nanted nations, and in consequence of that own the prelatical
government as then established, upon the ruins of the cause and work of
God in these nations,--he never entered or intermeddled with his
brother's estate any manner of way; but with Moses he made that noble
choice, rather _to suffer affliction with the people of God than enjoy
the pleasure of sin for a season_, and did esteem a stedfast adherence
to the cause of Christ, (with all the reproaches that followed thereon)
greater riches than all his brother's estate. For out of a true love to
Jesus Christ, his covenanted cause, interest and people, he laid his
worldly honour in the dust, continuing still a companion in the faith,
patience, affliction and tribulation of that poor, mean and despised
handful of the Lord's witnesses in these lands, who still owned and
adhered unto the state of the Lord's covenanted cause in Scotland.

A little after his return from Holland, when Messrs. Lining, Shields and
Boyd, were drawing and enticing those who had formerly been faithful
for, and owning and suffering for the Lord's covenanted cause into a
conformity and compliance with the defection of that time, in a general
meeting held at Douglas on the 6th of November 1689, he gave a faithful
protestation against these proceedings, as by them carried on, and
particularly their owning the then government, while sworn to prelacy,
in opposition to our laudable establishment and covenanted work of
reformation: As also against the raising of the Angus regiment, which he
took to be a sinful association with malignants:--And likewise against
joining with Erastian ministers at that time, from whom they had
formerly most justly withdrawn, without any evidence of repentance, for
the many gross sins and defections they were guilty of.--And (as the
last-cited author elsewhere observes[258]) after these three ministers
aforesaid had yielded up that noble cause, and drawn many of the owners
thereof into the same state of compliance with them, he had the honour
to be the chief instrument in the Lord's hand, in gathering together,
out of their dispersion, such of the old sufferers as had escaped these
defections that so many were fallen into, and in bringing them again
unto an united party and general correspondence, upon the former
laudable and honest state of the testimony.

And farther, he had also a principal hand in drawing up and publishing
that faithful declaration, published at Sanquha