to the presbytery of Edinburgh, declaring he was resolved to protect and preserve the government of the church of Scotland, as it is settled by law without violation: wherein it was observed he altered the stile, and spake never a word of the covenant, our _Magna Charta_ of religion and righteousness, our greatest security for all interests intrusted to him, but only of law; by which, as his practice expounded it afterwards, he meant the prelatical church, as it was settled by the law of his father, since which time he reckoned there was no law but rebellion. This was a piece and prelude of our base defection, and degeneration into blind blockish, and brutish stupidity; that after he had discovered so much perfidy, we not only at first tempted him to perjury, in admitting him to the crown, upon his mock-engagement in the covenant, whereby God was mocked, his Spirit was grieved, his covenant prostituted, the church cheated, and the state betrayed; but after the Lord had broken his yoke from off our necks, by sending him to exile ten years, where he was discovered to be imbibing all that venom and tyrannical violence, which he afterward vented in revenge upon the nation; and after we had long smarted for our first transaction with him; yet notwithstanding of all this, we believed him again, and Issachar-like couched under his burdens and were so far from withstanding, that we did not so much as witness against the re-admission and restoration of the head and tail of malignants, but let them come in peaceably to the throne, without any security to the covenanted cause, or for our civil or religious interests, and by meal, at their own ease, leisure and pleasure, to overturn all the work of God, and reintroduce the old antichristian yoke of absurd prelacy, and blasphemous sacreligious, supremacy, and absolute arbitrary tyranny with all their abominations: which he, and with him the generality of our nobility, gentry, clergy, and commonality by him corrupted, without regard to faith, or fear of God or man, did promote and propogate, the nation was involved in the greatest revolt from, and rebellion against God, that ever could be recorded in any age or generation; nay attended with greater and grosser aggravations, than ever any could be capable of before us, who have had the greatest privileges that ever any church had, since the national church of the Jews, the greatest light, the greatest effects of matchless magnified love, the greatest convictions of sin, the greatest resolutions and solemn engagements against it, and the greatest reformation from it, that ever any had to abuse and affront. O heavens be astonished at this, and horribly afraid! for Scotland hath changed her glory, and the crown hath fallen from off her head, by an unparalelled apostasy, a free and voluntary, wilful and deliberate apostasy, an avowed and declared and authorized apostasy, tyrannically carried on by military violence and