“is that they have provided for the feeding of souls. Building of hospitals provides for men’s bodies; to build material temples is judged a work of piety, but they that procure spiritual food, they that build up spiritual temples, they are the men truly charitable, truly pious. Such a work as this was your erecting the lecture.”
He goes on to say that the lecturer is a good and able man, and has done good work; help him therefore to carry it on.
“Surely, it were a piteous thing to see a lecture fall in the hands of so many able and godly men, as I am persuaded the founders of this are; in these times, wherein we see they are suppressed, with too much haste and violence by the enemies of God his Truth.... To withdraw the pay is to let fall the lecture; for who goeth to warfare at his own cost. I beseech you therefore ... let the good man have his pay. The souls of God’s children will bless you for it and so shall I.”
The changes which Laud introduced in the externals of worship were as abhorrent to Cromwell as the suppression of Puritan preaching. “There were designs,” said Cromwell, looking back on Laud’s policy in 1658,
“to innovate upon us in matters of religion, and so to innovate as to eat out the core and power and heart and life of all religion, by bringing on us a company of poisonous popish ceremonies, and imposing them upon those that were accounted the Puritans of the nation and professors of religion among us, driving them to seek their bread in a howling wilderness. As was instanced to our friends who were forced to fly to Holland, New England, almost anywhither, to find liberty for their consciences.”
ST. IVES AND THE RIVER OUSE, AND MEDIÆVAL CHAPEL ON THE BRIDGE.
(From Pike’s “Oliver Cromwell.”)
A persistent tradition asserts that Cromwell himself thought of emigrating to New England, and there are many grounds for accepting it as true.
If he ever entertained such a design, it was probably between 1631 and 1636. When he left Huntingdon in May, 1631, he converted all his landed property into money, as a man intending to emigrate would naturally do. The cattle he bought and the lands he hired could be disposed of at short notice. The time at which this took place renders it more significant, for in 1630 and 1631 the Puritan exodus was at its height, and most of the New England colonists came from East Anglia. In March, 1632, the Earl of Warwick granted the old Connecticut patent to Lord Say and his associates, amongst whom was John Hampden. Nothing can be more probable than that Cromwell should have thought of settling in a colony of which his cousin was one of the patentees.
If Cromwell wished to emigrate, what was it that prevented him? The eighteenth century story that he was on board one of the ships stopped by order of council in May, 1638, is demonstrably false, for on the petition of the passengers they were allowed to continue their voyage. The contemporary story supplies a much more credible explanation. It is that a kinsman died leaving him a considerable fortune, and this kinsman is identified with Sir Thomas Steward, whose death took place in January, 1636. A story which fits in so well with ascertained facts, and is intrinsically so probable, should not be lightly put aside as a fiction.