Carlyle's work on Oliver Cromwell is the first brilliant, strong, steady light thrown back from modern times into the recesses of the English Puritanic Epoch. It is one of the most valuable books ever published in this country. It is a book, we might almost say, of Homeric grandeur and simplicity, an Epic in its way, the story of a mighty life, and a mighty period. The partial grotesqueness of manner, half serious, half satirical, cannot diminish the sublimity of its impression, and the way is prepared for a thoughtful, steady investigation of the play of motive and character in the life and soul of the great man, heretofore misrepresented, but now reproduced, an undissembled, undissembling reality.

Next comes the Vindication of the Protector by D'Aubigné ; another work of great value, which we are glad to see published by Mr. Carter in as accessible a form as the History of the Reformation. It is important and valuable as the Christian Commentary of an unbiassed and acute mind, passing the facts more deliberately and clearly under the searching light of the Divine Law, and tracing in them the paths of Divine Providence and grace. Few things can be more instructive than two such works, brought together from two such minds, shining on one another's path, and on the religious and secular phases of the same period and subject. When the times are ready, such works are powerfully revolutionary in public opinion. There is already a complete reversal of the judgment passed on Cromwell by the enemies of the man, his republicanism, his patriotism, and his piety.

"With the documents before us, which have been published at various times," says D'Aubigné, "we are compelled, unless we shut our eyes to the truth, to change our opinion of him, and to acknowledge that the character hitherto attached to this great man, is one of the grossest falsehoods in all history. Charles II., who succeeded him after Richard's short protectorate, and this monarch's courtiers, not less immoral, but still more prepossessed than himself; and the writers and statesmen, too, of this epoch, all of them united in misrepresenting his memory. The wicked followers of the Stuarts have blackened Cromwell's tation."

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D'Aubigné declares that in his earnest search into the law of the remarkable unity in Cromwell's character, he has been compelled to discard the hypothesis by which the majority of historians have been content, with a mixture of indolence and injustice as disgraceful to the genius, as it is injurious to the morals of history, to account for the seeming contradictions in his nature, the trite and easy hypothesis of a consummate hypocrisy. He has been compelled, by the absolutism of facts, to drop and reject this miserable solution. "The documents now before us are a striking contradiction," says he, "to this hypothesis; and no writer

who possesses the smallest portion of good faith, will ever venture to put it forward again."

The character of this great man he declares to be one of the most astonishing problems that time has handed down to us; a problem, the historical darkness of which is scattered, as darkness is driven from the natural world, only gradually, and by slow degrees. He has been presented as a hero to the world; "I present him," says D'Aubigné, "as a Christian to Christians, to Protestant Christians; and I claim boldly, on his behalf, the benefit of that passage of Scripture, Every one that loveth God that begat, loveth him also that is begotten of him."

The worth of these declarations is rendered very great, by the struggle, the resistance, the conviction, against former opinion and strong prejudice, through which a man, perhaps the greatest historian of the modern age, has been forced into them. A foreigner, and therefore placed in a position of impartiality not to be gained by Cromwell's own countrymen, D'Aubigné had been nevertheless carried by the stream of royalist English history into the gulf of falsehood; he had been as hopelessly plunged in the common misrepresentation and delusion as any of the readers of English history from their childhood in their native land. It was only by a struggle that he got out of this gulf; but let it be marked-it was not a struggle to get out, but to keep in; it was the wrestling of the truth with him, that overcame him, and not his wrestling with falsehood that overcame that. The power of truth raised him from the gulf, and brought him into the light, in spite of his own resistance against it. This is an extraordinary fact.

"We have," says he, "so deeply imbibed in our early youth the falsehoods maintained by the Stuart party, and by some of Cromwell's republican rivals, among them the narrow-minded Ludlow and the prejudiced Holles, that these falsehoods have become in our eyes indisputable truths. I know it by my own experience, by the lengthened resistance I made to the light that has recently sprung up, and illuminated as with a new day, the obscure image of one of the greatest men of modern times. It was only after deep consideration that I submitted to the evidence of irresistible facts." This experience is of a character that will give, and ought to give, by itself, apart from D'Aubigné's reputation and power as a historian, the greatest weight to his vindication of the Protector. That vindication is at once a work of conscience and of love, and of that principle which impels D'Aubigné in all his historical studies, the acknowledged duty and desire of accepting and presenting God and not man, God's truth and providence, instead of man's ambition and intrigue. Hence he says, speaking of the fact that it is seldom that a great man is a Christian, but that Cromwell was both, "it would be an act of great meanness, a criminal falsehood, if those who, by studying the life of

this great man, find in him an upright heart, and a sincere piety, should unite their voices with those of his detractors. We, on our part, desire to the utmost of our ability to renounce all participation in this gross imposture."

"Who is there, but must be delighted with this frank determination? We hope the life and mind of D'Aubigné will be spared and sustained to go through the whole History of the Reformation in England with the same determination. There are plenty of gross impostures to be dissipated, and Christian lights to be hung up in their stead. We accept this noble memorial of Cromwell's true character by the great Historian of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, as a pledge of the impartiality, independence, and Christian feeling and discernment, with which he will carry his researches into the caves of ecclesiastical history in England. We are yet to view those recesses opened to the daylight, and no longer to wander through them under the care of guides with torches, revealing little else but the splendor of prelatical stalactites, appearing to support the roof, when in reality they hang from it. A Reformation that stops in semi-popery can never afterwards be expected to go on to perfection; but the history of its mingled light and darkness, with all the admonitory lessons to be drawn from it, we may yet have in such perfection, that the value of the experience may be worth to the world almost its incalculable cost.

