The motto which is printed at the head of this book, and which is borrowed from the most just of biographers, must give a note to the whole of my description. What was the movement which founded our modern society? what were its motives, its causes of action, its material surroundings? And what was the man who, above all others, represented that spirit at its most critical moment? To find a right answer to such questions it is necessary to do two things. First, we must make the sequence of cause and effect reasonable. In giving an explanation or in supposing a motive, we must present that which rational men, unbiassed, will admit. To put in the same character irreconcilable extremes is to leave no picture. To state a number of facts so that no thread connects them, so that they surprise by contrast but leave only confusion in the mind, is a kind of falsehood. It is the method most adopted by partisans; they frame a theory upon the lines of which such and such facts will lie, but they omit, or only mention as anomalies, facts which are equally true, but which would vitiate their conclusions. We must (to use a mathematical metaphor) _integrate_ the differentials of history; make a complete and harmonious whole of a hundred aspects; strike a curve which shall unite in a regular fashion what has appeared as a number of scattered points. Till we can say, “This man—seeing all his character and innumerable known acts—_could not_ have acted as such and such a report would have us believe;” or again, till we can say, “This epoch, with its convictions, its environment, its literature, _could not_ have felt the emotions which such and such an historian lends it,”—till we can say this, we do not understand a personality or a period. In the second place, we must recognise in all repeated and common expressions of conviction, and in all the motives of a time of action, some really existing ideal. There was a conviction common to many thousands of Parliamentarians in the earlier stages of the English Civil War. There was a genuine creed in the breasts of the well-paid Ironsides of its later period. There was a real loyalty and an explicable theory of kingship in the camp of Charles the First.