against which his supple mind, so indifferent as it was to all constitutional forms, stood inflexible. Yet this, for good or ill, is our system to-day, and the system of the wide host of political communities that have followed our parliamentary model. When it is said again, that it was owing to Cromwell that Nonconformity had time to take such deep root as to defy the storm of the Restoration, do we not overlook the original strength of all those giant puritan fibres from which both the Rebellion and Cromwell himself had sprung? It was not a man,

not even such a man as Oliver, it was the same underlying spiritual forces that made the Rebellion, which also held fast against the Restoration. It would hardly be more forced to say that Cromwell was the founder of Nonconformity.

It has been called a common error of our day to ascribe far too much to the designs and the influence of eminent men, of rulers, and of governments. The reproach is just and should impress us. The momentum of past events; the spontaneous impulses of the mass of a nation or a race; the pressure of general hopes and fears; the new things learned in the onward and diversified motions of "the great spirit of human knowledge,"-all these have more to do with the progress of the world's affairs than the deliberate views of even the most determined and far-sighted of its individual leaders. Thirty years after the death of the Protector, a more successful revolution came about. The law was made more just, the tribunals were purified, the rights of conscience received at least a partial recognition, the press began to enjoy a freedom for which Milton had made a glorious appeal, but which Cromwell never dared concede. Yet the Declaration of Right and the Toleration Act issued from a stream of ideas and maxims, aims and methods that were not puritan. New tributaries had already swollen the volume and changed the currents of that broad

CHAP. X

CONCLUSION

435

confluence of manners, morals, government, belief, on whose breast Time guides the voyages of mankind. The age of Rationalism with its bright lights and sobering shadows had begun. Some ninety years after 1688, another revolution followed in the England across the Atlantic, and the gulf between Cromwell and Jefferson is measure of the vast distance the minds of men had travelled. With the death of Cromwell, though the free churches remained as nurseries of strong-hearted civil feeling, the brief life of puritan theocracy in England expired. It was a phase of a movement that left an inheritance of many noble thoughts, the memory of a brave struggle for human freedom, and a procession of strenuous master-spirits with Milton and Cromwell at their head. Political ends miscarry, and the revolutionary leader treads a path of fire. True wisdom is to learn how we may combine sane verdicts on the historic event, with a just estimation in the actor of those qualities of high endeavour on which, amid incessant change of formula, direction, fashion, and ideal, the world's best hopes in every age depend.