an friend would exclaim, puffing from his mouth
at the same time a huge volume of symbolic smoke. We have withdrawn it
seems, from the path of light ever since the reign of the army and its
godly officers established A.D. 1649. We must return and connect
ourselves therewith; it is our only salvation; though, indeed, if
Puritanism was the manifestation of the ideas of all preceding
centuries--if the same current of thought can be traced from William the
Conqueror to Oliver the conqueror--a very little ingenuity would suffice
to trace the same ideas, the same current of thought, somewhat farther
still. But this reign of the puritanical army was really "the last
glimpse of the godlike!"--it was "the reign of God!" and we live under
the reign of ----, psha! Why, he does not even give us a substantial
devil, but coins a strange personification of a negative. Such was not
the devil, by the way, at the time of "the noblest heroism ever
transacted on the earth." Such a definition of the "roaring lion,"
would, in those days of light and happiness, have procured its author,
at the very least, a trip to Barbadoes. Even Cromwell himself would have
_Barbadoesed_ him.

"This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of
another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and
dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in
pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each
other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic
ones" revive upon the earth.

"The Christian doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now
in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive
with us. The same clear-sighted author, who sees the Christian doctrines
so beautifully and pre-eminently developed in the Ironsides of Cromwell,
in the troopers of Lambert and Harrison, sacking, pillaging,
slaughtering, and in all that tribe of men who ever shed blood the
readier after prayer-time--men who had dropped from their memory
Christ's own preaching, to fill their mouths with the curses which the
Hebrew prophets had been permitted, under a past dispensation, to
denounce against the enemies of Judea, who had constructed their
theology out of the darkest parts of the New, and the most fearful
portion of the Old Testament;--this same author, opening his eyes and
ears upon his own day and generation, finds that Christianity has died
out of