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Updated: May 25, 2025
The king was planning to restore the Scottish Prelacy to power; he still hoped to fight his way victoriously into Edinburgh; he had hired an army of 10,000 men to invade Scotland; he had watched with apparent complacency, we will not say his sanction, the slaughter of 200,000 Protestants in Ireland by the Papists. Such were the conditions in both kingdoms, which these counselors had to face.
Thus, this nation, by engrossing the English act, establishing Prelacy, and all the superstitious ceremonies, in the act of the union parliament, and by annulling all acts contrary to the united settlement, have sealed, as far as men can do, the gravestones formerly laid upon the covenanted uniformity of the nations.
By the introduction of the curates into the ministry of the Scottish establishment, at the king's behest, without any public confession or renunciation of Prelacy the germ of Moderatism was laid, which, in due time, budded and brought forth bitter fruits, in numerous corruptions and oppressions, and in multiplied divisions and separations.
This last order united in a common cause those who might privately rejoice in Porteous's death, though they dared not vindicate the manner of it, with the more scrupulous Presbyterians, who held that even the pronouncing the name of the "Lords Spiritual" in a Scottish pulpit was, quodammodo, an acknowledgment of prelacy, and that the injunction of the legislature was an interference of the civil government with the jus divinum of Presbytery, since to the General Assembly alone, as representing the invisible head of the kirk, belonged the sole and exclusive right of regulating whatever pertained to public worship.
If such a thing as a moral argument for Christianity was admitted as valid, surely the above was a moral argument against English Prelacy.
Every pacific effort had proved fruitless; and it had become undeniably evident, to every English patriot, that Prelacy must be abolished and the royal prerogative limited, unless they were prepared to yield up every vestige of civil and religious liberty.
As the presbytery find themselves in duty bound to testify against this most unhappy restoration of Charles II, so, of necessary and just consequence, they declare against the whole of his usurped and tyrannical administration particularly against his blasphemous and heaven-daring ecclesiastical supremacy; against the act rescissory, declaring null and void the covenants, presbyterian church government, and all the laws made in favor of the true religion since the year 1638; the wicked anniversary thanksgiving day, in memory of the restoration; the re-establishment of diocesan and Erastian Prelacy; his publicly and ignominiously burning of our solemn covenants, after pretending to nullify their obligation; with all his cruelty, tyranny, oppression and bloodshed, under color, and without form, of law, exercised upon the Lord's people, during the whole of his reign.
I answer, that if there be any such oath, which yet I have never seen nor heard of, unless the objection mean that clause in the late parliament protestation, wherein we vow and protest to maintain and defend the lawful rights and liberties of the subject; surely, neither in that nor this, do we swear against a lawful endeavour to get any such laws or clause of the law repealed and abolished, which is found a wrong, rather than a right, and the bondage, rather than the liberty of the subject, as prelacy was.
They almost magnified into Christian confessors the prelates who remonstrated against the indulgence, and actually plotted against the king for restoring them to liberty of person and conscience. The nightmare fear of Popery overcame their love of religious liberty; and they meekly offered their necks to the yoke of prelacy as the only security against the heavier one of Papist supremacy.
The "Anti-Christian" hierarchy of Prelacy is implanted in the national constitution and sustained by the whole prestige of the realm. Under its lordly bewitchery, Erastianism prevails in the Established Churches of the kingdom.
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