Cromwell's House

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Thu, 27/02/2025 - 00:00

Blessed visitors to the English city of Ely may pay a small fee to look around Oliver Cromwell’s House. Before he assumed national greatness, he lived at this comfortable though certainly not grand house in the city not far from the famous cathedral. Various exhibits detail his life and times, and the obligatory gift shop concludes the tour.

A man’s house is his primary place of worship. A Christian family should pray together and read the scriptures as a group, the head of the family impressing the rest with spiritual truths, as well as the moral and financial management which parents must instil. Knowing that Cromwell was a family man as well as one of the ‘godly’, these rooms would have once echoed with his rustic accent intoning the psalms, reading the Geneva Bible and offering prayers of thanksgiving and supplication to his mighty God.

Although he would have worshipped at the parish church next door or even the local cathedral when his tolerance levels were unusually high, this humbler construction was his primary place of worship: and may our own homes be ours.