A kindred impulse to theirs, moreover, was at work in high places of the army, where it did not forswear the use of a carnal sword. Major-general Harrison was now directing his course by a verse in the prophet Daniel, which promises the kingdom of the world to the saints of the Most High, and was looking to the Rump parliament to introduce this kingdom with all speed. If their factions and worldly interests prevented them from doing so, Cromwell, he held, by some method above that of civil government, could and would. It was not for a constitutional theory or a pagan republicanism that he had been fighting, but for a dominion of grace, and he would not long be still while grandees of parliament, whom God had never owned in war, wrangled over the legal adjustment of his mercies. Overton, the governor of Hull, was the most eminent of those who shared his view, which, however, was but the legitimate doctrine of the military saint. During more than two years, from the midsummer of 1649 to the autumn of 1651, the republican oligarchy was able to shut its eyes to the real situation. The military spirit was absorbed in the conquest under Cromwell of Ireland and Scotland, and the English royalists, hardly recovered from their crushing failure at home, were watching the fortune of war in these other countries. The only chance for the permanence of republicanism was that it should avail itself of this interval to establish itself on a more popular basis, and initiate practical reforms. If it had had the will or ability to do so, the levelling clamour, which with the return of the army was sure to be heard again, would have had nothing in popular sentiment to appeal to. The name of a ‘free parliament’ had been made to English ears, by the very men to whom it was now a word of ill omen, the familiar symbol of good government. The interference with the ordinary course of justice by special courts and parliamentary committees was a grievance that everyone could understand. An ecclesiastical anarchy, such as the journal of George Fox the quaker exhibits to us, was a scandal that came home to the parochial mind. In an ordinary parish, a presbyterian clergyman would be in possession of the benefice, to attempt {343} an irritating but ineffectual discipline and haggle over tithes, while in the same place there would be a knot of ‘common-prayer men’ with an excluded minister at hand to stimulate their zeal, and a congregation of baptists or independents, who, now that their friends were in power, would see no reason why their enemies should be beneficed. In the absence of any settled rule, each party might hope by local faction or intrigue to get the tithes for itself, and meanwhile would resist the payment of them to its adversaries.