[Footnote 2: Balfour, iv. 118, 123, 129-135, 160. Baillie, ii. 356.
A minister, James Guthrie, in defiance of the committee of estates,
excommunicated Middleton; and such was the power of the kirk, that even
when the king's party was superior, Middleton was compelled to do penance
in sackcloth in the church of Dundee, before he could obtain absolution
preparatory to his taking a command in the army.--Baillie, 357. Balfour,
240.]

[Sidenote a: A.D. 1650. Oct. 4.]
[Sidenote b: A.D. 1650. Oct. 5.]
[Sidenote c: A.D. 1650. Oct. 6.]
[Sidenote d: A.D. 1650. Oct. 10.]
[Sidenote e: A.D. 1650. Oct. 12.]
[Sidenote f: A.D. 1650. Nov. 4.]


In the mean while Cromwell in his quarters at Edinburgh laboured to unite
the character of the saint with that of the conqueror; and, surrounded as
he was with the splendour of victory, to surprise the world by a display
of modesty and self-abasement. To his friends and flatterers, who fed
his vanity by warning him to be on his guard against its suggestions,
he replied, that he "had been a dry bone, and was still an unprofitable
servant," a mere instrument in the hands of Almighty power; if God had
risen in his wrath, if he had bared his arm and avenged his cause, to
him, and to him alone, belonged the glory.[1] Assuming the office of a
missionary, he exhorted his officers in daily sermons to love one another,
to repent from dead works, and to pray and mourn for the blindness of their
Scottish adversaries; and, pretending to avail himself of his present
leisure, he provoked a theological controversy with the ministers in