‘Uniformity of free-growing healthy forest-trees is good; uniformity of clipt Dutch-dragons is not so good! The question, Which of the two? is by no means settled,—though the Assembly of Divines, and majorities of both Houses, would fain think it so. The general English mind, which, loving good order in all things, loves regularity even at a high price, could be content with this Presbyterian scheme, which we call the Dutch-dragon one; but a deeper portion of the English mind inclines decisively to growing in the forest-tree way,—and indeed will shoot out into very singular excrescences, Quakerisms and what not, in the coming years. Nay already we have Anabaptists, Brownists, Sectaries and Schismatics springing up very rife: already there is a Paul Best, brought before the House of Commons for Socinianism; nay we hear of another distracted individual who seemed to maintain, in confidential argument, that “God was mere Reason.”[1] There is like to be need of garden-shears, at this rate! The devout House of Commons, viewing these things with a horror inconceivable in our loose days, knows not well what to do. London City cries, “Apply the shears!”—the Army answers, “Apply them gently; cut off nothing that is sound!” The question of garden-shears, and how far you are to apply them, is really difficult;—the settling of it will lead to very unexpected results. London City knows with pain, that there are “many persons in the Army who have never yet taken the Covenant”; the Army begins to consider it unlikely that certain of them will ever take it’!—
These things premised, we have only to remark farther, that the House of Commons meanwhile, struck with devout horror, has, with the world generally, spent Wednesday the 10th of March 1646-7, as a Day of Fasting and Humiliation for Blasphemies and Heresies.[2] Cromwell’s Letter, somewhat remarkable for the grieved mind it indicates, was written next day. Fairfax with the Army is at Saffron Walden in Essex; there is an Order this day[3] that he is to quarter where he
