The laws of life are simple, but at the same time very terrible in their consequences if ignored or disobeyed.  What folly to imagine that any great figure or great tragedy comes into existence by chance!  Napoleon was just as necessary to the world as was Cromwell.  Both had the righting of wrongs and the clearing away of the accumulation of centuries of chaos and misgovernment, and it was not to be expected that they could carry out the necessary reforms without making the authors of such an intolerable state of things angry and resentful at their iron methods of discipline.  Napoleon and Cromwell possessed the combined arts of war and statesmanship to a higher degree than any of their contemporaries.  Cromwell excelled Napoleon in professional Christianity.  The latter never paraded his ideas of religion, though he acted on them silently and gave occasional expression to the thoughts of his soul.  Indeed, he was too much given to publicly disavowing the very principles he believed in privately.  This plan or habit was said to be for the purpose of creating controversy.  Be that as it may, when the natural spirit moved him he would declare his views in the most robust way.  On one of many occasions he startled the Council of State by reminding them that a man did not risk being killed for a few pence a day or for a paltry distinction.  “You must speak to the soul,” he declared, “to electrify the man.”  Another very notable expression is here worth referring to, as it instances how practical and human were his views.  “The heart,” said he, “warms the genius, but in Pitt the genius withers the heart, which is a very different thing”; and so it is that Cromwell and he were not dissimilar in many of their attributes.  Indeed, it is said that Napoleon never tired of quoting or having quoted to him some striking characteristic of Cromwell.  We could hardly, with any degree of good judgment, put Leslie the Covenanter or Sir Jacob Astley the Royalist, or Nelson the matchless naval strategist and national hero, on a par with either Cromwell or Napoleon.  They are only here referred to in connection with the two unequalled constructive statesmen and military generals as representing a type of peculiarly religious men who have occupied high military and naval positions in the service of the State.

Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Blake in Cromwell’s time, Nelson in Napoleon’s, were all fire-eating religious men, always asking favours and guidance in their perilous undertakings from the great mystic Power in whom they believed.  Collingwood was a great admiral and a Christian gentleman, who never mixed religion with hysterical or dramatic flashes of quarterdeck language.  He was ostentatious in nothing, and seemed to observe a strictly decorous attitude.  Nelson, on the other hand, resembled a restless squirrel, always swift in his instincts, with an enthusiasm which was contagious.  In many ways he did not adhere to what is called cricket in sporting phrase.  He was accustomed to say, “Never mind the justice or the impudence of this or that, only let me succeed.”  Then he would proceed to ask the Almighty in feverish zeal to aid him in the object he had in view.