whole grateful and real way, accept this anomalous act of Oliver's; at
least, he and they together made it good, and always better to the last.
But in their Parliamentary _articulate_ way, they had their difficulties,
and never knew fully what to say to it!--

Oliver's second Parliament, properly his _first_ regular Parliament, chosen
by the rule laid down in the Instrument of Government, did assemble, and
worked;--but got, before long, into bottomless questions as to the
Protector's _right_, as to "usurpation," and so forth; and had at the
earliest legal day to be dismissed. Cromwell's concluding Speech to these
men is a remarkable one. So likewise to his third Parliament, in similar
rebuke for their pedantries and obstinacies. Most rude, chaotic, all these
Speeches are; but most earnest-looking. You would say, it was a sincere
helpless man; not used to _speak_ the great inorganic thought of him, but
to act it rather! A helplessness of utterance, in such bursting fulness of
meaning. He talks much about "births of Providence:" All these changes,
so many victories and events, were not forethoughts, and theatrical
contrivances of men, of _me_ or of men; it is blind blasphemers that will
persist in calling them so! He insists with a heavy sulphurous wrathful
emphasis on this. As he well might. As if a Cromwell in that dark huge
game he had been playing, the world wholly thrown into chaos round him, had
_foreseen_ it all, and played it all off like a precontrived puppet-show by
wood and wire! These things were foreseen by no man, he says; no man could
tell what a day would bring forth: they were "births of Providence," God's
finger guided us on, and we came at last to clear height of victory, God's
Cause triumphant in these Nations; and you as a Parliament could assemble
together, and say in what manner all this could be _organized_, reduced
into rational feasibility among the affairs of men. You were to help with
your wise counsel in doing that. "You have had such an opportunity as no
Parliament in England ever had." Christ's Law, the Right and True, was to