{310} When Baxter was with the army he found that ‘Cromwell and his council took on them to join no religious party, but to be for the equal liberty of all.’ This account corresponds with the conception of Cromwell’s views to be gathered from his own letters. His relation to the sectaries was the same practically as we have seen Vane’s to have been more speculatively. Without any of Vane’s theosophy, he had the same open face towards heaven, the same consciousness (or dream, if we like,) of personal and direct communication with the divine, which transformed the ‘legal conscience’ and placed him ‘above ordinance.’ Having thus drunk of the spring from which the sectarian enthusiasm flowed, he had no taste for the reasonings which led it into particular channels, while he had, more than any man of his time, not indeed the speculative, but the political instinct of comprehension. In this spirit he entered on the war, where it soon took practical body from the discovery that ‘men of religion’ alone could fight ‘men of honour,’ and that the men of religion, once in war, inevitably became sectaries. To him, as to his men, the issues of battle were a revelation of God’s purpose; the cause, which in answer to the prayers of his people God owned by fire, had the true _jus divinum_. The practical danger of such a belief is obvious. To Cromwell is due the peculiar glory, that it never issued, as might have been expected, in fanatic military licence, but was always governed by the strictest personal morality and a genuine zeal for the free well-being of the state and nation. His extant letters, written during the first years of the war, written, be it remembered, by a farmer-squire, forty-four years old, simply exhibit a man of restless and infectious energy, gathering about him, without reference to birth or creed, the men who had the most active zeal for the common cause and promoting of religion, and gradually, as the work of these men grew in importance and was more visibly owned by God, asserting their claims in a louder key. In their tone they sometimes recall the man who some years before, in a parliamentary committee of enclosures, had defended the cause of some injured countrymen of his with so much passion and so ‘tempestuous a carriage,’ that the chairman had been obliged to reprehend him. Among the most frequent topics are the discouragement of his soldiers by their want of pay and supplies (to be borne in mind with reference {311} to subsequent history), his anxiety for godly men and the offence he was giving by the promotion of men of low birth or sectaries. A letter to his cousin, solicitor-general St. John, may be taken as an instance. It was written during the period of feeble management that preceded the self-denying ordinance, before Vane had got the upper hand in the house. [1]