On this ground, too, I explain to myself Cromwell's reputed confusion of speech. To himself the internal meaning was sun-clear; but the material with which he was to clothe it in utterance was not there. He had _lived_ silent; a great unnamed sea of Thought round him all his days; and in his way of life little call to attempt _naming_ or uttering that. With his sharp power of vision, resolute power of action, I doubt not he could have learned to write Books withal, and speak fluently enough;--he did harder things than writing of Books. This kind of man is precisely he who is fit for doing manfully all things you will set him on doing. Intellect is not speaking and logicizing; it is seeing and ascertaining. Virtue, _Vir-tus_, manhood, _hero_hood, is not fair-spoken immaculate regularity; it is first of all, what the Germans well name it, _Tugend_ (_Taugend_, _dow_-ing, or _Dough_-tiness), Courage and the Faculty to _do_. This basis of the matter Cromwell had in him. One understands moreover how, though he could not speak in Parliament, he might _preach_, rhapsodic preaching; above all, how he might be great in extempore prayer. These are the free out-pouring utterances of what is in the heart: method is not required in them; warmth, depth, sincerity are all that is required. Cromwell's habit of prayer is a notable feature of him. All his great enterprises were commenced with prayer. In dark inextricable-looking difficulties, his Officers and he used to assemble, and pray alternately, for hours, for days, till some definite resolution rose among them, some "door of hope," as they would name it, disclosed itself. Consider that. In tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the great God, to have pity on them, to make His light shine before them. They, armed Soldiers of Christ, as they felt themselves to be; a little band of Christian Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a great black devouring world not Christian, but Mammonish, Devilish,--they cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the Cause that was His. The light which now rose upon them,--how could a human soul, by any means at all, get better light? Was not the purpose so formed like to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed without hesitation any more? To them it was as the shining of Heaven's own Splendor in the waste-howling darkness; the Pillar of Fire by night, that was to guide them on their desolate perilous way. _Was_ it not such? Can a man's soul, to this hour, get guidance by any other method than intrinsically by that same,--devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light; be such _prayer_ a spoken, articulate, or be it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other method. "Hypocrisy"? One begins to be weary of all that. They who call it so, have no right to speak on such matters. They never formed a purpose, what one can call a purpose. They went