When the kings of England would forcibly have established episcopacy in Scotland, the presbyters passed an act _against the toleration of dissenters from presbyterian doctrines and discipline_; and thus, as Guthrie observes, they were committing the same violence on the consciences of their brethren which they opposed in the king. The presbyterians contrived their famous _covenant_ to dispossess the royalists of their livings; and the independents, who assumed the principle of toleration in their very name, shortly after enforced what they called the _engagement_, to eject the presbyterians! In England, where the dissenters were ejected, their great advocate Calamy complains that the dissenters were only making use of the same arguments which the most eminent reformers had done in their noble defence of the reformation against the papists; while the arguments of the established church against the dissenters were the same which were urged by the papists against the protestant reformation![172] When the presbyterians were our masters, and preached up the doctrine of passive obedience in spiritual matters to the civil power, it was unquestionably passing a self-condemnation on their own recent opposition and detraction of the former episcopacy. Whenever men act from a secret motive entirely contrary to their ostensible one, such monstrous results will happen; and as extremes will join, however opposite they appear in their beginnings, John Knox and Father Petre, in office, would have equally served James the Second as confessor and prime minister!