Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
It is no less accidental that the king’s commissioner be present in the General Assembly; for there have been General Assemblies in Scotland, both before the erection and since the last casting out of Prelacy, in which there was no commissioner from the king.
Yet the Covenant had its enemies; but they were apparently few and for a while very quiet. These anti-Covenanters stood with the king in his effort to foist Prelacy upon the people. These he repaid with political preferments. Hitherto they had claimed to be in the majority and therefore assumed the right to rule over the Presbyterians.
The extirpation of church government is not the reformation of it. The second article is indeed of things to be extirpated; but this of things to be preserved and reformed. Therefore as by the covenant Prelacy was not to be reformed, but to be abolished, so, by the same covenant, church government was not to be abolished, but to be reformed.
At the close, he said, "I leave my testimony against Popery, Prelacy, and Erastianism, and against all profanity, and every thing contrary to sound doctrine, and the power of godliness; particularly against all usurpations and encroachments made upon Christ's rights, who alone must bear the glory of ruling His own kingdom, the Church; and in particular, against this absolute power, usurped by this usurper, that belongs to no mortal; but is the incommunicable property of Jehovah; and against this toleration flowing from this absolute power."
To instance a few the accepting of William and Mary, and after them the present possessor of the Crown, to be supreme Magistrates, while they are knownly and professedly Prelatical in their judgment, and engaged by oath at their coronation to maintain the same; the swearing oaths of allegiance to them without security for their preserving of the true reformed religion yea, without any limitation or qualification whatsoever; as also, the taking an oath of adjuration, wherein, by consequence, the takers engaged to do to the utmost of their power to procure that the Kings or Queens of these kingdoms shall be of the communion of the Prelatical Church, and so that they shall contribute to the support of Prelacy.
The loftiness of the rooms, the paneling, of which nothing survived but the frames, the decoration of the ceilings, all displayed the dignity which the prelacy stamped on whatever it attempted or created, and which artists discern to this day in the smallest relic that remains, though it be but a book, a dress, the panel of a bookcase, or an armchair.
It may be well to remark here that the Prelacy which was so detested by the people of Scotland was not English Episcopacy, but Scotch Prelacy. It was, in truth, little better at that time than Popery disguised a sort of confused religio-political Popery, of which system the King was self-constituted Pope, while his unprincipled minions of the council were cardinals.
The resolution was therefore taken to restore prelacy; a measure afterwards attended with many and great inconveniencies: but whether in this resolution Charles chose not the lesser evil, it is very difficult to determine.
Is it necessary that the Archbishop of Canterbury should give feasts to Aristocratic London; and that the domestics of the Prelacy should stand with swords and bag-wigs round pig, and turkey, and venison, to defend, as it were, the Orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all the famished children of Dissent?
The socialist dreams of the peasantry, the new and keener spirit of personal morality, the hatred of the friars, the jealousy of the great lords towards the prelacy, the fanaticism of the reforming zealot were blended together in a common hostility to the Church and a common resolve to substitute personal religion for its dogmatic and ecclesiastical system.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking