The Covenants And The Covenanters: Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation
Religion
The Covenants And The Covenanters: Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation
Covenanters -- Scotland -- History -- Sources; Presbyterian Church -- Scotland -- History -- Sources
I will next turn me to strangers and foreigners. All ye of reformed
kirks (What! have I said strangers? These men who are brought up in the
kirk, are strangers from the womb; but) ye are joined with us in a
corporation; come therefore with your fellow-feeling, let us hear your
shouts and cries of, grace, grace, be unto the Kirk of Scotland; and let
your wishes condemn these ungrateful neutrals, who profess themselves
children of this kirk, and yet will not rejoice with us for the good of
our mother.
Now, ye have heard this text in all these six steps. 1. A mountain
seen. 2. A mountain reproved and disdained. 3. A mountain to be removed.
4. A growing work. 5. To be finished. 6. With great applause of all
well-willers, wishing grace unto the work. And seeing I have ado with
this great mountain; both with mountains that impede this work, and all
ranks of persons, removers of the work, I will direct my speech to these
with the apostrophe in the text.
And first, To the mountains lying in the way of this reformation: I rank
them in two sorts, viz., prelates, and upholders of prelates. O
prelates, if I had hope to come speed with you, I would exhort you in
the name of Christ, to lay down your worldly dignity, and help us to
exalt the kirk of Christ: but I fear ye have hardened yourselves so
against the truth, that nothing will prevail with you, except ye keep
your worldly monarchy; yet ye shall be forced to take up my apostrophe,
"O mountains of Gilboa, on whom the anointed of the Lord is fallen,
neither come dew nor rain upon you." Ye are these mountains, upon whom
Christ and His Anointed have been slain; the dew and rain of God's grace
are not on you: ye may well receive fatness from beneath, to make you
great in this world; but from above, ye are not bedewed with the grace
of God, without which, whatever your bodies be, ye have clean souls.
Under this curse I leave you, and turn to you, O great mountains; great
men, who are putting your shoulders to hold up this mountain of prelacy;
I beseech you, if ye have any love to Christ, to take your shoulders,
and help from this pestiferous mountain the wreck of Christ's kirk. And
if exhortance will not prevail with you, I charge you in the name of the
great God, and His Son Jesus Christ, to whom one day ye must give your
account, that ye in nowise underprop this mountain; the which if ye
obey, I am sure the Lord will bless you, and your posterity; but if ye
will not, though ye were never so high a mountain in this kingdom, ye
shall become a plain.
In particular, I speak to all ranks of persons. O noblemen, who are the
high mountains of this kingdom, bow your tops, and look on the kirk of
Christ, lying in the vallies, sighing, groaning, swooning and looking
towards you with pitiful looks: if the Sun of Righteousness hath shined
on you, let her have a shadow, as ye would have God to be a shadow to
you in the day of your distress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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