s a personal grievance, or rather a corroding passion. What
were bishops personally to him? He might have prayed, and expounded, and
walked meditative in his fields, and left a public question to be
decided by the movements, necessarily slow, of public opinion. But no;
he was constituted quite otherwise. From a spiritual jurisdiction,
claimed though not exercised over him, his soul revolted. And this
hatred to prelacy, to any spiritual authority over him or his--this
determination to be his own priest--is, if not the strongest, certainly
the steadiest and most constant feeling that he manifests. We trace it
throughout his whole career. The first thing we hear of him in the House
of Commons is a protest, a sort of ominous growl, against the promotion
of some Arminian or semi-Popish divine. "If these are the steps to
church preferment, what are we to expect!" Almost the first glimpse we
catch of him when he has taken arms, is as the captain of a troop
entering some cathedral church, and bidding the surpliced priest, who
was reading the liturgy, "to cease his fooling, and come down!" And
throughout the letters which he addresses to the Speaker from the seat
of war, he rarely omits the opportunity of hinting, that the soldiers
are worthy of that religious liberty for which they have fought so well.
"We pray you, own His people more and more; for they are the chariots
and horsemen of Israel." And in one of his latest speeches, he describes
it as the great "extremity" of past times, that men were not permitted
to preach in public unless they were ordained.

A rooted animosity to prelatical or other spiritual domination, is the
key-note of this "melodious worker," as Mr Carlyle calls him. Cromwell
entered the civil war provided with no theory or plan of civil
government, animated with no republican zeal; it was not patriotism in
any ordinary sense of the word, it was his controversy with the church
of England that brought him on the field of battle. After fighting
against episcopacy, he fought with equal zeal against presbyterianism;
but against monarchy, or for the republic, he can hardly be said to have
drawn the sword. We all applaud the sagacity which saw at once that the
strongest antagonist to the honour and fidelity of the royalist, was to
be found in the passion of the zealot. He enlisted his praying regiment.
From that time the battle was won. But the cause was lost. What hope
could there be for the cause of civil free