sluices that he can come at, can never be the sole author of all this (though he may be as guilty as if really he were, by intending and imagining to be so); but it is God that breaks up the flood-gates of so general a deluge, and all the art then and industry of mankind is not sufficient to raise up dikes and ramparts against it. In such a time it was as this, that not all the wisdom and power of the Roman senate, nor the wit and eloquence of Cicero, nor the courage and virtue of Brutus, was able to defend their country, or themselves, against the unexperienced rashness of a beardless boy, and the loose rage of a voluptuous madman. The valour and prudent counsels on the one side are made fruitless, and the errors and cowardice on the other harmless, by unexpected accidents. The one general saves his life, and gains the whole world, by a very dream; and the other loses both at once, by a little mistake of the shortness of his sight. And though this be not always so, for we see that, in the translation of the great monarchies from one to another, it pleased God to make choise of the most eminent men in nature, as Cyrus, Alexander, Scipio and his contemporaries, for his chief instruments and actors in so admirable a work (the end of this being, not only to destroy or punish one nation, which may be done by the worst of mankind, but to exalt and bless another, which is only to be effected by great and virtuous persons); yet, when God only intends the temporary chastisement of a people, he does

not raise up his servant Cyrus (as he himself is pleased to call him), or an Alexander (who had as many virtues to do good, as vices to do harm); but he makes the Massanellos, and the Johns of Leyden, the instruments of his vengeance, that the power of the Almighty might be more evident by the weakness of the means which he chooses to demonstrate it. He did not assemble the serpents and the monsters of Afric, to correct the pride of the Egyptians; but called for his armies of locusts out of Ethiopia, and formed new ones of vermin out of the very dust; and because you see a whole country destroyed by these, will you argue from thence they must needs have had both the craft of foxes, and the courage of lions?

"It is easy to apply this general observation to the particular case of our troubles in England; and that they seem only to be meant for a temporary chastisement of our sins, and not for a total abolishment of the old, and introduction of a new government, appears probable to me from these considerations, as far as we may be bold to make a judgment of the will of God in future events. First, because he has suffered nothing to settle or take root in the place of that, which hath been so unwisely and unjustly removed, that none of these untempered mortars can hold out against the next blast of wind, nor any stone stick to a stone, till that which these foolish builders have refused be made again the head of the corner. For, when the indisposed and long-tormented

commonwealth has wearied and spent itself almost to nothing, with the chargeable, various, and dangerous experiments of several mountebanks, it is to be supposed, it will have the wit at last to send for a true physician, especially when it sees (which is the second consideration) most evidently (as it now begins to do, and will do every day more and more, and might have done perfectly long since) that no usurpation (under what name or pretext soever) can be kept up without open force, nor force without the continuance of those oppressions upon the people, which will at last tire out their patience, though it be great even to stupidity. They cannot be so dull (when poverty and hunger begin to whet their understanding) as not to find out this no extraordinary mystery, that it is madness in a nation to pay three millions a year for the maintaining of their servitude under tyrants, when they might live free for nothing under their princes. This, I say, will not always lie hid, even to the slowest capacities; and the next truth they will discover afterwards is, that a whole people can never have the will, without having at the same time the power, to redeem themselves. Thirdly, it does not look (methinks) as if God had forsaken the family of that man, from whom he has raised up five children, of as eminent virtue, and all other commendable qualities, as ever lived perhaps (for so many together, and so young) in any other family in the whole world. Especially, if we add hereto this considera

tion, that by protecting and preserving some of them already through as great dangers as ever were passed with safety, either by prince or private person, he has given them already (as we may reasonably hope it to be meant) a promise and earnest of his future favours. And lastly (to return closely to the discourse from which I have a little digressed), because I see nothing of those excellent parts of nature, and mixture of merit with their vices, in the late disturbers of our peace and happiness, that uses to be found in the persons of those who are born for the erection of new empires.

"And, I confess, I find nothing of that kind, no not any shadow (taking away the false light of some prosperity) in the man whom you extol for the first example of it. And certainly, all virtues being rightly divided into moral and intellectual, I know not how we can better judge of the former, than by men's actions; or of the latter, than by their writings or speeches. As for these latter (which are least in merit, or rather which are only the instru> ments of mischief, where the other are wanting), I think you can hardly pick out the name of a man who ever was called great, besides him we are now speaking of, who never left the memory behind him of one wise or witty apophthegm even amongst his domestic servants or greatest flatterers. That little in print, which remains upon a sad record for him, is such, as a satire against him would not have made him say, for fear of transgressing too much

the rules of probability. I know not what you can produce for the justification of his parts in this kind, but his having been able to deceive so many particular persons, and so many whole parties; which if you please to take notice of for the advantage of his intellectuals, I desire you to allow me the liberty to do so too when I am to speak of his morals. The truth of the thing is this, that if craft be wisdom, and dissimulation wit (assisted both and improved with hypocrisies and perjuries), I must not deny him to have been singular in both; but so gross was the manner in which he made use of them, that, as wise men ought not to have believed him at first, so no man was fool enough to believe him at last: neither did any man seem to do it, but those who thought they gained as much by that dissembling, as he did by his. His very actings of godliness grew at last as ridiculous, as if a player, by putting on a gown, should think he represented excellently a woman, though his beard at the same time were seen by all the spectators. If you ask me why they did not hiss, and explode him off the stage; I can only answer, that they durst not do so, because the actors and the door-keepers were too strong for the company. I must confess that by these arts (how grossly soever managed, as by hypocritical praying and silly preaching, by unmanly tears and whinings, by falsehoods and perjuries even diabolical) he had at first the good-fortune (as men call it, that is, the ill-fortune) to attain his ends; but it

VOL. III.

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