because there be many of them in our own bowels.' By which we may see how impartially they opposed both; and that this cannot be condemned in the testimonies of the present sufferers, except the assembly be condemned. And because many now a-days have extenuating notions of those debates, against prelacy and sectarianism, about the government of the church, &c. and condemn these that would adhere to and suffer for the punctilios of it, as rigid nicety: I shall, for seeing what account the assembly had of them, cite their words in a letter to the assembly of divines at Westiminster, dated Edinburgh, June 18, 1646. The 'smallest (say they) of Christ's truths (if it be lawful to call any of them small) is of greater moment than all the other businesses, that ever have been debated since the beginning of the world to this day: but the highest of honours and heaviest of burdens is put upon you; to declare out of the sacred records of divine truth, what is the prerogative of the crown and extent of the sceptre of Jesus Christ; what bounds are to be set between him ruling in his house, and powers established by God on earth; how and by whom his house is to be governed; and by what ways a restraint is to be put on these who would pervert his truth and subvert the faith of many.' II. In the manner of maintaining this testimony, these famous fathers, while faithful for God, gave us a perfect pattern of purity and strictness, in opposition to all degrees of conformity and compliance with the corruptions of the time; and laid down such rules and constitutions, as might regulate us in our contendings about present defections, and teach us what account to make of them, and how to carry towards them: which if adverted unto, would evince how manifest and manifold the declinings of many have been from the late reformation, that yet pretend to adhere unto it, and how justifiable the aversation and abstraction of the present reproaching suffering party is, from all these defections and the daubings of them, because so much deviating and declining from the attained reformation. I need not repeat how prelacy, and all the parts and pendicles of that antichristian hierarchy, were abjured in the national covenant, and condemned in the acts of assemblies, and re-abjured in the solemn league and covenant, and in the solemn acknowledgement of sins and engagement to duties, where also we came under sacred and inviolable engagements, to endeavour the extirpation thereof: Which doth clearly file the present countenancing and submitting to the prelatic curates, in receiving ordinances from them, among the grossest of defections; being altogether inconsistent with these acts and constitutions, and covenant obligations to extirpate them, as much as the countenancing of popish priests were inconsistent therewith, being both equally covenanted to be extirpated. Next, though in this period, tyranny being in its retrograde motion, erastian