n the oracles of God. If their names were not found in
the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If
their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials,
legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were
houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should
never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests,
they looked down with contempt, for they esteemed themselves rich in a
more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language,
nobles by the right of an early creation, and priests by the
imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to
whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged; on whose
slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious
interest; who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created,
to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should
have passed away. Events which shortsighted politicians ascribed to
earthly causes had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires
had risen, and flourished, and decayed.

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all
self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm,
inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his
Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional
retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was
half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of
angels, or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the
Beatific Vision, or awoke, screaming, from dreams of everlasting
fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the scepter of the
millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his
soul that God had hidden His face from him. But when he took his seat
in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous
workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People
who saw nothing of the Godly but their uncouth visages, and heard
nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might
laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered
them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics
brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and
immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent
with their religious zeal, but which were in