The Scottish covenanted congregations grew quickly indeed into a covenanted army, and advanced to the border. The King, by Archbishop Laud's counsel, disbelieving in the Covenant, proclaimed that if within six weeks the Scotch did not renounce it, he would come and chastise them (in a fatherly way) with an army. The King and Archbishop Laud regarded the Covenant as a freak of rebellious misguided children. The Scotch regarded it as the portion of the eternal law of God which they then had to keep; and would keep, or die. A difference not to be settled by royal proclamation. The Scotch had the advantage of _being_ their own army, ready to fight for their Divine law; while the king had to pay his army with the coin of the realm, and never could inspire them to the end with the conviction that they were fighting for anything but coin of the realm. The coin of the realm, moreover, lay in the keeping of those dragons called Parliaments, which his majesty had termed "vipers" at their last meeting, and in a letter to Strafford, had compared to "cats," tameable when young, "cursed" if allowed to grow old, and which he had therefore banished underground for eleven years into shadow and silence. When, therefore, the king and the Covenanted army met on the borders, it was found that the Scotch, commanded, as my Father said, by old Gustavus Adolphus's officers; every regiment as in that old Swedish army, also a congregation, meeting morning and evening round its banner of "Christ's crown and covenant," for prayer was a rock against which the English army might vainly break; but from which, as the event proved, it preferred to ebb silently away, the pay for which only it professed to fight, being, moreover, exhausted. The king took refuge in a treaty, promising to leave Kirk affairs in the hands of the Kirk, and to call a free assembly. Poor gentleman, his promises were still believed to have some small amount of truth in them, and a pacification was effected. Then came the moment of hope for those who had been watching those movements with the intensest interest in England. Of the two evils, a remonstrating Parliament in London and a fighting Kirk in Scotland, the former now appeared to the king the least. In the keeping of the Parliament, dragon-monster as it seemed to him, lay the gold. And once more, after a silence of eleven years, on the 15th of April, 1640, the Parliament was summoned; a weapon welded by the wrongs and the patience of eleven years into a temper the king had done well to heed. Pym and Hampden were the chief spokesmen, and Mr. Cromwell sat for Huntingdon. At the last Parliament they, and brave men like them, had wept bitter tears at the king's arbitrary measures, and at his false dealing. At this Parliament there were no tears shed. There were no disrespectful or hasty words spoken.