KNOI AND CROMWELL.

Press, Volume X, Issue 1143, 7 July 1866, Page 3

KNOI AND CROMWELL.

- J , } of Sophocles there etern ?• dlßtin ct recognition of the Xi 1 J ÜB ?»fe of Heaven, and the unkm %^^ of crime against the Wof-Goi- I believe you fe will find

in all histories that that has been a the head and foundation of them all and that no nation that did not con template this wonderful universe witt an awe-stricken and reverential feeling that there was a great unknown, omnipotent, and all-wise, and all-virtuous Being, superintending all men in it and all interests in it—no nation evei came to very much, nor did any man either, who forgot [that. If a man did forget that, he forgot the most important part of his mission in this world. Our own history of England, which you will take a great deal of natural pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find beyond all others worthy of your study; because I believe that.the British nation —and I include in that the Scottish nation—produced a finer set of men than any you will find it possible to get anywhere else in the world. I don't know in any history of Greece or Borne where you will get so fine a man as Oliver Cromwell. And we have had men worthy of memory in our little corner of the island here as well as others, and our history has been etrong at least in being connected with the world history—for if you examine well you will find that John Knox was the author, as it were, of Oliver Cromwell; that the Puritan revolution would never have taken place in England at all had it not been for that Scotchman. That is an authentic fact, and is not prompted by national vanity on my part at all. And it is very possible, if you look at the struggle that was then going on in England, as I have had to do in my time, you will see that people were overawed by the immense impediment lying in their way. A small minority of God-fearing men in the country were flying away with any ship they could get to Mew England, rather than take the lion by the beard. They dursn't confront the powers with their most just complaints, to be delivered from idolatry. They wanted to make the nation altogether comfortable to the Hebrew Bible, which they understood to be according to the will of God ; and there could be no aim more legitimate. However, they could not have got their desire fulfilled at all if Knox bad not succeeded by the firmness and nobleness of his mind. For he is also of the select of the earth to me—John Knox. What he has suffered from the ungrateful generation that have followed him should really make us humble ourselves to the dust, to think that the most excellent man our country has produced, to whom we owe everything that distinguishesus among I modern nations, should have been so sneered at and abused. Knox was heard by Scotland—the people heard him with the marrow of their bones — they took up his doctrine, and they defied principalities and powers to move them from it. "We must have it," they said. It was at that time the Puritan struggle arose in England, and you know well that the Scottish earls jand nobility, with their tenantry, marched away to Dunse Hill, and sat down there; and just in the course of that struggle, when it was either to be. suppressed or brought into greater vitality, they encamped on the top of Dunse Hill—thirty thousand armed men, drilled for that occasion, each regiment around its landlord, its earl, or whatever he might be called, and eager for Christ's crown and covenant. That was the signal for all England rising up into unappeasable determination to have the Gospel there also; and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether the Parliament or the King should rule— whether it should be old formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new conceived in the souls of men, namely, a divine determination to walk according to the laws of God here as the sum of all prosperity—which of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of struggle, it waa decided —the way we know. I should say also of that Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's —notwithstanding the abuse it has encountered, and tho denial of everybody that it was able to get on in the worid, and so on —it appears to mc to have been the most salutary thing in. the modern history of England, on the whole If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, J! don't know what it would have come to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could not have gone on; but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his-mind—there was truth in, it when he ruled over it.