prove how short this is of true repentance, I will recite the penitence of others, who have repented in words not borrowed, but their own, and yet, by the doom of Scripture itself, are judged reprobates.

321. "Cain said unto the Lord: My iniquity is greater than I can bear: behold thou hast driven me this day from the face of the earth, and from thy face shall I be hid.

"And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with an exceeding bitter cry, and said, Bless me, even me also, O my father; yet found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. Heb. xii.

"And Pharaoh said to Moses, The Lord is righteous, I and my people are wicked; I have sinned. against the Lord your God, and against you.

And Balaam said, Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.

"And Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord; yet honour me now, I pray thee, before the elders of my people.

"And when Ahab heard the words of Elijah, he rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly.

"Jehoram also rent his clothes, and the people looked, and behold he had sackcloth upon his flesh;" yet in the very act of his humiliation he could say, "God do so, and more also to me, if the head of Elisha shall stand on him this day.

66

Therefore, saith the Lord, They have not cried unto me with their heart, when they howled upon

their beds. They return, but not to the Most High, Hosea vii.

"And Judas said, I have sinned, in that I have betrayed innocent blood. (85)

"And Simon Magus said, Pray ye to the Lord for me, that none of these things come upon me."

322. All these took the pains both to confess and to repent in their own words, and many of them in their own tears, not in David's. But transported with the vain ostentation of imitating David's language, not his life, (86) observe how he brings a curse

(65) Nothing could more strongly mark the odious light in which Charles I. appeared to Milton, than this section, where tacitly he classes him with Cain, Pharaoh, and Judas Iscariot, who, like him, prayed to the Almighty, when punishment was about to overtake them. But, whatever was the guilt of that bad king, and it was not a little, we ought perhaps to acquit him of the hypocrisy contained in the "Eikon Basilikè,” which is probably the work of a bishop; though it would seem to have been shown the king, and to have obtained, though we know not how far, his approbation. As this point is doubtful, let him, therefore, enjoy the credit of not having been the author of the cant and nonsense published in his name.

(66) Gibbon, in his account of Andronicus Comnenus, quoted in a former note, describes that consummate tyrant as most adroitly imitating the style of St. Paul, but making no attempt to imitate his life. Our own tyrant must certainly have been an adept in all the subtle arts of autocracy, since he not only imposed upon his contemporaries, but has obtained from posterity, in a Protestant country, the honours of a popish saint and martyr. But in this transaction our countrymen somewhat resemble the crocodile-worshippers of Egypt, who, when their god grew large, and threatened to become dangerous, killed, and then adored him. Numbers of gods that had undergone this pious kind of martyrdom, are, in fact, still found closely and carefully packed up in the caverns of the Saïd. (Egypt and Mohammed Ali, ii. 174.)

upon himself and his father's house (God so disposing it) by his usurped and ill-imitated prayer: "Let thy anger, I beseech thee, be against me and my father's house; as for these sheep, what have they done?" For if David indeed sinned in numbering the people, of which fault he in earnest made that confession, and acquitted the whole people from the guilt of that sin; then doth this king using the same words, bear witness against himself to be the guilty person; and either in his soul and conscience here acquits the parliament and the people, or else abuses the words of David, and dissembles grossly to the very face of God; which is apparent in the next line; wherein he accuses even the church itself to God, as if she were the church's enemy, for having overcome his tyranny by the powerful and miraculous might of God's manifest arm for to other strength, in the midst of our divisions and disorders, who can attribute our victories? Thus had this miserable man no worse enemies to solicit and mature his own destruction, from the hastened sentence of divine justice, than the obdurate curses which proceeded against himself out of his own mouth.

323. Hitherto his meditations, now his vows; which, as the vows of hypocrites use to be, are most commonly absurd, and some wicked. Jacob vowed, that God should be his God, if he granted him but what was necessary to perform that vow, life and subsistence; but the obedience proffered here is nothing so cheap. He, who took so heinously to

be offered nineteen propositions from the parliament, capitulates here with God almost in as many articles.

"If he will continue that light," or rather that darkness of the gospel, which is among his prelates, settle their luxuries, and make them gorgeous bishops;

If he will "restore" the grievances and mischiefs of those obsolete and popish laws, which the parliament without his consent had abrogated, and will suffer justice to be executed according to his sense;

"If he will suppress the many schisms in church," to contradict himself in that which he hath foretold must and shall come to pass, and will remove reformation as the greatest schism of all, and factions in state, by which he means in every leaf, the parliament;

If he will" restore him" to his negative voice and the militia, as much as to say, to arbitrary power, which he wrongfully avers to be the "right of his predecessors;"

"If he will turn the hearts of his people" to their old cathedral and parochial service in the liturgy, and their passive obedience to the king;

"If he will quench" the army, and withdraw our forces from withstanding the piracy of Rupert, (97) and the plotted Irish invasion; (88)

(87) The reader may see in Guizot, (Histoire de la Revolution de l'Angleterre, passim,) the conduct and character of this instrument of tyranny. His insolent behaviour to Newcastle on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor, (t. ii. p. 51, 52,) and the total

"If he will bless him with the freedom" of bishops again in the house of peers, and of fugitive delinquents in the house of commons, and deliver the honour of parliament into his hands, from the most natural and due protection of the people, that entrusted them with the dangerous enterprize of being faithful to their country against the rage and malice of his tyrannous opposition;

"If he will keep him from that great offence," of following the counsel of his parliament, and enacting what they advise him to; which in all reason,

want of foresight and ability on that celebrated field, expose him to our contempt; elsewhere his actions entitle him to our hatred. Alluding to the treacherous advance upon Brentford during treaty with the parliament, of which I have given the history above, (note 77,) Warburton observes :-"He seems to have done it for no other reason than to break off the treaty. He was a soldier of fortune, and loved the service, and his whole conduct was conformable to that character. In a word, the king was ruined by his ministers in peace, and by his officers in war. But he who certainly most contributed to the ill-success of his arms, was Prince Rupert; and this was one of the most mischievous as well as barbarous of his exploits. In this affair, if the king's sole purpose was to disengage Prince Rupert's horse on Hounslow Heath, why did he advance to Hounslow (a mistake for Brentford) with his foot, and force the barricades of the town, defended by the parliament's foot? I doubt he was not so clear in his purpose as his historian represents him." (History, &c. vii. 564.) Clarendon, who has always something civil to say of a tyrant, or a tyrant's instruments, calls Rupert and Newcastle, “ two great generals;" upon which Warburton remarks: "These two great generals ought both to have been hanged, and where any discipline or law prevailed would have been so." (Notes on Clarendon's History, vii. 597.)

(88) See on this point, Guizot's "Histoire de la Revolution de l'Angleterre," (ii. 323, 404); and Brodie's "History of the British Empire." (iii. 489.)