the justification of its own inward tumult. [1] [_Breviary of the History of the Long Parliament_, Maseres, Tracts, i. 74.] It is a notion which governs much of the popular thought of the present day, and which the most cultivated ‘men of feeling’ are not ashamed to express, that the world is atheised when we regard it as a universe of general laws, equally relentless or equally merciful to the evil and to the good. If such a notion, through mere impatience of thought, can dominate an educated age, we may well excuse uncultivated men, who clung close to God, for believing him to manifest himself to his favoured people by sudden visitation and unaccountable events. This was indeed the received belief of Christendom at the time of our civil war. The man who was to vindicate a higher reason for God’s providence, and to be called an atheist for doing so, was still at Mr. van den Ende’s school in Amsterdam. It was in the realisation of the belief by individuals that the difference lay. Where the bible was not in the hands of the people, it could be regulated by priests and ceremonial. Elsewhere it was controllable by state-churches, or by ecclesiastical authority, claiming to be _jure divino_ like the presbyterian, and which appealed to popular reason, but to this reason as regulated by fitting education and discipline. Everywhere, in ordinary times, law and custom would put a veil on the face which the believer turned towards God. But now in England the bands were altogether loosed. Enthusiasts who had been waiting darkly on God while he was hidden behind established {307} worships and ministrations of the letter, who had heard his voice in their hearts but seen no sign of him in the world, were now enacting his work themselves, and reading his strange providences on the field of battle. Their own right hand was ‘teaching them terrible things.’ Here was the revelation of the latter days, for which they had been bidden to wait. That which they had sought for literally ‘with strong crying and tears,’ which they had not found in the system of the church, in the reasoning of divines, in the ungodly jangle of the law, was visible and audible in war. There God glowed above With scarce an intervention ... ... his soul o’er theirs. They felt him, nor by painful reason knew.’ [1] [1] [ ‘My own East! How nearer God we were. He glows above With scarce an intervention, presses close And palpitatingly, his soul o’er ours! We feel him, nor by painful reason know!’ BROWNING, Luria.]