d) you
would find a perfumed smoke of incense springing from our altar in
savoury and soul refreshing blessings. But ah! when shall this day dawn?
so long as the common enemy are gaining their long-wished for hopes,
That ministers in their public preaching must confine themselves to
their nicknamed faith and repentance; without noticing any incroachments
upon Christ's proper rights to his church in the glorious work of
reformation, lest constructed fire-{illegible}ands and seditions, which
in running the full career may gradually drop into superstition through
neutrality, and thence plunge into an abyss of the shadow of popery. But
to sum up shortly all my present thoughts of the time in this one, I
cannot see an evasion of the church, in its present circumstance, from a
sharp and more trying furnace than ever it has yet met with, come the
trial from what airth it will, it fears me: Our principles are so
slippry, and the truths of God so superficially rooted in us, that when
we are thrown in the furnace, many of us shall melt to dross. It is many
years since I heard one of the greatest seers in our nation, in horror
and with fear, dreading the heavy judgments of God upon the biassed
professors in the west of Scotland. But all that I say, not diminishing
my hopes of the Lord's reserving his purchased inheritance in his own
covenanted land, though Malachi be affrighted at the day of his coming,
and be made to cry out, _Who may abide it_, chap. iii. 1, 2, 3. _when he
sits as refiner and purifier of the sons of Levi_: A remnant shall be
left, that shall be as the teil tree or the oak whose feed is in them,
when they cast their leaves; so the holy seed shall be the substance
thereof.

"To revive a reflection upon two stupenduous passages of providence, I
know would have an imbittering relish to many professors in our country
side. The one is upon the last indulgence, wherein professors by bond
and penalty obliged themselves to produce their minister before the
council, when called. For this was a restriction so narrow, that all the
freedom and faithfulness of ministers in their office was so blocked up,
that either conscience towards God in discharging of necessary duties
behoved utterly to be buried, or else the life of their minister exposed
to sacrifice.--And if this be not an universal evil to be mourned over,
let conscience and reason judge; yet this is looked upon to be but a
trip, in these gloomy times, of inconsidera