late, grumbling, yet on the whole grateful and real way,
accept this anomalous act of Oliver's; at least, he and they together
made it good, and always better to the last. But in their Parliamentary
_articulate_ way, they had their difficulties, and never knew fully what
to say to it--!

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his _first_ regular Parliament,
chosen by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did
assemble, and worked;--but got, before long, into bottomless questions
as to the Protector's _right_, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had
at the earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech
to these men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament,
in similar rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude,
chaotic, all these Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would
say, it was a sincere helpless man; not used to _speak_ the great
inorganic thought of him, but to act it rather! A helplessness of
utterance, in such bursting fulness of meaning. He talks much about
"births of Providence:" All these changes, so many victories and events,
were not forethoughts, and theatrical contrivances of men, of _me_ or
of men; it is blind blasphemers that will persist in calling them so!
He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful emphasis on this. As he well
might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge game he had been playing, the
world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had _foreseen_ it all, and
played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by wood and wire!
These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could tell what
a day would bring forth: they were "births of Providence," God's finger
guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's
Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament could
assemble together, and say in what manner all this could be _organized_,
reduced into rational feasibility among the affairs of men. You were
to help with your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an
opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had." Christ's Law, the
Right and True, was to be in some measure made the Law of this land.
In place of that, you have got into your idle pedantries,
constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings and questionings about
written laws for my coming here;--and would send the whole matter into
Chaos again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but only God's
voice from the battle-whirlwind, for