now by their faintness and the enemy's force, robbed from her, and none now allowed by law to administer the ordinances, but either apostate curates, who by their perjury and apostacy forfaulted their ministry, or other hirelings and prelates journeymen, who run without a mission, except from them who had none to give according to Christ's institution, the seal of whose ministry could never yet be shewn in the conversion of any sinner to Christ: but if the tree may be known by its fruits, we may know whose ministers they are; _ut ex ungue leonem_, by their conversions of reformation into deformation, of the work and cause of God into the similitude of the Roman beast, of ministers into hirelings, of their proselytes into ten times worse children of the devil than they were before, of the power of godliness into formality, of preaching Christ into orations of morality, of the purity of Christ's ordinances into the vanity of men's inventions, of the beautiful government of the house of God for edification, to a lordly pre-eminence and domination over consciences; in a word, of church and state constitutions for religion and liberty, all upside dwon into wickedness and slavery: These are the conversions of prelacy. But now this astonishing blow to the gospel of the kingdom, introducing such a swarm of locusts into the church, and in forcing a compliance of the people with this defection, and that so violently and rigorously, as even simple withdrawing was so severely punished by severe edicts of fining, and other arbitrary punishments at first; what did it produce? did it awaken all Christ's ambassadors, now to appear for Christ, in this clear and claimant case of confessing him, and the freedom and purity of his ordinances? Alas! the backwardness and bentness to backsliding, in a superseding from the duties of that day, did make it evident, that now the Lord had in a great measure forsaken them, because they had forsaken him. The standard of the gospel was then fallen, and few to take it up. The generality of ministers and professors both went and conformed so far as to hear the curates, contrary to many points of the reformation formerly attained, contrary to their covenant engagements, and contrary to their own principles and practice at that same time; scrupling and refusing to keep the bishops visitations, and to countenance their discipline and power of jurisdiction, because it was required as a testification of their acknowledgment of, and compliance with the present government, and yet not scrupling to countenance their doctrine and usurped power of order required also by the same law, as the same test of the same compliance and submission. Its strange that some yet do plead for persisting in that same compliance, after all the bitter consequents of it. Other ministers lay altogether by in their retired recesses, waiting to see what things would turn to: others were hopeless, turned farmers