first contest took place, was never more necessary than in the present day.

In glancing over those times, however, we must make a distinction between acts and men. There are deeds which we are bound openly and vehemently to condemn; but we should proceed too far were we to throw upon individuals the responsibility of the results. Does it not sometimes happen in the course of ages that circumstances occur so calculated to shake the mind, that, dazzled, stunned, and blinded, men can no longer see their way, and are mere instruments in the hand of God to punish and to save?

Such is the idea put forth by an eminent writer, equally great as an historian and a statesman, when treating of this epoch: "The time had now come when good and evil, salvation and peril, were so obscurely confounded and intermixed, that the firmest minds, incapable of disentangling them, had become mere instruments in the hand of Providence, who alternately chastises kings by their people, and people by their kings."*

But why should we endeavor to blacken the character of those whom God has employed in His work? Is it improper in this instance, more than on other occasions, to entertain respect for those minds which remain sincere, even when they are misguided, and are doing what they believe to be right, and to be the will of the King of kings?

From the beginning of the seventeenth century England was on a steep declivity, which she seemed inevitably doomed to descend, and be carried by it into the gulf of Popery. The blood of the Stuarts was mingled with the blood of the Guises. What the Bourbons were effecting in France, the sons and descendants of Queen Mary, older veterans than they in Roman fanaticism, considered themselves called upon to accomplish on a larger scale on the other side of the Channel. Of a truth these unfortunate princes cannot all be placed in the same rank; but there is visible in them a constant progres

* Guizot, Hist. de la Révolution d'Angleterre, i. 278.

sion towards the Church of Rome. Charles I. (1625) is more averse from the Word of God, and more inclined to tradition and hierarchy than James I. (1603); Charles II. (1660) more so than Charles I.; and James the Second surpasses all his predecessors. This progression has all the strictness of a mathematical law.

The despotic counter-revolution attempted by the two last Stuarts demonstrates the necessity of the democratic revolution which it pretended to combat. It plainly showed that, in the eighteen years between 1642 and 1660, the English nation had not risen up against mere phantoms. Charles II. -who, as his mother Henrietta Maria declared to Louis XIV., "had abjured the heresy of his education, and was reconciled to the Church of Rome;"*-Charles II. composing a treatise to prove that there could be but one Church of Christ upon earth, and that that was the Church of Rome; -Charles II. acknowledging to his brother, the Duke of York, that he also was attracted to the mother-church ;Charles II. sounding his ministers on their intentions with regard to Popery, and prepared to follow the duke's advice by a plain and public declaration of Romanism, if he had not been checked by the prudent counsel of Louis XIV.;— Charles II. refusing on his death-bed the sacrament from the Protestant bishop of Bath-replying to his brother, who proposed in a whisper to send him a Romish priest, "Do so, for the love of God!"-confessing to the missionary Huddlestone, declaring his wish to become reconciled to the Roman Church, and receiving from him absolution, the host, and even extreme unction ;-these most assuredly were not phantoms.

James II., his successor, declaring to the French ambassador, immediately after his accession, that the English were unconsciously Roman Catholics, and that it would be easy to

* See a letter from Pell, English minister in Switzerland, to Secretary Thurloe, dated 8 May, 1656, in Dr. Vaughan's Protectorate, i. 402, London, 1839.

induce them to make a public declaration;-James II. hearing mass in the Queen's chapel with open doors on the first Sunday of his reign;—James II., in contemptuous defiance of the laws, filling his army with Roman Catholic officers; and when Protestant clergymen went over to the Church of Rome, giving them dispensations to continue in the receipt of their stipends, and even in the administration of their cures ; --a great number of Roman churches rising, even in the metropolis;-a Jesuit school opened without any attempt at concealment ;-Roman Catholic peers admitted into the privy council, and along with them Father Petre, a covetous and fanatical Jesuit, who possessed his most intimate confidence; -Roman Catholic bishops in full activity in England ;-Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a popish president;-seven Anglican bishops who had protested against these encroachments, conveyed to the Tower through crowds of people who fell on their knees as they passed, and who, when these patriots were acquitted by the jury, lighted up bonfires in every part of the city, and burnt the pope in effigy ;-William of Orange, landing on the coast of Devonshire, on the 5th of November, 1688, with the English flag waving at the masthead of his ships, and bearing this inscription: THE PROTESTANT RELIGION AND LIBERTIES OF ENGLAND;—James II. next seeking an asylum at St. Germain en Laye, where he met with a magnificent reception from Louis, the persecutor of the Protestants, and where the two monarchs remained some minutes in each other's embrace, amidst a crowd of courtiers astonished at the sight of this foreign prince, who, as they said, "had given three kingdoms for a mass" these are facts of History,-facts which tell us what was to be expected of the Stuarts,-facts which show that the evil against which England revolted in the seventeenth century was not mere imagination.

