Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/109

 nest men, who outstripped the legal technicalities on which Parliament called them to arms, and enlisted for the war as for the supreme struggle against the powers of evil. In the literature of the Great Civil War a book like John Goodwin’s Anti-Cavalierisme represents the spirit of such men. The Independent bade his hearers remember that as Englishmen they stood in defense of their property and political liberty against the godless cavaliers, Satan’s last hope. “If you shall hold out this one impression and onset which they are now making upon you, and make good the ground you stand on against them; you shall breake their cords in sunder, and cast their bands from you for ever; you shall make such an entaylement of this pretious inheritance we speake of, your libertie, to your children, and childrens children, that they shall never be able to cut off. If they be but now broken, they are not like ever to make themselves whole againe: if you will be perswaded to be men of wisedome once, you may be men of comfort and peace ever after.” Nor did Goodwin believe that the godly as martyrs were to conquer by patience. Martyrdom, he said, he did not think that God would use much longer to advance his kingdom. Goodwin’s book preserves to us the early hopes and aspirations of the men who later molded the temper of the New Model, and later still, some of them, claimed their liberties by the Agreement of the People.

Lilburne, it may be imagined, possessed a double portion of the spirit of Goodwin. As a boy, sick