heavy to bear,
yet two prime truths were sealed with their blood (and that of the best,
as of our honourable nobles, faithful ministers, gentry, burghers and
commons of all sorts) which were never before sealed either by the blood
of our primitive martyrs, our late martyrs in the dawning of our
reformation; and the two truths were, Christ's headship in the church in
despite of supremacy and bold erastianism, and our covenants: Which two
great truths were in the mouths of all our worthies, when mounting their
bloody theatres and scaffolds, ascending as it were up unto God in a
perfumed cloud of transporting joy, that they were honoured to suffer
upon such clear grounds. That supremacy was so agasted by our covenants,
that no rest could it have till it got the grave stone laid upon them,
and so conjured all who tasted the liquor of that supremacy, that the
thoughts of getting the buried covenants out of the grave were more
terrible to them than the devils, who are now in the place of our vows
to God, managing their diabolical games in these places where the
covenants were most in honour and request, the one burned and the other
rising in its room. Much blood and treasure have been spent to set the
flourishing crown upon Christ's head in Scotland. Declarations, acts of
councils and parliament, remonstrances, engagements, vows and covenants;
but the sealing blood of the late martyrs was the cope-stone of all. The
primitive martyrs sealed the prophetic office of Christ with their
hearts blood, the reforming martyrs sealed his priestly offices with
their blood; but last of all our martyrs have sealed his kingly office
with their best blood: They indeed have cemented it upon his royal head,
so that to the end of the world it shall not drop off again. Let us
never dream of a reviving spirit among us, till there be a reviving
respect to these solemn vows of God. If there was but a little
appearance of that spirit which actuated our worthy forefathers in our
public assemblies and preachings, ye would see a wonderful alteration in
the face of affairs: The fields, I assure you would look white near to
harvest. If ye would adventure to trace our defections from the breach
of the act of classes in the year 1650, all along to this day of our
being bound in the grave of our neutrality, and all to edge up the
spirit of the people to a due sense of our woful and irrevocable like
backsliding from God (who hath acted many wonders for Scotlan