He had now to grapple with the question which the Rump had fingered in vain. The Lord’s people were to be saved from themselves, and the interests of the world so reformed and adjusted that it might yield them fit habitation. The task, as I have shown in the previous lectures, was in the nature of the case a hopeless one. The claim of the saints was at once false and self-contradictory; false, for the secular world, which it sought to ignore, had rights no less divine than its own; {360} and self-contradictory, since even amongst the most sectarian of the sectaries it was constantly hardening into authority hostile to the individual persuasion in which it originated. ‘That hath been one of the vanities of our contest. Every sect saith, “Oh, give me liberty.” But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.’ [1] Cromwell’s labour, however, was not wholly in vain. During five years, by the mere force of his instinct of settlement, his commanding energy, and that absorbing sympathy miscalled hypocrisy, which enabled him to hold the hearts of the sectaries even while he disappointed their enthusiasm, he at least kept the peace between the saints and the world, secured liberty of conscience, and placed it on ground which even the flood of prelatical reaction was not able wholly to submerge. But while protecting the godly interest, he was obliged more and more to silence its pretension. A gradual detachment from the saints, and approximation to the ancient interests, was the necessary policy of his later years. [1] [Carlyle, _ib_. Speech III.] The dissolution of the Rump caused no derangement of administration. As captain-general in a council of officers, Cromwell directed all officials to continue their work, and summoned a body of notables to act as a constitutive assembly. The change was generally acceptable to puritan sentiment. ‘I told the parliament,’ said Cromwell afterwards, ‘what I knew better than anyone else, because of my manner of life, which took me up and down the country, thereby giving me to know the temper of all men, that the nation loathed their sitting. I knew it, and when they were dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog, or any general and visible repining at it.’ [1] [1] [_ib_.]