    38

    kn

    to pay a physician the equivalent of what a middle-class family earned

    in five years.  Often Cromwell scolded his daughter for hanging

    around with worldly folk.  Oliver, you see, was a profoundly religious

    man.  It never occurred to him that there was anything "worldly" about

    his accumulation of huge estates. These were merely God's rewards for

    killing.  Sometimes a successful meme can pay its helpers well.

    In his own way, Oliver Cromwell could see that he was the

    servant of a force battling to impose its form of organization on the

    world of men and matter.  He realized that he was a tool in a struggle

    between concepts of truly massive scope.  Cromwell regarded war, to

    quote his biographer, Antonia Fraser, as "part of an inevitable, deeply

    disturbing, deeply exciting process, by which the way of the Lord had

    to be fought out in order to be discovered."  God's will, Oliver felt,

    would be found in the cannon's mouth.

    When Cromwell and his Puritans won the English Civil War, the

    entire state was forced to adopt Puritan views.  Alas for the Puritans, it

    was not to last.  Eventually, the English grew tired of the dour new

    meme and its henchmen.  Two years after Oliver Cromwell's death in

    1658, the monarchy was restored.

    But the battle between Cromwell and the king had never merely

    been a contest between men.  It had been a struggle between ideas.

    Ideas had attracted vast hordes of men to their cause, and pitted them

    against each other for the possession of England.  Ideas had used a

    person who went from killing pigeons to killing men.  Ideas had

    manipulated a convenient tool named Oliver Cromwell.

      own) became so wealthy that when he had an ailment, he was able

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