Thomas Hill Green

“ A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action ”

“ Hence it has issued, as among the quakers, in a far-reaching zeal of cosmopolitan philanthropy. Jesuitry, on the other hand, is the ruin of all public spirit. It satisfies the individual soul and reconciles it to the church by casuistical devices which give the guise of reason to the interested suggestions of personal passion. In saving the soul it ruins nations, not because it proposes a higher law than that of which the kingdoms of this world are capable, but because it makes salvation a process of self-seeking no other than the satisfaction of the hunger of sense. ”

“ That in Cromwell, as a matter of fact, it was an expansive element, in which a sympathy with the ‘waiting spirit’ of the sectaries, such as was necessary for their guidance, went along with a prevailing zeal for the ‘salus populi’ and a clear judgment of its needs, is the only interpretation that will explain the history as a whole. To the guidance of a man possessing such a strange compound of qualities, it is due that our great religious war ended not simply in blood, but in a real step forwards of English society. ”

“ It was not in them that men, whose pastime was preaching and being preached to, who discovered strange lights in their bibles to interpret strange events, could find a natural leader, but in one who in his private prayers would ‘throw himself on his face and pour out his soul with tears for a quarter of an hour,’ who never went into battle without a text to feed on, who sang psalms as he led them to victory. The army, though it had no representative of its peculiar spirit on the council of state except Cromwell, was the real constituency of the republican parliament. ”

“ The soul, admitted in its own right to the divine audience, still needs a language. It must know whom it approaches, and what it is his will to give. But as the intercourse is inward and spiritual, so must be the power which regulates it; not a priest or a liturgy, but the voice of the divine spirit in the bible, interpreted by the believer’s conscience. Religion being thus internalised and individualised, preaching, as the action of soul on soul, becomes the natural channel of its communication. ”

“ A seasonable threat of a praemunire, however, from the commons, laid the rising dust in the assembly; but the mounting spirit of the new forcers of conscience was shown in the opposition made to the petition which the independents offered to parliament, that their congregations might have the right of ordination within themselves, and that they might not be brought under the power of the ‘presbyterian classes.’ It would be tedious to follow the war of committees, sermons, pamphlets, which this request, modest in itself, and more modest in form, excited. ”

“ His conduct at this crisis, as throughout his public life, corresponded exactly to the account which he gave of it himself. Into parliament, as into battle, he carried the ‘waiting spirit’ in which the sectaries believed. He trusted for guidance to a sudden inspiration interpreting the necessity of events. At last, at the critical point, just when he saw Lesley making a gap in his line at Dunbar, ‘the spirit of God was strong upon him,’ he would no longer consult ‘flesh and blood,’ but took the decisive step. ”

“ In these days of playing at heroes among the ‘inferior races,’ such men, perhaps, receive less credit than is their due, nor is it my purpose to measure the man of principle against the ‘man of destiny,’ who may be a political gambler, but merely to indicate their inevitable {349} collision. If Cromwell had been a political gambler, he would not have been always showing his hand, nor should we have the strange collection of impromptu letters and speeches, speeches of which ‘he could not recall four words’ after they were spoken, which let us see into the workings of his soul. ”

“ I desire you would receive this man into your favour and good opinion. I believe, if he follow my counsel he will deserve no other but respect from you. Take heed of being sharp, or too easily sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning religion. If there be any other offence to be charged upon him, that must in a judicial way receive determination.’
[1] [Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xx.] ”

“ But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.’ [1] Cromwell’s labour, however, was not wholly in vain. During five years, by the mere force of his instinct of settlement, his commanding energy, and that absorbing sympathy miscalled hypocrisy, which enabled him to hold the hearts of the sectaries even while he disappointed their enthusiasm, he at least kept the peace between the saints and the world, secured liberty of conscience, and placed it on ground which even the flood of prelatical reaction was not able wholly to submerge. ”

“ In the conscience of man, the process had three principal stages, called by Vane the natural, legal, and evangelical conscience. The natural conscience was the light of those who, having not the law, were by nature a law unto themselves. It was the source of ordinary right and obligation. ‘The original impressions of just laws are in man’s nature and very constitution of being.’ These impressions were at once the source and the limit of the authority of the magistrate. The legal conscience was the source of the ordinances and dogmas of the christian. ”

“ To the higher intellects of the time, like Dante, the co-ordination of the two seemed an evil, for under the name of a separation between the spiritual and temporal was covered an antagonism of sovereignties equally temporal. The one thwarted, supplemented, combined with the other in the same sphere of outward relations. Together they built up the firmament of custom and ordinance, which the boundless spirit had not yet learned to feel as a limitation.
The Reformation, however, had a history. Not only was it struggling into life during the whole fifteenth century ”

“ It is meet that he have all the praise. Presbyterians, independents, all have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; the same presence and answer; they agree here, have no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere! All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious; because inward and spiritual, in the body, and to the head. For being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace-sake study and do as far as conscience will permit. ”

