The circumstances of my narrative oblige me again to recur to the state of public affairs. The treaty of Uxbridge was now pending; the necessities of the King compelled him to enquire on what terms his subjects would sheath the sword, and the rapid ascendancy of the fanatic party in Parliament, added to the mutual accusations and recriminations of their generals, induced the moderate Presbyterians to try if, by reconciliation with their Sovereign, they could gain strength to oppose the power which openly threatened their destruction and his. The artifices of Cromwell and his adherents need not be minutely detailed in a work intended only to give an admonitory picture of those times. In one point those men differed from the majority of modern Reformers, or rather the manners of that age were different from ours. Religion was then the mode; men and women were in general expounders and preachers; ordinary conversation was interlarded with Scripture phrases; common events were providences; political misconstructions of the sacred story were prophecies; and a fluency of cant was inspiration. No man (to borrow one of their favourite terms) was more _gifted_ this way than Cromwell; he had discerned the current of the public humour, and could adopt the disguise which suited his ambition. Every step which led him to the summit of power was prefaced by what he called seeking the Lord; that is, attending sermons and prayers, by which the suborned performers of those profane and solemn farces prepared their congregations to desire what their employers had previously determined to do; thus giving an air of divine inspiration to the projects of fraud, murder, and ambition. By such a perversion of public worship, joined with an affectation of disinterested purity, that celebrated preparative for military despotism, the self-denying ordinance was introduced into the Commons. After numerous prayers and sermons, intreating Providence to strengthen the hands of the faithful, by choosing new instruments to carry on the godly work, an agent of Cromwell's inferred, that the Lord had indeed prompted their counsels, and proposed that henceforth no peer or member of Parliament should hold any public office. By these means, every man of rank and eminence who had been distinguished by a constitutional struggle against arbitrary acts of power, and afterwards reluctantly led into open rebellion, was cashiered and dismissed from the army and from all official situations, which were thus left open to the fanatical party.