victory he shall yet have? Our sorrow is the inverted image of our nobleness. The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope. Black smoke as of Tophet filling all your universe, it can yet by true heart-energy become flame, and brilliancy of Heaven. Courage!
It is therefore in these years, undated by History, that we must place Oliver’s clear recognition of Calvinistic Christianity; what he, with unspeakable joy, would name his Conversion; his deliverance from the jaws of Eternal Death. Certainly a grand epoch for a man: properly the one epoch; the turningpoint which guides upwards, or guides downwards, him and his activity forevermore. Wilt thou join with the Dragons; wilt thou join with the Gods? Of thee too the question is asked;—whether by a man in Geneva gown, by a man in ‘Four surplices at Allhallowtide,’ with words very imperfect; or by no man and no words, but only by the Silences, by the Eternities, by the Life everlasting and the Death everlasting. That the ‘Sense of difference between Right and Wrong’ had filled all Time and all Space for man, and bodied itself forth into a Heaven and Hell for him: this constitutes the grand feature of those Puritan, Old-Christian Ages; this is the element which stamps them as Heroic, and has rendered their works great, man-like, fruitful to all generations. It is by far the memorablest achievement of our Species; without that element, in some form or other, nothing of Heroic had ever been among us.
For many centuries, Catholic Christianity, a fit embodiment of that divine Sense, had been current more or less, making the generations noble: and here in England, in the Century called the Seventeenth, we see the last aspect of it hitherto,—not the last of all, it is to be hoped. Oliver was henceforth a Christian man; believed in God, not on Sundays only, but on all days, in all places and in all cases.
1624
The grievance of Lay Impropriations, complained of in the Hampton-Court Conference twenty years ago, having never