D'Aubigné's remarks on the character and position of the Protector are closed by a solemn warning, which cannot be deemed exaggerated, considering the indications of the present age. "If there is any one man, who in times past has contributed more than another, more than all others, to the wonders of the present day, that man is Oliver Cromwell. The existing greatness of England is but the realization of the plan he had conceived. If that enthusiasm for the gospel, if that opposition to Popery, those two distinctive characteristics of his mind, which Cromwell has imprinted on the people of Great Britain, should ever cease in England; if a fatal fall should ever interrupt the Christian course of that nation; and if Rome, which has already ruined so many kingdoms, should receive the homage of Old England-then should I at any period revisit her shore, I should find her glory extinct, and her power humbled in the dust.'

We come now to another work, the title of which we have placed at the head of these pages. At the period when that work was written, a more valuable contribution to historical literature had hardly ever been made, than the History of the Puritans by Mr. Neal. It was, and still is, a noble work. We are glad that it has been printed again in this country, in so accessi-ble and convenient a shape, by the Harpers. As a work of genius, none ever claimed for it a pre-eminence.. But as a work of

truth, a work filled with the spirit and principles of religious liberty, a plain, unvarnished story of the great struggles and sufferings of godly men, endured beneath oppression for Christ and the truth's sake, and made interesting, not only by the inevitable, irrepressible interest of the tale, but by the honest, unexaggerated sympathy of a pious heart, it has won and maintained a very high place in the standard historical literature of England and the world. Indeed, it was almost the first great effort to collect the light of an age of heroic religious enthusiasm and principle, and to let it shine. The masses of its facts, and presentations of facts, were so indisputably true, that nothing could successfully be said or done against it. And it made an impression like that which the faithful testimony of an honest, unpolished, but evidently strong-minded, straight-forward, undissembling man from the country would make upon the minds of a court and jury, listening to his statements in a case of great importance before them.

It is a trustworthy, and has become a familiar, well-known, respected work. Calm, unprejudiced, impartial, entirely free from bigotry, but written from the heart, in a deep sympathy with the pious spirit of the Reformers, it has accomplished a great mission, in a time of obscurity and calumny. It has carried the truth into many a household, where all the historical impressions before had been gathered almost exclusively from the pages of Hume. It is a work which we rejoice to see spreading throughout our country, so much more readily and generally than it could do in the edition in five volumes.

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A full history of the Puritans, according to Edwards's " method entirely new," is yet to be written. The history of Neal, following only the stream of Puritanism in England, through its surprising developments of truth and principle there, affords no view of the still greater developments of God's Providence with the Puritans of America. But these latter developments have come to be the great river, and the historical record of them remains to be written. It should be written only on the same principles on which Cromwell in England, and the Puritans in America, spoke and acted. Supposing this cause or this business must be carried on," he once said to his Parliament, "it is either of God or man. If it be of man, I would I had never touched it with a finger. If I had not had a hope fixed in me that this cause and this business was of God, I would many years ago have run from it. If it be of God, He will bear it up. If it be of man, it will tumble; as everything that hath been of man since the world begun hath done. And what are all our histories, and other traditions of actions in former times, but God manifesting himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled down, and trampled upon, everything that he hath not planted. And

as this is, so let the Allwise God deal with it. If this be of human structure and invention, and if it be an old plotting and contriving to bring things to this issue, and that they are not the births of Providence, then they will tumble."

One would think it was old Latimer or John Bunyan speaking in this strain, instead of the greatest ruler and statesman in the world. But this is simply that entirely new method in history, which ought to have been as old and as familiar as God's Providence itself, but seems new and strange even now, whenever state affairs are made to bend to it, and are measured by it in the scale of importance. That which is to be sought in History is the births of Providence; of which Cromwell and his age in England was a remarkable one indeed, but the unobtrusive growth of the Puritans and their institutions in this country a greater. "Without Cromwell, humanly speaking," remarks D'Aubigné, "liberty would have been lost, not only to England, but to Europe. And the defeat of liberty would have been the defeat of the gospel." But, Cromwell or no Cromwell in England, the irresistible progress and triumph of the gospel in this country would have been the same, and must have been followed by the great developments of God's Providence, through the principles of Puritanism, extending from this country over the world. It is this wonderful sweep of Divine Providence which is yet to be traced by some great and devout mind; and perhaps God for this purpose is training, or will train, some acute and comprehensive intellect, to discern the steps of God, and to pour upon the history of this country, beginning with New England, as powerful a light of Providence and grace in union, as was ever poured through the mind of Jonathan Edwards to form and illustrate the body of New England theology.

A part of the preparation for this work must lie in memorials of individual manifestations of the grace of God, drawn from hitherto neglected materials. It is a good indication that the descendants of the Puritans are becoming sensible of the importance of opening and enshrining these records of their ancestors. When God thus turns the heart of the children to the fathers, we may hope it is done, that he may not be compelled to smite their inheritance with a curse. The works and biographies of the fathers of New England ought, before this, as precious stones neglected in the rough, to have been set, and to have formed, as far as possible, the commanding volumes in our national literature. For a long time this work of filial piety was hardly thought of, and Mather's Magnalia stood conspicuously alone, without imitation or rivalship, as, indeed, it ever must in its quaintness and singularity.

There have been some glowing and admirable testimonials; now and then an orator has spoken in tones that have gone to the