Heavenly Purpose. To see God’s own Law, then universally acknowledged for complete as it stood in the holy Written Book, made good in this world; to see this, or the true unwearied aim and struggle towards this: it was a thing worth living for and dying for! Eternal Justice; that God’s Will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven: corollaries enough will flow from that, if that be there; if that be not there, no corollary good for much will flow. It was the general spirit of England in the Seventeenth Century. In other somewhat sadly disfigured form we have seen the same immortal hope take practical shape in the French Revolution, and once more astonish the world. That England should all become a Church, if you like to name it so: a Church presided over not by sham-priests in ‘Four surplices at Allhallowtide,‘ but by true god-consecrated ones, whose hearts the Most High had touched and hallowed with his fire:—this was the prayer of many, it was the godlike hope and effort of some.
Our modern methods of Reform differ somewhat,—as indeed the issue testifies. I will advise my reader to forget the modern methods of Reform; not to remember that he has ever heard of a modern individual called by the name of Reformer, if he would understand what the old meaning of the word was. The Cromwells, Pyms, Hampdens, who were understood on the Royalist side to be firebrands of the Devil, have had still worse measure from the Dryasdust Philosophies, and sceptical Histories, of later times. They really did resemble firebrands of the Devil, if you looked at them through spectacles of a certain colour. For fire is always fire. But by no spectacles, only by mere blinders and wooden-eyed spectacles, can the flame-girt Heaven’s-messenger pass for a poor mouldy Pedant and Constitution-monger, such as this would make him out to be!
On the whole, say not, good reader, as is often done, ‘It was then all one as now.’ Good reader, it was considerably different then from now. Men indolently say, ‘The Ages are all alike; ever the same sorry elements over again, in new
