II.

CHAS. I. A.D. 1644.

CHAPTER still persisting, Laud turned to the executioner as to the gentler and discreeter person, and in a few moments his headless trunk lay bleeding on the scaffold.* It was a day of shame for the Westminster assembly. The storm of revengeful passion was furious, and they bent before it. In their collective capacity they did not lift a hand to stay the madness of the people, nor whisper a request to parliament, nor offer up a prayer to God for mercy to the prisoner. Heart and hand they joined in his execution. Yet some of the assembly were great men, most of them were sincerely good. If these men became insensible to right, and indifferent to scenes of blood, what must have been the peril of common natures in a civil war! But when hatred and revenge step in, coloured with the pretext of zeal for God, the consequences are always terrible. The admirers of the Westminster divines must regard their acquiescence in this unrighteous sentence with silent shame and sorrow; and their enemies can say of them nothing worse than this,— that a body of christian ministers, sitting in calm deliberation from day to day in the city in which he was tried and beheaded, looked on with composure, if not with secret exultation, when archbishop Laud was put to death.

*Heylyn, Laud, part ii. pp. 54, 55.

CHAPTER III.

A.D. 1643-1645.

III.

A.D.

1643-4-5.

RELIGION, it has been said, operates most upon CHAPTER those of whom history knows least. Its benign influences are chiefly to be traced in private life. CHAS. I. It eludes the grasp and touch of history. The historian cannot penetrate the hearts of men, where religion has its seat. He may describe their conduct and trace it to what appear to him the most likely motives. But even here his disadvantages are great; for the conduct of religious men is conversant, to an extent unknown in other affairs, with matters which pass in secret between themselves and God. Ecclesiastical writers, who understand the importance of their work, have always felt the difficulty and to some extent it is insuperable: it belongs to the very nature of their task.

Yet by this clue, imperfect as it is, we must endeavour to ascertain the real character of the puritans during the stormy period of the civil war. Their conduct lies open, in the broad face of day. No party, civil or religious, was ever less anxious for concealment. Their sincerity is not now to be impeached. We dismiss at once the sweeping charge of hypocrisy with which popular historians

III.

CHAPTER have so long amused us, and we dismiss it with contempt. It is true in the same sense, and proCHAS. I. bably to the same extent, in which it might be said 1643-4-5. that the troops at Waterloo were not brave, because

A.D.

a few recruits fled from their ranks and hid themselves in ditches. Of their motives it is more difficult to speak. In excited times men change their motives and put off their moral sameness rapidly: and few men are so calm as not to imbibe the contagion of external uproar, and transmit it to their inner man. Thus motives are exchanged for mere impulses. A lofty principle still abides within, but it is governed in its modes of action by circumstances, and by the passions of the majority.

There is something in great calamities which conceals their magnitude till they really appear and are present with us. This is the case with war. Till the fight begins, the question of peace or war has been the intellectual strife of statesmen. The mustering of the hosts for battle, the drill and the parade, has been the sport of children; a splendid pageantry and nothing more. Then comes the stern reality;-the first battle and its consequences; the agonies of thousands on the field, the shame of defeat, the insolence of triumph, the desolated street, and the despairing widow. The puritans, if they had precipitated the conflict, had at least a becoming sense of the difficulty and peril of the solemn crisis when at length it came. Having accepted the alternative of civil war, they entered upon it in a spirit of deep devotion. They believed that the cause and the battle were the LORD's; and to Him they appealed for help against the

III.

CHAS. I.

A.D.

mighty. Society was disturbed to its lowest depths. CHAPTER There was not a heart in England capable of reflection that did not beat high with hope or fear, or with the distress of an uncertain vague anxiety. 1643-4-5. Thousands prepared for battle; tens of thousands knelt and prayed. Whenever there is danger, fear no doubt assumes the aspect of piety, and we are liable to mistake the expression of mere alarm for that of sincere devotion. This must be admitted, and some allowance must be made; but still the devotion of the puritans is not thus explained; it was part of their habitual piety. And the state of religion during the war, in the metropolis, in the country, and in the puritan camp, requires our attention.

LONDON was entirely devoted to the parliamentary cause, to presbyterianism, and to the Westminster assembly. Here puritanism in England achieved her greatest triumph. The principles which she proclaimed elsewhere were here enforced, and all her practices were eagerly embraced. All the puritans of later days refer with pride to puritan London in the civil war, and their boast is not unreasonable. No European metropolis has ever displayed a higher character for purity of morals, for calmness in the midst of danger, for disinterested patriotism (even if it were misled), for a universal respect for religion, united with earnestness and zeal in the discharge of all its duties. An almost perfect unanimity prevailed, and enthusiasm ran high. The offerings of the wives and daughters of the citizens to the parliamentary chest resembled those of the Hebrew women to the tabernacle.

III.

CHAPTER Wedding rings and jewels were literally poured out in bushels. Money and plate were furnished in CHAS. I. the same profusion. To the royalists it seemed as 1643-4-5. if a strange kind of frenzy had smitten the citizens.*

A.D.

They appeared all at once to despise their wealth,
to impoverish their families, and to neglect them-
selves, for the sake of the public cause. Yet the
pursuits of trade went on : commerce was not
impeded in the river or on the seas; and even
literature was undisturbed. The consciousness of
power, or the more invigorating consciousness of
right, imparted an air of tranquillity strangely at
variance with the perils which threatened the city
from day to day. When the royal army was drawn
up
at Brentford there was some disturbance, and
London prepared for an assault. But even then
Milton wrote his sonnets in Aldersgate-street,† and
the learned Gataker, the pastor of Rotherhithe across
the Thames, pursued his philological speculations
on diphthongs, linguals, and bivocals, or upon the
awful mysteries of the tetragrammaton and the
sacred name Jehovah, like Archimedes, undis-
turbed. The press was at work incessantly.
Passing by the rush of political writings which
every day, and almost every hour, produced, the
calmer walks of literature were crowded as before;
and theology, not only in the shape of sermons and
appeals, but in its higher forms of critical and

*Bates, Hist. Civil Wars in England, p. 43. He was physician to Charles I.

+ "Captain, or Colonel, or Knight at Arms," &c. written when the city was threatened, 1645.

His "Dissertatio de Nomine Tetragrammato," and his "Dissertatio de Diphthongis, sive Bivocalibus," were both published during the war.