the more than cimmerian darkness of antichristianism, and, by the antidote
of reformation, to avoid the poison of Popery; forasmuch as in England and
Ireland, every noisome weed which God's hand had never planted was not
pulled up, therefore we now see the faces of those churches overgrown with
the repullulating twigs and sprigs of popish superstition. Mr Sprint
acknowledgeth the Reformation of England to have been defective, and
saith, "It is easy to imagine of what difficulty it was to reform all
things at the first, where the most part of the privy council, of the
nobility, bishops, judges, gentry, and people, were open or close Papists,
where few or none of any countenance stood for religion at the first, but
the Protector and Cranmer."(11) The church of Scotland was blessed with a
more glorious and perfect reformation than any of our neighbour churches.
The doctrine, discipline, regiment, and policy established here by
ecclesiastical and civil laws, and sworn and subscribed unto by the king's
majesty and several presbyteries and parish churches of the land, as it
had the applause of foreign divines; so was it in all points agreeable
unto the word, neither could the most rigid Aristarchus of these times
challenge any irregularity of the same. But now, alas! even this church,
which was once so great a praise in the earth is deeply corrupted, and
hath "turned aside quickly out of the way," Exod. xxxii. 8. So that this
is the Lord's controversy against Scotland. "I had planted thee a noble
vine, wholly a right seed? How then art thou turned into the degenerate
plant of a strange vine unto me?" Jer. ii. 21.

It is not this day feared, but felt, that the rotten dregs of Popery,
which were never purged away from England and Ireland and having once been
spued out with detestation, are licked up again in Scotland, prove to be
the unhappy occasions of a woeful recidivation. Neither is there need of
Lyncean eyes, for if we be not poreblind, it cannot be hid from us. What
doleful and disastrous mutation (to be bewailed with tears of blood) hath
happened to the church and spouse of Christ in these dominions? Her comely
countenance is miscoloured with the fading lustre of the mother of
harlots, her shamefaced forehead hath received the mark of the beast, her
lovely locks are frizled with the crisping pins of antichristian fashions,
her chaste ears are made to listen to the friends of the great whore, who
bring the bewitching doc