be in some measure made the Law of this land. In place of that, you have
got into your idle pedantries, constitutionalities, bottomless cavillings
and questionings about written laws for my coming here;--and would send the
whole matter into Chaos again, because I have no Notary's parchment, but
only God's voice from the battle-whirlwind, for being President among you!
That opportunity is gone; and we know not when it will return. You have
had your constitutional Logic; and Mammon's Law, not Christ's Law, rules
yet in this land. "God be judge between you and me!" These are his final
words to them: Take you your constitution-formulas in your hand; and I my
informal struggles, purposes, realities and acts; and "God be judge between
you and me!"--

We said above what shapeless, involved chaotic things the printed Speeches
of Cromwell are. _Wilfully_ ambiguous, unintelligible, say the most: a
hypocrite shrouding himself in confused Jesuitic jargon! To me they do not
seem so. I will say rather, they afforded the first glimpses I could ever
get into the reality of this Cromwell, nay into the possibility of him.
Try to believe that he means something, search lovingly what that may be:
you will find a real _speech_ lying imprisoned in these broken rude
tortuous utterances; a meaning in the great heart of this inarticulate man!
You will, for thc first time, begin to see that he was a man; not an
enigmatic chimera, unintelligible to you, incredible to you. The Histories
and Biographies written of this Cromwell, written in shallow sceptical
generations that could not know or conceive of a deep believing man, are
far more _obscure_ than Cromwell's Speeches. You look through them only
into the infinite vague of Black and the Inane. "Heats and jealousies,"
says Lord Clarendon himself: "heats and jealousies," mere crabbed whims,
theories and crotchets; these induced slow sober quiet Englishmen to lay
down their ploughs and work; and fly into red fury of confused war against
the best-conditioned of Kings! _Try_ if you can find that true.