centre and forum of it; he is not a
representative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was
rather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance or
vision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collision
between the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-century
movement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, when
the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down into
the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwell
said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own God
who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as
overpowering as a nightmare--and as passing.

It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; it
was the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even what
followed Cromwell's death, the Restoration, was an aristocratic
compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for a
mediaeval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of a
piece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things where
there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus the
Puritan regime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown to
mediaevalism--militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled but
highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans
became masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories
and Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in
the spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A discovery
is an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd could
be turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds.
Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; but
they had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the
Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the
vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished
almost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed
valour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It
was the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and
perhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal
symbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed they
tried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric in
the very nakedness of