'James the VII. II. by the V. of G. king of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, defender of the antichristian faith: To all and sundry our good subjects, whom these presents do, or may concern: greeting. We having taken into our royal consideration, the many and great inconveniencies which have happened in that our ancient kingdom of Scotland, especially of late years, through the persuasions of the christian religion, and the great heats and animosities, betwixt the professors thereof, and our good and faithful subjects, whose faith and religion is subject and subservient to our royal will (the supreme law, and reason, and public conscience) to the disappointment of our projects, restraint of our pleasures, and contempt of the royal power, converting true loyalty and absolute subjection, into words and names (which we care not for) of religion and liberty, conscience and the word of God, thereby withdrawing some to the christian faction, from an absolute and implicit subjection to us and our will, as if there were a superior law to which they might appeal; and considering that these rebellious christians do never cease to assert and maintain strange paradoxes, such principles as are inconsistent with the glory and interest of our government, as that the authority of kings should be hemmed in with limits, and that their acts and actions are to be examined by another rule than their own authority to make them lawful, that some things in the kingdom are not subject to the king's authority, that there is a kingdom within a kingdom not subordinate to the king, and that there is another King superior to the supreme whom they will rather obey than us, and that we must either take laws from him, or otherwise we are no magistrates; and considering also their practices are conform to their principles, they will not obey our laws, but the laws of another inconsistent with ours, and will calculate their religion according to his laws, and not according to ours, and continually make their addresses to, and receive ambassadors from a prince whom we know not, whom our predecessors, of truly worthy memory, did crucify, one Jesus who was dead, whom they affirm to be alive, whose government they alledge is supreme over all kings, whom they acknowledge but as his vassals: being now by favourable fortune, not only brought to the imperial crown of these kingdoms through the greatest difficulties, but preserved upon the throne of our royal ancestors, which from our great founder Nimrod of glorious memory, and our illustrious predecessors Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod the great, Nero, Caligula, &c. of blessed and pious memory, hath been ever opposite to, and projecting the destruction of that