Cromwell, when he attempted to legalize his power, and to settle his
conquered country in a state of order, did not look for dispensers of
justice in the instruments of his usurpation. Quite the contrary. He
sought out, with great solicitude and selection, and even from the party
most opposite to his designs, men of weight and decorum of character;
men unstained with the violence of the times, and with hands not fouled
with confiscation and sacrilege: for he chose an HALE for his chief
justice, though he absolutely refused to take his civic oaths, or to
make any acknowledgment whatsoever of the legality of his government.
Cromwell told this great lawyer, that since he did not approve his
title, all he required of him was, to administer, in a manner agreeable
to his pure sentiments and unspotted character, that justice without
which human society cannot subsist: that it was not his particular
government, but civil order itself, which, as a judge, he wished him to
support. Cromwell knew how to separate the institutions expedient to his
usurpation from the administration of the public justice of his country.
For Cromwell was a man in whom ambition had not wholly suppressed, but
only suspended, the sentiments of religion, and the love (as far as
it could consist with his designs) of fair and honourable reputation.
Accordingly, we are indebted to this act of his for the preservation of
our laws, which some senseless assertors of the rights of men were then
on the point of entirely erasing, as relics of feudality and barbarism.
Besides, he gave in the appointment of that man, to that age, and to
all posterity, the most brilliant example of sincere and fervent piety,
exact justice, and profound jurisprudence. (See Burnet's Life of Hale.)
But these are not the things in which your philosophic usurpers choose
to follow Cromwell.
One would think, that after an honest and necessary revolution (if they
had a mind that theirs should pass for such) your masters would have
imitated the virtuous policy of those who have been at the head of
revolutions of that glorious character. Burnet tells us, that nothing
tended to reconcile the English nation to the government of King William
so much as the care he took to fill the vacant bishoprics with men who
had attracted the public esteem by their learning, eloquence, and piety,
and, above all, by their known moderation in the state. With you, in
your purifying revolution, whom have you chosen to regulate the church?
Mr. Mirabeau is a fine speaker--and a fine writer,--and a fine--a very
fine man;--but really nothing gave more surprise to everybody here, than
to find him the supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The rest is
of course. Your Assembly addresses a manifesto to France, in which they
tell the people, with an insulting irony, that they have brought the
church to its primitive condition. In one respect their declaration is
undoubtedly true; for they have brought it to a state of poverty and
persecution. What can be hoped for after this? Have not men (if they
deserve the name), under this new hope and head of the church, been made
bishops for no other merit than having acted as instruments of atheists;
for no other merit than having thrown the children's bread to dogs;
and in order to gorge the whole gang of usurers, pedlars, and itinerant
Jew-discounters at the corners of streets, starved the poor of their
Christian flocks, and their own brother pastors? Have not such men
been made bishops to administer in temples, in which (if the patriotic
donations have not already stripped them of their vessels) the
churchwardens ought to take security for the altar-plate, and not so
much as to trust the chalice in their sacrilegious hands, so long as
Jews have assignats on ecclesiastic plunder, to exchange for the silver
stolen from churches?