being President among you! That
opportunity is gone; and we know not when it will return. You have had
your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules
yet in this land. "God be judge between you and me!" These are his final
words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I
my informal struggles, purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge
between you and me!"--

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed
Speeches of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, say the
most: a hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me
they do not seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses
I could ever get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into the
possibility of him. Try to believe that he means something, search
lovingly what that may be: you will find a real _speech_ lying
imprisoned in these broken rude tortuous utterances; a meaning in the
great heart of this inarticulate man! You will, for thc first time,
begin to see that he was a man; not an enigmatic chimera, unintelligible
to you, incredible to you. The Histories and Biographies written of this
Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical generations that could not
know or conceive of a deep believing man, are far more _obscure_ than
Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only into the infinite vague
of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies," says Lord Clarendon
himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims, theories and
crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay down their
ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against the
best-conditioned of Kings! _Try_ if you can find that true. Scepticism
writing about Belief may have great gifts; but it is really _ultra
vires_ there. It is Blindness laying down the Laws of Optics.--

Cromwell's third Parliament split on the same rock as his second. Ever
the constitutional Formula: How came you there? Show us some Notary
parchment! Blind pedants:--"Why, surely the same power which makes you
a Parliament, that, and something more, made me a Protector!" If
my Protectorship is nothing, what in the name of wonder is your
Parliamenteership, a reflex and creation of that?--

Parliaments having failed, there remained nothing but the way of
Despotism. Military Dictators, each with his district, to _coerce_
the Royalist and other gainsayers, to govern them, if not by act of
Parliament,