It was at that time the Puritan struggle arose in England, and you know well that the Scottish Earls and nobility, with their tenantry, marched away to Dunse-hill, and sat down there; and just in the course of that struggle, when it was either to be suppressed or brought into greater vitality, they encamped on the top of Dunse-hill thirty thousand armed men, drilled for that occasion, each regiment around its landlord, its earl, or whatever he might be called, and eager for Christ’s Crown and Covenant.  That was the signal for all England rising up into unappeasable determination to have the Gospel there also, and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether the Parliament or the King should rule—­whether it should be old formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new conceived in the souls of men—­namely, a divine determination to walk according to the laws of God here as the sum of all prosperity—­which of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of struggle, it was decided—­the way we know.  I should say also of that Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell’s—­notwithstanding the abuse it has encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in the world, and so on—­it appears to me to have been the most salutary thing in the modern history of England on the whole.  If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, I don’t know what it would have come to.  It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could not have gone on, but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his mind—­there was truth in it when he ruled over it.

Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking about the Romans, that democracy cannot exist anywhere in the world; as a Government it is an impossibility that it should be continued, and he goes on proving that in his own way.  I do not ask you all to follow him in his conviction (hear); but it is to him a clear truth that it is a solecism and impossibility that the universal mass of men should govern themselves.  He says of the Romans that they continued a long time, but it was purely in virtue of this item in their constitution—­namely, that they had all the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly necessary at times to appoint a Dictator—­a man who had the power of life and death over everything—­who degraded men out of their places, ordered them to execution, and did whatever seemed to him good in the name of God above him.  He was commanded to take care that the Republic suffered no detriment, and Machiavelli calculates that that was the thing that purified the social system from time to time, and enabled it to hang on as it did—­an extremely likely thing if it was composed of nothing but bad and tumultuous men triumphing in general over the better, and all going the bad road, in fact.  Well, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, or Dictatorate if you will, lasted for about ten years, and you will find that nothing that was contrary to the laws of Heaven was allowed to