The story of the new-modelling of the army, of the self-denying ordinance, and of the special exemption of Cromwell from its operations, is too well known to need repetition. Two points deserve special notice; one, the long discussion against the imposition of the covenant on the new army, ending in an ordinance of parliament after the army was already formed, that it should be taken by the officers within twenty days, which does not appear to have been ever carried into effect; the other, that the self-denying ordinance, as originally passed by the commons, excluded from military command, during the war, all members of either house of parliament. It would thus have been general and prospective in its operation. In this form, the lords, with judicial blindness, rejected it. The commons then sent it up in a new form, merely discharging from their present commands those who were at present members of either house of parliament. In this form it was passed, and thus when Vane at the end of 1645 carried a measure, declaring vacant the seats of those members who had adhered to the king and ordering them to be filled, the officers of the new-model army were eligible, and elected in large numbers. If the party of the army and the sectaries had not thus gained a footing in the house, the course of history would probably have been very different. The new-model army went to the war, according to May, the clerk of the Long parliament, ‘without the confidence of their friends and an object of contempt to their enemies.’ [1] Their outward triumph it is needless to describe; we should rather seek to appreciate the nature of the spiritual triumph which the outward one involved. It used to be the fashion to treat the sectarian enthusiasm of the ‘Ironsides’ as created, or at least stimulated, by Cromwell. The army went mad, and it was to gain Cromwell’s private ends. The prevalent conception of our time, that the great men of history have not created popular ideas or events, but merely expressed or {306} realised them with special effect, excludes such a view. The sectarian enthusiasm, as we have seen, was a necessary result of the consciousness of spiritual right elicited by the Reformation, where this consciousness had not, as in Scotland, been early made the foundation of a popular church, but had been long left to struggle in the dark against an unsympathetic clergy and a regulated ceremonial worship. The spirit which could not ‘find itself’ in the authoritative utterance of prelates, or express its yearnings unutterable in a stinted liturgy, was not likely, when war had given it vent and stimulus, to acquiesce in a new uniformity as exact as that from which it had broken. It had tasted a new and dangerous food. Taught as it had been to wait on God, in search for new revelations of him, it now read this lesson by the stronger light of personal deliverances and achievements, and found in the tumultuous experience of war at once the expression and