No. 15

TWICE-BORN MEN

REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE

Compiled by HY. PICKERING

England’s Great Protector

OLIVER CROMWELL, “the Protector of England,”and Puritan Ruler, writing to his cousin, speaks of himself as “a poor creature.” CARLYLE writes thus about him:

“Cromwell was then (1623) in his twenty-fourth year, with all his life before him. He says, ‘At about this time took place what Cromwell, with unspeakable joy, would name his conversion. Certainly a grand epoch for a man properly the one epoch; the turning-point which guides upwards, or guides downwards, him and his activities for evermore! Oliver was henceforth a Christian man; believed in God, not on Sundays only, but on all days, in all places, and in all cases.”

CROMWELL wrote to the Mayor of Hursley in 1650, “I hope you give my son good counsel; I believe he needs it. He is in the dangerous time of his age, and it is a very vain world. 0 how good it is to close with Christ betimes! There is nothing else worth looking after!”

One who was present at the closing scene of Cromwell’s life has graphically described it for us. “At Hampton Court, being sick nigh unto death, and in his bedchamber, Cromwell called for his Bible and desired an honourable and godly person to read unto him that passage in the fourth of Philippians which saith, ‘ I can do all things ‘through Christ that strengtheneth me.'” Which read, he observed, “This Scripture did once save my life, when my eldest son, poor Robert, died, which went as a dagger to my heart, indeed it did!”