A Hind Let Loose: Or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies of the Church of Scotland for the Interest of Christ. With the True State Thereof in All Its PeriodsShields, Alexander
History
A Hind Let Loose: Or, An Historical Representation of the Testimonies of the Church of Scotland for the Interest of Christ. With the True State Thereof in All Its Periods
Shields, Alexander
Church of Scotland -- Controversial literature; Church of Scotland -- History; Covenanters; Scotland -- Church history
general, with a combination of malignants and public resolutioners, did
machinate our misery, and effectuated it by bringing home the king to
England from his banishment: Wherein he was habituate into an implacable
hatred against the work of God. Yet, though since the king's first
reception into Scotland, our declensions were still growing, until they
produced this dreadful revolt from God, wherein the nation is now
involved; there was still a faithful remnant of ministers and
professors, zealous for the cause, keeping their integrity; who in their
remonstrances and testimonies witnessed against both their malignant
enemies, and their backsliding brethren the revolutioners, and also
against the sectarians their invaders; whose vast toleration and liberty
of conscience, which they brought in to invade our religion as they had
invaded our land, and infected it with their multifarious errors, was
particularly by the synod of Fife, and other brethren in the ministry
that joined themselves to them, testified against, and demonstrated to
be wicked and intolerable. Now to see how far the present testimony is
confirmed by the witnesses of this period, we may resume some
reflections on it.
I. They impartially carried on the testimony against prelacy, and the
popish, prelatical and malignant factions on the one hand, and the
sectarians on the other, without ever waving the testimony against
either, or at the least, winking at the one to weaken the other: both
which testimonies they thought of so great importance, that they could
not dispense with but faithfully maintain both, in their witnessings and
warnings. In that seasonable and necessary warning and declaration,
concerning present and imminent dangers, given at Edinburgh July 27.
sess. 27. they first say of the sectaries, 'That prevailing party of
sectaries in England, who have broken the covenant, and despised the
oath of God, corrupted the truth, subverted the fundamental government,
look upon us with an evil eye, as upon these who stand in the way of
their monstrous and new fangled devices in religion and government; and
though there were no cause to fear any thing from that party, but the
gangrene and infection of those many damnable and abominable errors
which have taken hold on them; yet our vicinity unto and daily commerce
with that nation, may justly make us afraid, that the Lord may give up
many in this land into a spirit of delusion to believe lies, because
they have not received the love of the truth. In that same warning they
say, We are not so to have the one of our eyes upon the sectarians, as
not to have the other upon malignants, they being an enemy more numerous
and more dangerous than the other; not only because experience hath
proven, that there is a greater aptitude and inclination in these of our
land to comply with malignants, than sectaries, in that they carry on
their wicked design, under a pretext of being for the king, but also
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