Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/348

314 General Allen, a most authentic earnest man, whom we shall know better afterwards, reports what they did. Entirely amazing to us. These are the longest heads and the strongest hearts in England; and this is the thing they are doing; this is the way they, for their part, begin despatch of business. The reader, if he is an earnest man, may look at it with very many thoughts, for which there is no word at present.

‘In the year Forty-seven, you may remember,’ says Adjutant Allen, ‘we in the Army were engaged in actions of a very high nature; leading us to very untrodden paths,—both in our Contests with the then Parliament, as also Conferences with the King. In which great works,—wanting a spirit of faith, and also the fear of the Lord, and also being unduly surprised with the fear of man, which always brings a snare, we, to make haste, as we thought, out of such perplexities, measuring our way by a wisdom of our own, fell into Treaties with the King and his Party: which proved such a snare to us, and led into such labyrinths by the end of that year, that the very things we thought to avoid, by the means we used of our own devising, were all, with many more of a far worse and more perplexing nature, brought back upon us. To the overwhelming of our spirits, weakening of our hands and hearts; filling us with divisions, confusions, tumults, and every evil work; and thereby endangering the ruin of that blessed Cause we had, with such success, been prospered in till that time.

‘For now the King and his Party, seeing us not answer their ends, began to provide for themselves, by a Treaty with the then Parliament, set on foot about the beginning of Forty-eight. The Parliament also was, at the same time, highly displeased with us for what we had done, both as to the King and themselves. The good people likewise, even our most cordial friends in the Nation, beholding our turning aside from that path of simplicity we had formerly walked in and been