red and envied Scotland's
establishments, now to see her so dispirited and deceived, as to accept
and address for a toleration, without a testimony, whereby instead of
all the laws and covenants securing her reformation, the only tenor and
security for it she had now remaining, was, the arbitrary word of an
absolute prince, whose principles obliged him to break it? What occasion
of disdainful insulting, did it give to the prelatical party, then
pleading for the nation's laws, to observe presbyterians, acquiescing in
that which suspended and stopped the penal statutes? Yea, what matter of
gloriation and boasting was it to papists, to see presbyterians sleeping
and succumbing, and not opposing, when, at this opened gap, they were
bringing in the Trojan horse of popery and slavery?

V. Moreover, with respect to some things, at present, which we account
corruptions, and are offensive to many, we cannot forbear to remonstrate
and plead, That consideration may be taken, of the sinfulness of the too
universal defect and neglect of zeal and faithfulness, in receiving the
buried national covenants, when now they seem to be laid aside, and many
ministers forbear to preach plainly the obligation of them, and discover
particularly the breaches of them, and to mention them in engagements
which they require of parents, when they present their children in
baptism, according to the continued custom of faithful ministers, these
many years bygone. And it is stumbling to many, that in all addresses to
king and parliament, the renewing of them hath not been desired. This we
think very grievous,

1. Because in the scriptures, as we have many precepts, promises, and
precedents for renewing them, and demonstrations of their perpetual,
indissoluble obligation, being in their matter and form agreeable with
the word of God; so we have many denunciations and certifications of
unavoidable threatenings of all evils, rational, personal, temporal,
spiritual, and eternal, against forsaking or forgetting them.

2. Because as there is no other way to prevent the curse of the
covenants, and this threatened wrath imminent upon the land, for breach
of covenants, but to acknowledge the breaches of them, and engage again
to the duties of them; so these omissions cannot consist with that
faithfulness required of ministers in such a case.

3. Because it is a plain defection from first love, and former
attainments of our fathers, who commenced all reformatio