dispose of the facts which rest on actual Puritan testimony.  If, even after the Self-denying Ordinance, the “Perfect Occurrences” repeatedly report soldiers of the Puritan army, as cashiered for drunkenness, rudeness to women, pilfering, and defrauding innkeepers, it is inevitable to infer that in earlier and less stringent times they did the same undetected or unpunished.  When Mrs. Hutchinson describes a portion of the soldiers on her own side as “licentious, ungovernable wretches,”—­when Sir Samuel Luke, in his letters, depicts the glee with which his men plunder the pockets of the slain,—­when poor John Wolstenholme writes to head-quarters that his own compatriots have seized all his hay and horses, “so that his wife cannot serve God with the congregation but in frosty weather,”—­when Vicars in “Jehovah Jireh” exults over the horrible maiming and butchery wrought by the troopers upon the officers’ wives and female camp-followers at Naseby,—­it is useless to attribute exaggeration to the other side.  In civil war, even the humanest, there is seldom much opening for exaggeration,—­the actual horrors being usually quite as vivid as any imaginations of the sufferers, especially when, as in this case, the spiritual instructors preach, on the one side, from “Curse ye Meroz,” and, on the other side, from “Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.”

We mention these things, not because they are deliberately denied by anybody, but because they are apt to be overlooked by those who take their facts at secondhand.  All this does not show that the Puritans had, even at the outset, worse men or a cause no better; it simply shows that war demoralizes, and that right-thinking men may easily, under its influence, slide into rather reprehensible practices.  At a later period the evil worked its own cure, among the Puritans, and the army of Cromwell was a moral triumph almost incredible; but at the time of which we write, the distinction was but lightly drawn.  It would be easy to go farther and show that among the leading Parliamentary statesmen there were gay and witty debauchees,—­that Harry Marten deserved the epithet with which Cromwell saluted him,—­that Pym succeeded to the regards of Stafford’s bewitching mistress,—­that Warwick was truly, as Clarendon describes him, a profuse and generous profligate, tolerated by the Puritans for the sake of his earldom and his bounty, at a time when bounty was convenient and peers scarce.  But it is hardly worth while farther to demonstrate the simple and intelligible fact, that there were faults on both sides.  Neither war nor any other social phenomenon can divide infallibly the sheep from the goats, or collect all the saints under one set of staff-officers and all the sinners under another.