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sincere and real men beyond what is possible or honest to retreat from, not only turn revolters from those principles, which only could at first move them, but lay the strain of disloyalty, and worse, on those proceedings which are the necessary consequences of their own former actions; nor disliked by themselves, were they managed to the entire advamogos of their own faction; not considering the while that he toward whom they boasted their new fidelity, counted them accessory; and by those statutes and laws, which they so impotently brandish against others, would have doomed them to a traitor's death for what they have done already.

It is true, that most men are apt enough to civil wars and commotions as a novelty, and for a flash hot and active; but through sloth or inconstancy, and weakness of spirit, either fainting ere their own pretences, though never so just, be half attained, or through an inbred falsehood and wickedness, betray, ofttimes to destruction with themselves, men of noblest temper joined with them for causes whereof they in their rash undertakings were not capable. If God and a good cause give them victory, the prosecution whereof for the most part inevitably draws after it the alteration of laws, change of government, downfall of princes with their families; then comes the task to those worthies which are the soul of that enterprise, to be sweat and laboured out amidst the throng and noses of vulgar and irrational men. Some contesting for privileges, customs, forms, and that old entanglement of having at the outset preached a crusade against royalty; but is far from joining with the poet in reprehending their backwardness to "fight it out, mordicus, to death." "The presbyterians (many of whom, before the war, had got, he observes, into parish churches) preached the people into rebellion; incited them to take up arms and fight the Lord's battles, and destroy the Amalekites, root and branch, hip and thigh, and to root out the wicked from the earth; that was, in their sense, all that loved the king, the bishops, and the common prayer." "It has been fully made out, that many of the regicides were drawn into the grand rebellion by the direful imprecations of seditious preachers from the pulpit." Dr. South relates that "he had it from the mouth of Axtell the regicide, that he, with many more, went into that execrable war, with such a controlling horror upon their spirits, from those public sermons, especially of Brooks and Calamy, that they verily believed they should have been accursed of God for ever, if they had not acted their part in the dismal tragedy, and heartily done the devil's work." (Sermons, i. 513.) He adds, that "it was the pulpit that supplied the field with swordsmen, and the parliament-house with incendiaries."-ED.

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iniquity, their gibberish laws, though the badge of their ancient slavery. Others, who have been fiercest against their prince, under the notion of a tyrant, and no meau incendiaries of the war against them, when God, out of his providence and high disposal hath delivered him into the hand of their brethren, on a sudden and in a new garb of allegiance, which their doings have long since cancelled, they plead for him, pity him, extol him, protest against those that talk of bringing him to the trial of justice, † which is the sword of God, superior to all mortal things, in whose hand soever by apparent signs his testified will is to put it.

But certainly, if we consider who and what they are, on a sudden grown so pitiful, we may conclude their pity can be no true and Christian commiseration, but either levity and

*To those who would see a thorough exposure of the absurdity of this "gibberish," we recommend Arthur Symonds's "Mechanics of Lawmaking," a work of much merit, and little pretensions, which should be the vade mecum of members of Parliament, committee-men, and the readers of parliamentary debates.-ED.

From this passage it is clear that, though the work was not published until after the execution of Charles, it was written previously, to fortify the resolution, perhaps, of the more hesitating and faint-hearted among the tyrannicides, who, to keep them steady to their purpose, may have stood in need of being supported by texts of Scripture. Sir Egerton Brydges, an ardent and an enlightened admirer of Milton, is exceedingly scandalized at the doctrine maintained in this treatise: "the very title," he says, "is surely, in the highest degree, objectionable, and does not, in these days, require any refutation. To say the truth, this is a part of Milton's character which puzzles me-and no other. This bloodthirstyness does not agree with his sanctity, and other mental and moral qualities," &c. (Life, p. 108.) From this it is evident, that in professing not to comprehend this point of the poet's character, he is guilty of no hypocrisy; for most certainly, nothing could be further from Milton's soul than the brutal thirst of blood here attributed to him, which would have brought down his noble nature to a level with the Murats and Robespierres of the past age. On the contrary, it was his horror for blood, his humane impatience at beholding it shed like water, in civil wars, his dread of seeing re-established a tyranny by which the value of man's life was not properly recognised, that caused him to desire the interference of the "sword of God," to restore peace and freedom to these distracted kingdoms. He was in all things an enthusiast. Had the firm establishment of liberty required the sacrifice, we are fully persuaded there were moments in his glorious career in which he who willingly encountered blindness for the Commonwealth would, with equal ardour, have encountered death. It was under the influence of these stern principles that he called for and justified the execution of Charles; not from any fierce or malignant wish to destroy the man who for so many years had wielded the supreme authority in England.-ED.

shallowness of mind, or else a carnal admiring of that worldly pomp and greatness, from whence they see him fallen; or rather, lastly, a dissembled and seditious pity, feigned of industry to beget new discord. As for mercy, if it be to a tyrant, under which name they themselves have cited him so oft in the hearing of God, of angels, and the holy church assembled, and there charged him with the spilling of more innocent blood by far than ever Nero did, undoubtedly the mercy which they pretend is the mercy of wicked men; and "their mercies," we read, "are cruelties;" hazarding the welfare of a whole nation, to have saved one whom they so oft have termed Agag, and vilifying the blood of many Jonathans who have saved Israel; insisting with much niceness on the unnecessariest clause of their covenant wrested, wherein the fear of change and the absurd contradiction of a flattering hostility had hampered them, but not scrupling to give away for compliments, to an implacable revenge, the heads of many thousand Christians more.

