Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/41

CIVIL WARS minority consisting of a number of allied sects.

Yet Lincoln was as profoundly religious a man as Cromwell was, though more reticent in the expression of his religious feelings. That was very much the result of the difference between the two ages in which they lived—what was natural and seemly to the Puritans of the seventeenth century would have appeared artificial and indecent to the men of the nineteenth. But there was a difference in the temperament of the two men, and in any age Cromwell would have been more outspoken than Lincoln about such matters. Both men had in early life passed through a period of melancholy caused by religious doubts. In Lincoln there was an underlying strain of sadness which was permanent. But in Cromwell's sanguine nature doubts once settled were settled for ever, and his faith translated itself into sober certainty or an exultant confidence.

Each alike professed his resolve to do in mundane affairs that which appeared to him 33