ns, that we might at least give some discovery of our
respect to the cause of God, for the advancement and preservation
whereof these covenants were first entered into, and afterwards again
and again renewed by our religious progenitors, and by the whole
representative body of the three kingdoms, who had any zeal for the
interest of religion. And that we might, for our parts, be in some
measure instrumental to transmit a testimony for the work of God in our
land to the succeeding generation. Neither do we want, besides these
general motives, some special inducements to this undertaking. As 1.
Because these national covenants, having been nationally broken, and
their funeral piles erected by wicked and perfidious rulers in the
capital cities of the kingdom, with all imaginable ignominy and
contempt, have long lien buried and (almost) quite forgotten under these
ashes; most people either hating the very name and remembrance of them,
or at least being ashamed honorably to avouch their adherence to them,
and afraid to endeavor a vigorous and constant prosecution of the duties
contained in them: So that it is high time that every one should do his
utmost towards a reviving of them. 2. Because many openly declare their
sorrow and grief that ever these covenants should have been entered
into: malignants calling them a conspiracy, attributing every
miscarriage of the persons engaged in them to the covenants themselves
as their native effects; and others, who would take it ill to be called
malignants, making them the causes of all the tyranny, rapine, bloodshed
and persecution of the late reigns, as having raised the spleen of the
enemies of religion, and accounting it safer that they should lie still
in their graves, than that they should irritate malignants any more by
their resurrection.[4] Therefore we judge it our duty to renew them,
that we might evidence, that notwithstanding all these malicious
calumnies and false consequences cast upon them, we are still of the
same judgment with our reformers, that they are the most sovereign
means, under the blessing of God, for the reviving and preserving the
work of God in the land. 3. Because of the courses that are carried on
in direct opposition to these covenants; the nations, formerly cemented
in peace and love in conjunction with truth and righteousness, having
broken these bonds, and united themselves upon another footing, by the
late sinful incorporating union: and imposing ne