of them, can we
refuse our belief that the tragical events of those days were ordered
for our good? Acknowledging that the overthrow of a rotten throne was
necessary for the building up of a throne that should have its sole
stable foundation in the welfare of the people, can we affirm that the
men who did the mightier portion of that work--sternly, unflinchingly,
illegally, yet ever professing to "seek to know the mind of God in all
that chain of Providence"--are quite correctly described, in the statute
for their attainder, as "a party of wretched me