He had a short and pertinent discourse on the nature, the subject, the causes, and the ends of excommunication in general: And then declared, that he was not led out of any private spirit or passion to this action, but constrained by conscience of duty, and zeal to God to stigmatize with this brand, and wound with the sword of the Lord, these enemies of God that had so apostatized, rebelled against, mocked, despised, and defied our Lord, and to declare them as they are none of his, to be none of ours. 'The persons excommunicated; and the sentence against them was given forth as follows: 'I being a minister of Jesus Christ, and having authority and power from him, do, in his name, and by his Spirit, excommunicate, cast out of the true church, and deliver up to Satan, Charles the Second, king,' &c. The sentence was founded upon these grounds, declared in the pronunciation thereof, (1.) 'For his high mocking of God, in that after he had acknowledged his own sins, his father's sins, his mother's idolatry, yet he had gone on more avowedly in the same than all before him. (2.) For his great perjury in breaking and burning the covenant. (3.) For his rescinding all laws for establishing the reformation, and enacting laws contrary thereunto. (4.) For commanding of armies to destroy the Lord's people. (5.) For his being an enemy to true protestants, and helper of the papists, and hindering the execution of just laws against them. (6.) For his granting remissions and pardons for murderers, which is in the power of no king to do, being expressly contrary to the law of God. (7.) For his adulteries, and dissembling with God and man.' Next, by the same authority, and in the same name, he excommunicated James duke of York, 'for his idolatry, and setting it up in Scotland to dedefile the land, and enticing and encouraging others to do so:' Not mentioning any other sins but what he scandalously persisted in in Scotland, &c. With several other rotten malignant enemies, on whom the Lord hath ratified that sentence since very remarkably, whole sins and punishments both may be read more visible in the providences of the time, than I can record them. But about this time, when amidst all the abounding defections and divisions of that dark and dismal hour of temptation, some in zeal for the cause were endeavouring to keep up the testimony of the day, in an abstraction from complying ministers; others were left (in holy judgment, to be a stumbling-block to the generation hardening them in their defections, and to be a beacon to the most zealous to keep off from all unwarrantable excesses) to fall into fearful extravagancies, and delirious and damnable delusions, being overdriven with ignorant and blind zeal into untrodden paths, which led them into a labyrinth of darkness; when as they were stumbled at many ministers unfaithfulness, so through the deceit of Satan, and the hypocrisy of his instruments, they came to be offended at Mr. Cargil's faithfulness, who spared