If Ireton, however, held the pen, the scheme, we may be sure, was Cromwell’s no less than his, and a more statesmanlike plan of reconstruction it is difficult to conceive. If carried out in its completeness it would have given England at once a genuine parliamentary government and a free national church. Two centuries of government by borough-mongering and corruption, of church-statesmanship and state-churchmanship would have been saved. Charles, as we have seen, rejected it, and began his game anew. No such opportunity for reconciliation could ever occur again, but Cromwell’s purpose remained the same, {347} though his mode of executing it varied with events. The anxiety for a settlement which should reconcile the old interests with the new enthusiasm is the key to his subsequent conduct. The reconciliation, for reasons which I have sufficiently described, was, in fact, impossible. The new piece would not fit the old garment. To us, looking backward with historical calmness, it seems well that it would not, for the enthusiasm adjusted to the interests would have been poetry translated into prose. That of which it is the essence to be motive, negative, abstract, would have become fixed, positive, and concrete. The sudden palpable reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh, apparently, perhaps, a spiritualising of the flesh, would have been really a carnalising of the spirit. The hopelessness, however, of the pacification which he contemplated was the tragedy of Cromwell’s later life. In the stress of protecting the ‘godly interest’ against itself, ‘worldly mixtures’ inevitably came to prevail over the pure spiritual fire. To the saints he seemed in serving the Lord’s people to lose his own soul, and his conscience was too sympathetic not to shrink under their judgment. Its burden, perhaps, found voice in his exclamation on his death-bed that ‘he knew he had been in grace _once_.’