["Beautiful great Soul," exclaims a modern Commentator here, "Beautiful great Soul; to whom the Temporal is all irradiated with the Eternal, and God is everywhere divinely visible in the affairs of men, and man himself has as it were become divine! O ye eternal Heavens, have those days and those souls passed away without return?-Patience: intrinsically they can never pass away: intrinsically they remain with us; and will yet, in nobler unexpected form, reappear among us, if it please Heaven! There have been Divine Souls in England; England too, poor moiling toiling heavy-laden thick-eyed England has been illuminated, though it were but once, by the Heavenly Ones; and once, in a sense, is always!"] - that we are got again to peace. And whoever shall seek to break it, God Almighty root that man out of this Nation! And He will do it, let the pretences be what they may! [Privilege of Parliament, or whatever else, my peppery friends!] "[Peace-breakers, do they consider what it is they are driv ing towards? They should do it!] He that considereth not the 'woman with child,' the sucking children of this Nation that know not the right hand from the left, of whom, for aught I know, it may be said this City is as full as Nineveh was said to be; he that considereth not these, and the fruit that is like to come of the bodies of those now living added to these; he that considereth not these, must have the heart of a Cain; who was marked, and made to be an enemy to all men, and all men enemies to him! For the wrath and justice of God will prosecute such a man to his grave, if not to Hell! [Where is Sam Cooper, or some "prince of limners," to take us that look of his Highness? I would give my ten best High-Art Paintings for it, gilt frames and twaddle-criticisms into the bargain!]— say, look on this Nation; look on it! Consider what are the varieties of Interests in this Nation, if they be worthy the name of Interests. If God did not hinder, it would all but make up one confusion. We should find there would be but one Cain in England, if God did not restrain! We should have another more bloody Civil War than ever we had in England. For, I beseech you, what is the general spirit of this I if I may call Nation? Is it not that each sect of people, them sects, whether sects upon a Religious account or upon a Civil account-[Sentence gone; meaning left clear enough] Is not this Nation miserable in that respect? What is that which possesseth every sect? What is it? That every sect may be uppermost! That every sort of men may get the power into their hands, and they would use it well;'- that every sect may get the power into their hands! [A reflection to make one wonder. Let them thank God they have got a man able to bit and bridle them a little; the unfortunate, peppery, loud-babbling individuals, with so much good in them too, while "bitted"!] "It were a happy thing if the Nation would be content with rule. [Content with rule,] if it were but in Civil things, and with those that would rule worst; - because misrule is better than no rule; and an ill Government, a bad Government, is better than none! Neither is this all: but we have an appetite to variety; to be not only making wounds [but widening those already made]. As if you should see one making wounds in a man's side, and eager only to be groping and grovelling with his fingers in those wounds! This is what [such] men would be at; this is the spirit of those who would trample on men's liberties in Spiritual respects. They will be making wounds, and rending and tearing, and making them wider than they were. Is not this the case? Doth there want anything -I speak not of sects in an ill sense; but the Nation is hugely made up of them, and what is the want that prevents these things from being done to the uttermost, but that men have more anger than strength? They have not power to attain their ends. [There wants nothing else.] And, I beseech you, judge what such a company of men, of these sects, are doing, while they are contesting one with another! They are contesting in the midst of a generation of men (a malignant Episcopal Party, I mean); contesting in the midst of these all united. What must be the issue of such a thing as this? [So stands it;] it is so. And do but judge what proofs have been made of the spirits of these men. [Republican spirits: we took a "Standard" lately, a Painted one, and a Printed, with wondrous apparatus behind it!] Summoning men to take up arms; and exhorting men, each sort of them, to fight for their notions; each sort thinking they are to try it out by the sword; and every sort thinking that they are truly under the banner of Christ, if they but come in, and bind themselves in such a project!1 "Now do but judge what a hard condition this poor Nation is in. This is the state and condition we are in. Judge, I say, what a hard condition this poor Nation is in, and the Cause of God [is in], amidst such a party of men as the Cavaliers are, and their participants! Not only with respect to what these["Cavaliers and their Participants," both equally at first, but it becomes the latter chiefly, and at length exclusively, before the Sentence ends]—are like to do of themselves: but some of these, yea some of these, they care not who carry the goal [Frantic-Anabaptist Sexby, dead the other day, he was not very careful!:- some of these have invited the Spaniard himself to carry on the Cavalier Cause. "And this is true. [This] and many other things that are not fit