After that it pleased God, by the light of his glorious gospel, to dispel the more than cimmerian darkness of antichristianism, and, by the antidote of reformation, to avoid the poison of Popery; forasmuch as in England and Ireland, every noisome weed which God’s hand had never planted was not pulled up, therefore we now see the faces of those churches overgrown with the repullulating twigs and sprigs of popish superstition. Mr Sprint acknowledgeth the Reformation of England to have been defective, and saith, “It is easy to imagine of what difficulty it was to reform all things at the first, where the most part of the privy council, of the nobility, bishops, judges, gentry, and people, were open or close Papists, where few or none of any countenance stood for religion at the first, but the Protector and Cranmer.”(11) The church of Scotland was blessed with a more glorious and perfect reformation than any of our neighbour churches. The doctrine, discipline, regiment, and policy established here by ecclesiastical and civil laws, and sworn and subscribed unto by the king’s majesty and several presbyteries and parish churches of the land, as it had the applause of foreign divines; so was it in all points agreeable unto the word, neither could the most rigid Aristarchus of these times challenge any irregularity of the same. But now, alas! even this church, which was once so great a praise in the earth is deeply corrupted, and hath “turned aside quickly out of the way,” Exod. xxxii. 8. So that this is the Lord’s controversy against Scotland. “I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed? How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?” Jer. ii. 21.