“ Religion, meanwhile, is regulated, and the agencies such as jesuitry by which it might interfere with secular life are carefully watched. Under such regulation it is left to itself. To the citizen it becomes a mere ceremonial. His attitude towards it is simply passive. At best it does but fill up the vacancies of his social life or comfort him in his final seclusion from it. The devout become a class by themselves, estranged from the activities of civil life. Only for them and for women, as the passive element in society, is religion a permanent influence. ”

“ Thus there arose that combination, by which the catholic reaction had everywhere worked, of a court party and a church party, each using the other for the purpose of silencing the demand for a ‘reason why’ in politics and religion. Charles and Laud alike represent that jesuitical conscience (if I may be allowed the expression) which is fatal to true loyalty. As Milton has it, ‘a private conscience sorts not with a public calling.’ Such a conscience may be true to a cause, as Charles and Laud were doubtless, from whatever reason, both true to the cause of a sacerdotal church. ”

“ An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people. ”

“ Their general burden is that tithes may be either abolished as levitical and Romish, or gathered into a common treasury, and then some part of them applied to the maintenance of a godly ministry in each county; that those ‘drunken, malignant, scandalous, and profane ones,’ that go under the name of ministers, be put to work for their living; that justice may be given, not bought, and all matters of meum and tuum determined free, yet by a written law; that some check may be put on the swarms of lawyers, attorneys, and solicitors, nourished with the bread of oppression by long and tedious suits. ”

“ As our critical conceit gets the better of our political insight when we judge of the political capacity of a nation or class by the roughness of its ideas or the bad taste of its utterances, so it masters our historical sense when we treat the enthusiasm of a past age as simulation, its unscrupulousness as want of principle, and the energy which regards neither persons nor formulae in going straight to its end as a selfish instinct of aggrandisement. ”

“ It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally merciful to the evil and to the good. ”

“ The republic claimed, and claimed truly, to be the creation of the impulse of freedom, yet it found nothing but sullen acquiescence around it; it spoke in the name of the people, not half of whom, as lady Fairfax said, it represented; it asserted parliamentary right, though parliament had been ‘purged’ (nearly clean) to make room for it; it was directed by men of a ‘civil’ spirit, and had civil right to maintain, while it rested on the support of armed enthusiasts, who cared only for the privilege of saints. ”

“ The sudden palpable reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh, apparently, perhaps, a spiritualising of the flesh, would have been really a carnalising of the spirit. The hopelessness, however, of the pacification which he contemplated was the tragedy of Cromwell’s later life. In the stress of protecting the ‘godly interest’ against itself, ‘worldly mixtures’ inevitably came to prevail over the pure spiritual fire. To the saints he seemed in serving the Lord’s people to lose his own soul, and his conscience was too sympathetic not to shrink under their judgment. ”

“ The historic hero, strong to make the world new, and exulting in his strength, has his inspiration from a past which he knows not, and is constructing a future which is not that of his own will or imagination. ”

“ If you choose godly honest men to be captains of horse, honest men will follow them.... I had rather have a plain, russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman, and is nothing else. I honour a gentleman that is so indeed.’
[1] [Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, No. xvi.] ”

“ The lords, as if it were the chief privilege of nobility to be licensed in vice, claimed many prerogatives, which set them out of the reach of common justice, which these good people would have had equally belong to the poorest as well as to the mighty.’ ‘But,’ continues Mrs. Hutchinson, taking a turn at philosophy, ‘as all virtues are mediums and have their extremes, there rose up after under the same name a people who endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities, which these sober levellers were never guilty of desiring.’ [1]
[1] [Life of colonel Hutchinson, ii. 125; ed, 1885.] ”

“ Through the policy of the fifteen years which preceded the Long Parliament, a policy sometimes outrageous, sometimes trivial, the same purpose runs. The promulgation of the Book of Sports, the torturing of writers against plays and ceremonies, the persecution of calvinism, the suppression of the lectureships by which the more wealthy puritans sought to maintain a preaching ministry uncontrolled by the bishops, all tend to divert the human spirit from the consciousness of its right and privilege to acquiescence in what is given to it from without. ”

“ It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial. Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical authority, claiming to be jure divino like the presbyterian, and which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned towards God. ”

“ The rational desire for reform, however, which these petitions indicate, was always liable in the army to pass into a spirit of mutiny and disaffection, or into an ecstatic revolt, such as constantly appeared in those times against the clothing, literal and metaphorical, with which custom has covered the nakedness of human life. The grand mover of the mutinous spirit was John Lilburne, the object of Marten’s well-known joke, that if he were the only man left in the world, John would quarrel with Lilburne and Lilburne with John. His obligations to Cromwell were of long standing. ”

“ And providence only must be the drum; providence the word of command, that calls them from above, but always to some larger benefice.... For while the hope to be made classic and provincial lords led them on, while pluralities greased them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of religion, more than all sects and heresies they exclaim against; then to fight against the king’s person, and no less a party of his lords and commons, or to put force on both the houses was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers ”