“This great man is risen from a very low and afflicted condition; one that hath suffered very great troubles of soul, lying a long time under sore terrors and temptations, and at the same time in a very low condition for outward things: in this school of afflictions he was kept, till he had learned the lesson of the Cross, till his will was broken into submission to the will of God.” Religion was thus “laid into his soul with the hammer and fire”; it did not “come in only by light into his understanding.”
In 1638, at the request of his cousin, Mrs. St. John, Cromwell confided to her the story of this crisis in his life.
“You know,” he said, “what my manner of life hath been. Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. This is true, I hated godliness, yet God had mercy on me.” Even now the struggle was not ended. “I live in Meshec, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Blackness: yet the Lord forsaketh me not. Though He do prolong, yet He will I trust bring me to His tabernacle, to His resting-place. My soul is with the Congregation of the First-born, my body rests in hope.... He giveth me to see light in His light.”
It would be wrong to take these self-accusings as a confirmation of the charges which royalist writers brought against Cromwell’s early life. They refer to spiritual rather than moral failings, perhaps to the love of the world and its vanities against which he so often warns his children. They denote a change of feeling rather than a change of conduct, a rise from coldness to enthusiasm, from dejection to exaltation.
Full of thankfulness for this deliverance, Cromwell longed to testify to his faith. “If here I may honour my God, either by doing or suffering, I shall be most glad. Truly no poor creature hath more cause to put himself forth in the cause of his God than I have. I have had plentiful wages beforehand, and I am sure I shall never earn the least mite.” The time for doing was near at hand, for when he wrote the resistance of the Scots had begun. The friend quoted before points out how strangely the turning-point in Cromwell’s spiritual life coincided with the turning-point in the history of his cause. “The time of his extreme suffering was when this cause of religion in which we are now engaged was at its lowest ebb.” When the cause began to prosper, “he came forth into comfort of spirit and enlargement of estate.” And so “he suffered and rose with the cause, as if he had one life with it.”