helpless man; not used to _speak_ the great
inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of
utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about
"births of Providence": All these changes, so many victories and events,
were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of _me_ or of
men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so! He
insists with a heavy sulphurous, wrathful emphasis on this. As he well
might. As if a Cromwell in that dark, huge game he had been playing, the
world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had _foreseen_ it all, and
played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood 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 _organized_,
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 in 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