d genuine for a
deep-hearted Calvinistic Cromwell. Only to vain unbelieving Cavaliers,
worshipping not God but their own "lovelocks," frivolities, and
formalities, living quite apart from contemplations of God, living
_without_ God in the world, need it seem hypocritical.

Nor will his participation in the King's death involve him in
condemnation with us. It is a stern business killing of a King! But if
you once go to war with him, it lies _there_; this and all else lie
there. Once at war, you have made wager of battle with him: it is he to
die, or else you. Reconciliation is problematic; may be possible, or,
far more likely, is impossible.

It is now pretty generally admitted that the Parliament, having
vanquished Charles First, had no way of making any tenable arrangement
with him. The large Presbyterian party, apprehensive now of the
Independents, were most anxious to do so; anxious indeed as for their
own existence; but it could not be. The unhappy Charles, in those final
Hampton-Court negotiations, shows himself as a man fatally incapable of
being dealt with. A man who, once for all, could not and would not
_understand_:--whose thought did not in any measure represent to him the
real fact of the matter; nay worse, whose _word_ did not at all
represent his thought. We may say this of him without cruelty, with deep
pity rather: but it is true and undeniable. Forsaken there of all but
the _name_ of Kingship, he still, finding himself treated with outward
respect as a King, fancied that he might play-off party against party,
and smuggle himself into his old power by deceiving both. Alas, they
both _discovered_ that he was deceiving them. A man whose _word_ will
not inform you at all what he means or will do, is not a man you can
bargain with. You must get out of that man's way, or put him out of
yours! The Presbyterians, in their despair, were still for believing
Charles, though found false, unbelievable again and again. Not so
Cromwell: "For all our fighting," says he, "we are to have a little bit
of paper?" No!--

In fact, everywhere we have to note the decisive practical _eye_ of this
man; how he drives toward the practical and practicable; has a genuine
insight into what _is_ fact. Such an intellect, I maintain, does not
belong to a false man: the false man sees false shows, plausibilities,
expediences: the true man is needed to discern even practical truth.
Cromwell's advice about the Parliament's Army, early i