hich Cromwell found much
that he liked. It was a political sermon, on "Israel's bringing-out
of Egypt, through a Wilderness, by many signs and wonders, towards a
Place of Rest,"--Egypt interpreted as old Prelacy and the Stuart role
in England, the Wilderness as all the intermediate course of the
English Revolution, and the Place of Rest as the Protectorate or what
it might lead to. Goodwill seems to have described with special
reprobation that latest part of the Wilderness in which the cry had
arisen for sheer Levelling in the State and sheer Voluntaryism in the
Church; and Cromwell, starting in that key himself, addressed the
Parliament, with noble earnestness, in what would now be called a
highly "conservative" speech. Glancing back to the Barebones
Parliament and beyond, he sketched, the proceedings of himself and
the Council and the great successes of the Commonwealth during the
intervening eight months and a half, and hopefully committed to the
Parliament the further charge of Order and Settlement throughout the
three nations, Then he withdrew. That same day they chose Lenthall
for their Speaker, and Scobell for their Clerk.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cromwell's Second Speech (Carlyle, III. 16-37); Commons
Journals of dates.]

Cromwell's hopes were blasted. The political division of the
population of the British Islands was now into OLIVERIANS, REPUBLICAN
IRRECONCILABLES, PRESBYTERIANS, and STUARTISTS, the two last
denominations hardly separable by any clear line, Now, in this new
Parliament, though there were many staunch Oliverians, and no avowed
Stuartists, the Republican Irreconcilables and the Presbyterians
together formed a majority. They needed only to coalesce, and the
Parliament called by Oliver's own writs would be an Anti-Oliverian
Parliament. And this is what happened.

No sooner was the House constituted, with about 320 members present
out of the total 460, than it proposed for its first business what
was called "The Matter of the Government"; by which was meant a
review of that document of forty-two Articles, called the
_Government of the Commonwealth_, which was the constitutional
basis of the Protectorate. On Thursday, Sept. 7, accordingly, they
addressed themselves to the vital question of the whole document as
propounded in the first of the Articles. "Whether the House shall
approve that the Government shall be in one Single Person and a
Parliament": such was the debate that day in Grand Committee, afte