work to do. I trust you will always hear so of them. The Lord is our strength, and in Him is all our hope. Pray for us. Present my love to my friends: I beg their prayers. The Lord still bless you.
We have some amongst us much[1] slow in action:—if we could all intend our own ends less, and our ease too, our business in this Army would go on wheels for expedition! “But” because some of us are enemies to rapine and other wickednesses, we are said to be ‘factious,’ to ‘seek to maintain our opinions in religion by force,’—which we detest and abhor. I profess I could never satisfy myself of the justness of this War, but from the Authority of the Parliament to maintain itself in its rights: and in this Cause I hope to approve myself an honest man and single-hearted.
Pardon me that I am thus troublesome. I write but seldom: it gives me a little ease to pour my mind, in the midst of calumnies, into the bosom of a friend.
Sir, no man more truly loves you than your brother and servant, OLIVER CROMWELL.[2]
SELF-DENYING ORDINANCE
The following Three small Fragments of Speeches will have to represent for us some six months of occasional loud debating, and continual anxious gestation and manipulation, in the Two Houses, in the Committee of Both Kingdoms, and in many other houses and places;—the ultimate outcome of which was the celebrated ‘Self-denying Ordinance,’ and ‘New Model’ of the Parliament’s Army; which indeed brings on an entirely New Epoch in the Parliament’s Affairs.
