LIFE OF RICHARD ,BAXTER. 51 says, occasioned the riotous proceedings referred to ; and every such popular movement widened the breach and made the quarrel more desperate. "Thus rash attempts of headstrong people do work against the good ends which they themselvesintend ; and the zeal which hath censorious strife and envy, doth tend to confusion and every evil work; and OVERDOING IS THE ORDINARY WAY OF UNDOING. "* Another thing on the side of the parliament, which hastened the war, and made it inevitable and irreconcilable, wasthe revolutionary spirit of some of the active members, who encouraged the disorders before mentioned, and were unwilling to rest at any point short of the reduction of the whole system of church and state to their no- tions. To these causes he adds another, "the great distrust which the parliament had of the king;," but though he mentions this in the catalogue of those particulars in which the parliament was blame- worthy, he neglects to show how the blame of this distrust could be imputed either to the parliament or to the people. " They were confident," he says, and evidently they hadgood reason to be confident, " that the king was unmovable as to his judgment and affections; and that whatever he granted them, was but in design to get his advantage utterly to destroy them; and that he did but watch for such an opportunity. They supposed that he utterly abhorred the parliament and their actions ; and therefore whatever he promised them, they believed him not, nor durst take his word ; which theywere hardened in by those former actions of his, which they called the breach of his former promises. "t On the other side, the quarrel was aggravated, and the war has- tened, first by a plot, in which the king was involved, to bring the northern army to London, and thus to overawe and subdue the parliament; then by his undertaking to provide a guard, ostensibly for the protection, but really for the restraint, of the house of com- mons; next by the king's coming in person to the house, followed by an armed retinue, with the design of seizing five members, whom he had accused of treason; afterwards' by the rash move- ments of some of the king's friends ; and more than all the rest, by the supposed connection between the court and the rebellion of the Papists in Ireland, who had murdered two hundred thou- sand Protestants in that kingdom, and to whom the English Catholics, favored by the king, and known to be his zealous partisans in his whole controversy with the parliament, were look- ing with undisguised sympathy and with ardent hopes for their success. *Narrative, Part I. pp. 26, 27. i Narrative, Part I. p. 27.
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