to be suggested unto you; because [so] we should betray the interest of our intelligence. [Spy-Royalist Sir Richard Willis and the like ambiguous persons, if we show them in daylight, they vanish forever, as Manning, when they shot him in Neuburg, did.] I say, this is your condition! What is your defence? What hindereth the irruption of all this upon you, to your utter destruction? Truly, [that] you have an army in these parts, in Scotland, in England and Ireland. Take them away to-morrow, would not all these Interests run into one another? I know you are rational prudent men. Have you any Frame or Model of things that would satisfy the minds of men, if this be not the Frame, [this] which you are now called together upon, and engaged in, I mean, the Two Houses of Parliament and myself? What hinders this Nation from being an Aceldama [a field of blood], if this doth not? It is, without doubt [this]: give the glory to God; for without this, it would prove as great a plague as all that hath 1 "and oblige upon this account" in orig. 2 "it would prove" is an impersonal verb; such as "it will rain," and the like. been spoken of. It is this, without doubt that keeps this Nation in peace and quietness. — And what is the case of your Army [withal]? A poor unpaid Army; the soldiers going barefoot at this time, in this city, this weather! [Twentyfifth of January.] And yet a peaceable people [these soldiers]; seeking to serve you with their lives; judging their pains and hazards and all well bestowed, in obeying their officers and serving you, to keep the Peace of these Nations! Yea, he must be a man with a heart as hard as the weather who hath not a due sense of this! [A severe frost, though the Almanacs do not mention it.] "So that, I say, it is most plain and evident, this is your outward and present defence. [This frame of Government; the Army is a part of that.] And yet, at this day, do but you judge! The Cavalier Party, and the several humors of unreasonable men [of other sorts], in those several ways, having [continually] made battery at this defence ever since you got to enjoy peace-[Sentence catches fire] - What have they made their business but this, To spread libellous Books [Their "Standard," "Killing no Murder," and other little fiddling things belonging to that sort of Periodical Literature]; yea and pretend the Liberty of the Subject' - [Sentence gone again]-?— which really wiser men than they may pretend! For let me say this to you at once: I never look to see the People of England come into a just Liberty, if another [Civil] War overtake us. I think, [I] at least, that the thing likely to bring us into our Liberty' is a consistency and agreement at this Meeting! Therefore all I can say to you is this: It will be your wisdom, I do think truly, and your justice, to keep that concernment close to you; to uphold this Settlement [now fallen upon]. Which I have no cause but to think you are agreed to; and that you like it. For I assure you I am very greatly mistaken else [for my own part]; having taken this which is now the Settlement among us as my chief inducement to bear the burden I bear, and to serve the Commonwealth in the place I am in! - "And therefore if you judge that all this be not argument enough to persuade you to be sensible of your danger-? [A danger] which [all manner of considerations], besides goodnature and ingenuity [themselves], would move a stone to be sensible of! Give us leave to consider a little, What will become of us, if our spirits should go otherwise [and break this Settlement]? If our spirits be dissatisfied, what will become of things? Here is an Army five or six months behind in pay; yea, an Army in Scotland near as much [behind]; an Army in Ireland much more. And if these things be considered, I cannot doubt but they will be considered; — I say, judge what the state of Ireland is if free-quarter come upon the Irish People! [Free-quarter must come, if there be no pay provided, and that soon!] You have a company of Scots in the North of Ireland [forty or fifty thousand of them settled there]; who, I hope, are honest men. In the Province of Galway almost all the Irish, transplanted to the West.1 You have the Interest of England newly begun to be planted. The people there [in these English settlements] are full of necessities and complaints. They bear to the uttermost. And should the soldiers run upon free-quarter there, upon your English Planters, as they must, the English Planters must quit the country through mere beggary: and that which hath been the success of so much blood and treasure, to get that Country into your hands, what can become of it, but that the English must needs run away for pure beggary, and the Irish must possess the country [again] for a receptacle to the Spanish Interest? "And hath Scotland been long settled? [Middleton's Highland Insurrection, with its Mosstroopery and misery, is not dead three years yet.2] Have not they a like sense of poverty? I speak plainly. In good earnest, I do think the Scots Nation have been under as great a suffering, in point of livelihood and subsistence outwardly, as any People I have yet named to you. I do think truly they are a very ruined Nation. [Torn to pieces with now near Twenty Years of continual War, and foreign and intestine worrying with themselves and with all the 1 "All the Irish;" all the Malignant Irish, the ringleaders of the Popish Rebellion Galway is here called "Galloway." 2 Feb. 1654-5 (Whitlocke, p. 599). |