.....

If, during the eighteen years of the Revolution, the evangelical faith and Protestant spirit had not been reanimated and greatly strengthened, England would not have been able

to resist the invasions of the Papacy under James the Second. It was the Revolution which began in 1642, rather than the Dutch prince, that overthrew that King. The extirpation of Popery required an ingens aliquod et præsens remedium, as Erasmus said of the work of the Reformation in the sixteenth century-"a physician who cuts deep into the flesh, or else the malady would be incurable."* There is not in England a single royalist or episcopalian, who, if he is a Protestant, and at the same time a good citizen, can fail to acknowledge the necessity of the violent remedy then applied to the disease that was destroying Great Britain. And if the revelations of history show us that the men of those times were more sincere, more pious, and even more moderate than is usually believed, it is the duty of every friend of justice not to close his eyes against this new light. We may be deceived, but, in our feeble judgment, the address in which the peers of England thanked the Prince of Orange, in December, 1688, for having delivered the country "from slavery and Popery," might have been presented by the nation to the authors of the Revolution of 1642, with more propriety than to William the Third.

In studying the life of Cromwell, the reader will undoubtedly have frequent reason to bear in mind the saying of holy Scripture, In many things we offend all. He interfered violently in public affairs, and disturbed the constitutional order of the state. This was his fault,-a fault that saved his country. With the documents before us which have been published at various times, we are compelled, unless we shut our eyes to the truth, to change our opinion of him, and to acknowledge that the character hitherto attached to this great man is one of the grossest falsehoods in all history. Charles II., who succeeded him after Richard's short protectorate; this monarch's courtiers, not less immoral, but still more prepossessed than himself; the writers and statesmen too of this epoch,all of them united in misrepresenting his memory. The

* Saying of Erasmus on Luther.

wicked followers of the Stuarts have blackened Cromwell's reputation. Protestantism was on its trial. There can be no doubt that the principles of civil liberty, which the family of James the First desired to crush, but which eventually triumphed in the English nation, and which have raised it to such an elevation, had a great share in this struggle; and no one man did more than Oliver towards their development. But the principal thing which drew down the anger of his enemies was Protestantism, in its boldest not less than its clearest, form; and the false imputation borne by this eminent man was essentially the work of Popery. In the seventeenth century, when the Protestant princes were everywhere intimidated, weakened, and dumb, and when some of them were making ready for a fatal apostasy, Cromwell was the only one to declare himself in the face of all Europe the protector of the true faith. He even induced Cardinal Mazarin, a prince of the Romish Church, to connive at his generous designs. This is a crime for which he has never been pardoned, and for which his enemies have inflicted a scandalous revenge. In this task so much perseverance and skill have been employed, that not only enlightened Catholics, but even Protestants themselves have been deceived. We feel no inclination to adopt the hatred and the calumnies of Rome, and we sympathize with Protestantism wherever it is to be found. This will not lead us to extenuate the faults of those who have been its supporters; but their defects will not shut our eyes to their good qualities. In the struggle between Protestantism and Popery, which took place in the British isles in Cromwell's time, the noblest part indisputably belongs to the former; and the mistakes of its adherents are unimportant compared with the excessive immorality and the frightful cruelties of which the friends of Rome were guilty.

The erroneous traditions of which we have spoken havespread everywhere, and have been adopted by France, that ancient ally of the Stuarts. But Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, which have been recently published by Mr. Thomas