But alas! how have we their degenerate and renegade posterity followed their example or traced their steps, yea we have rather served ourselves heirs to them who persecuted and killed them, by our long accession to their perjury and apostacy in a general and avowed denial of our most solemn vows and oaths of allegiance to Jesus Christ. To mention nothing more of the total extermination of our ancient and laudable constitution, during the two tyrants reigns, with the many grave stones cast thereon by the acts rescissory, &c. (which acts seem by no act in particular yet to be repealed) and claim of right at the revolution, whereby we have in a national way and capacity (whatever be the pretences) declared ourselves to be on another footing than the footing of the once-famous covenanted church of Scotland. How many are the defections and encroachments annually and daily made upon our most valuable rights and privileges! For since the revolution, the duty of national covenanting has not only been slighted and neglected, yea ridiculed by some, but even some leading church-men, in their writings[10], have had the effrontery to impugn (though in a very sly way) the very obligation of these covenants, asserting that there is little or no warrant for national covenanting under the new Testament dispensation: And what awful attacks since that time have been made upon the crown-rights of our Redeemer (notwithstanding some saint acts then made to the contrary) as witness the civil magistrate's still retaining his old usurped power, in calling and dissolving the supreme judicatories of the church, yea, sometimes to an indefinite time.--Likewise appointing diets of fasting and thanksgiving to be observed, under fines and other civil pains annexed; imposing oaths, acts and statutes upon church-men, under pain of ecclesiastic censure, or other Erastian penalties. And instead of our covenants, an unhallowed union is gone into with England, whereby our rights and liberties are infringed not a little, _bow down thy body as the ground that we may pass over_.--Lordly patronage[11], which was cast out of the church in her purest times, is now restored and practised to an extremity.--A toleration bill[12] is granted, whereby all and almost every error, heresy and delusion appears now rampant and triumphant, prelacy is now become fashionable and epidemical, and of popery we are in as much danger as ever[13]; Socinian and deistical tenets are only in vogue with the wits of the age, _foli rationi cedo_, the old Porphyrian maxim having so far gained the ascendant at present, that reason (at least pretenders to it, who must needs hear with their eyes, and see with their ears, and understand with their elbows till the order of nature be inverted) threaten not a little to banish revealed religion and its most important doctrines out of the professing world.--A latitudinarian scheme prevails among the majority, the greater part,