"Truly, the whole country is like the prophets’ roll, written within and without with mourning and wrong and woe. As for the Royalists, they are harried to death; they hold everything on sufferance. The time for this strictness has gone by. England now wants peace, justice for all, Amnesty, and above all, a new Parliament. If these things don’t come to pass, worse things will—I say this to you; it is the plain truth; I profess it is!" "Then tell them what to do, Oliver. And if they will not obey, make them. Are they not as much at your disposal as the shoes on your feet?" "The time is not fully ripe; a little longer they must trample upon law and justice and mercy, and do such bare-faced things as will make men wonder—a little longer we must suffer them, then——" "Then, Oliver?" "I will thunder at the door for inquisition, and it will be with no runaway knock. I am sorry, and I could be sorry to death, for the needs-be, but it will come, it will come. God knows I wish it otherwise. I do, indeed!" "What were they about to-night?" "About nothing they should be. Have we not come to a pretty state when Parliament looks to the private doings of its members? After some testimonies, there came a motion to expel all profane and unsanctified persons from the House, and I rose and said,—’I could wish also, that all fools were expelled; then we might have a house so thin it would be at our say-so.’" "Pray, what said Sir Harry Vane to that? He is as touchy as tinder." "He said, ’General, no man in England knows better than you do, the usefulness of piety;’ and I answered him prompt, ’Sir Harry Vane, I know something better than the usefulness of piety, it is the piety of usefulness. Take heed,’ I said, ’of being too sharp, or of being too easily sharpened by others. If Parliament is to sit that it may count the number of glasses a man drinks, or the style of his coat and his headgear, England is in her dotage. I would rather see death than such intolerable things, I would truly.’ And I said these words in great wrath, and I could wish I had been in still greater anger." "Why don’t they do what you desire? Will they come to disputing with you?"