OLIVER
CROMWELL, "the
Protector of England,"
and Puritan Ruler, writing to his cousin,
speaks
of himself as "a poor ceature." CARLYLE writes thus
about him:
"Cromwell was then (1623) in his twenty-
fourth year,
with all his life before him. He
says, ‘At about this time
took place what Cromwell, with unspeakable joy, would
name his conversion.
Certainly a grand epoch for a man
properly the one epoch; the turning-point which guides
upwards, or guides downwards, him and his activities for
evermore! Oliver was henceforth a Christian man;
believed in God, not on Sundays only,
but on all days, in
all places, and in all cases."
CROMWELL wrote to the Mayor of Hursley in
1650,
"I hope you give my son good counsel; I believe he
needs
it. He is in the dangerous time of his age, and
it is a very
vain world. O how good it is to close with Christ betimes!
There is nothing else worth looking after!"
One who was present at the closing scene of Cromwell's
life has graphically described it for us. "At Hampton
Court, being sick nigh unto death, and
in his bedchamber,
Cromwell called for his Bible and
desired an honourable
and godly person to read unto him that passage in the
fourth of Philippians which saith, ‘I can do all
things
through Christ which strengtheneth me.’" Which
read, he
observed, "This Scripture did once save my life, when my
eldest son, poor Robert, died, which
went as a dagger
to my heart, indeed it did!"