Another sort there is, who coming in the course of these affairs to have their share in great actions above the form of law or custom, at least to give their voice and approbation; begin to swerve and almost shiver at the majesty and grandeur of some noble deed, as if they were newly entered into a great sin; disputing precedents, forms, and circumstances, when the commonwealth nigh perishes for want of deeds in substance, done with just and faithful expedition. To these I wish better instruction, and virtue equal to their calling; the former of which, that is to say, instruction, I shall endeavour, as my duty is, to bestow on them; and exhort them not to startle from the just and pious resolution of adhering, with all their strength and assistance, to the present parliament and army, in the glorious way wherein justice and victory hath set them-the only warrants through all ages, next under immediate revelation, to exercise supreme power— in those proceedings, which hitherto appear equal to what hath been done in any age or nation heretofore justly or magnanimously.

Nor let them be discouraged or deterred by any new apostate scarecrows, who, under shew of giving counsel, send out their barking monitories and mementoes, empty of aught else but the spleen of a frustrated faction. For how

can that pretended counsel be either sound or faithful, when they that give it see not, for madness and vexation of their ends lost, that those statutes and scriptures which both falsely and scandalously they wrest against their friends and associates, would, by sentence of the common adversary, fall first and heaviest upon their own heads? * Neither by mild and tender dispositions be foolishly softened from their duty and perseverance with the unmasculine rhetoric of any puling priest or chaplain, sent as a friendly letter of advice, for fashion's sake in private, and forthwith published by the sender himself, that we may know how much of friend there was in it, to cast an odious envy upon them to whom it was pretended to be sent in charity. Nor let any man be deluded by either the ignorance or the notorious hypocrisy and self-repugnance of our dancing divines, who have the conscience and the boldness to come with scripture in their mouths, glossed and fitted for their turns with a double contradictory sense, transforming the sacred verity of God to an idol with two faces, looking at once two several ways; and with the same quotations to charge others, which in the same case they made serve to justify themselves. 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 the 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

* On the conduct of the Presbyterians, Dr. Symmons, himself belonging to the movement party in politics, makes the following pertinent remarks: "In the course of this work the presbyterians obtain much of the author's notice; and their conduct is exposed by him with the severity it deserved. It was difficult indeed to animadvert too strongly upon the inconsistency of men who, after resisting the authority of their sovereign, after making him the aim of their devout execrations from the pulpit and of their artillery in the field, after hunting and pursuing him,' to use the author's own words, 'round about the kingdom with fire and sword;' after dethroning, seizing, and imprisoning him, now clamoured against the natural result of their own actions; and, pretending conscience and the covenant, felt extreme tenderness for the inviolability and sacredness of the king's person, which they had endangered by their war, and violated by their chains. It would have been well for them if they had attended to the salutary warning given to them by our author, and, withholding their confidence from men exasperated beyond the just hope of a reconciliation, had forborne to coalesce with the royalists, by whom they were soon to be crushed in one common ruin with their im mediate enemies, the independents."—(Life of Milton, p. 299-300.)-ED.

force upon both the houses, was good, was lawful, was no resisting of superior powers; they only were powers not to be fesisted, who countenanced the good, and punished the evil.

But now that their censorious domineering is not suffered to be universal, truth and conscience to be freed, tithes and pluralities to be no more, though competent allowance provided, and the warm experience of large gifts, and they so good at taking them; yet now to exclude and seize upon impeached members, to bring delinquents without exemption to a fair tribunal by the common national law against murder, is now to be no less than Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. He who but erewhile in the pulpits was a cursed tyrant, an enemy to God and saints, laden with all the innocent blood spilt in three kingdoms, and so to be fought against; is now, though nothing penitent or altered from his first principles, a lawful magistrate, a sovereign lord, the Lord's anointed, not to be touched, though by themselves imprisoned. As if this only were obedience, to preserve the mere useless bulk of his person, and that only in prison, not in the field, not to disobey his commands, deny him his dignity and office, everywhere to resist his power, but where they think it only surviving in their own faction.

But who in particular is a tyrant, cannot be determined in a general discourse, otherwise than by supposition; his particular charge, and the sufficient proof of it, must determine that: which I leave to magistrates, at least to the uprighter sort of them, and of the people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevailed above the law of nature and right reason, to judge as they find cause. this I dare own as part of my faith, that if such a one there be, by whose commission whole massacres have been committed on his faithful subjects,* his provinces offered to pawn

But

The following are a few of the crimes which Milton, in the "Eikonoklastes" imputes to Charles I. "After the suspected poisoning of his father, not inquired into, but smothered up, and him protected and advanced to the very half of his kingdom, who was accused in parliament to be author of the fact; (with much more evidence than Duke Dudley, that false protector, is accused upon record to have poisoned Edward the Sixth ;) after all his rage and persecution, after so many years of cruel war, on his people in three kingdoms! Whence the author of Truths Manifest,' a Scotsman, not unacquainted with affairs, positively affirms, that there hath been more Christian blood shed by the commission, approbation, and connivance of King Charles and his father, James, in the latter end of their reigns, than in

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