e. But affairs are now changed. During the progress of military
operations, there have arisen in the parliamentary armies many excellent
officers, who are qualified for higher commands than they are now
possessed of. And though it becomes not men engaged in such a cause "to
put trust in the arm of flesh," yet he could assure them, that
their troops contained generals fit to command in any enterprise
in Christendom. The army, indeed, he was sorry to say it, did not
correspond by its discipline to the merit of the officers; nor were
there any hopes, till the present vices and disorders which prevail
among the soldiers were repressed by a new model that their forces would
ever be attended with signal success in any undertaking.

In opposition to this reasoning of the Independents, many of the
Presbyterians showed the inconvenience and danger of the projected
alteration. Whitlocke, in particular, a man of honor, who loved his
country, though in every change of government he always adhered to the
ruling power, said, that besides the ingratitude of discarding, and that
by fraud and artifice, so many noble persons, to whom the parliament had
hitherto owed its chief support, they would find it extremely difficult
to supply the place of men now formed by experience to command and
authority: that the rank alone possessed by such as were members of
either house, prevented envy, retained the army in obedience, and gave
weight to military orders: that greater confidence might safely be
reposed in men of family and fortune, than in mere adventurers, who
would be apt to entertain separate views from those which were embraced
by the persons who employed them: that no maxim of policy was more
undisputed, than the necessity of preserving an inseparable connection
between the civil and military powers, and of retaining the latter in
strict subordination to the former: that the Greeks and Romans, the
wisest and most passionate lovers of liberty, had ever intrusted
to their senators the command of armies, and had maintained an
unconquerable jealousy of all mercenary forces: and that such men alone,
whose interests were involved in those of the public, and who possessed
a vote in the civil deliberations, would sufficiently respect the
authority of parliament, and never could be tempted to turn the sword
against those by whom it was committed to them.[*]

* Whitlocke, p. 114, 115. Rush. vol. vii. p. 6.

Notwithstanding these reasonings