anno 1606.

The earnest desire of our hearts is to be faithful, and in case we would
have been silent and unfaithful at this time, when the undermined estate
of Christ's kirk craveth a duty at our hands, we should have locked up
our hearts with patience, and our mouths with taciturnity, rather than
to have impeached any with our admonition. But that which Christ
commandeth, necessity urgeth, and duty wringeth out of us, to be
faithful office bearers in the kirk of God, no man can justly blame us,
providing we hold ourselves within the bounds of that Christian
moderation, which followeth God, without injury done to any man,
especially these whom God hath lapped up within the skirts of his own
honourable stiles and names, calling them, Gods upon earth.

Now therefore, my lords, convened in this present parliament, under the
most high and excellent majesty of our dread sovereign, to your honours
is our exhortation, that ye would endeavour with all singleness of
heart, love and zeal, to advance the building of the house of God,
reserving always into the Lord's own hand that glory, which he will
communicate neither with man nor angel, viz. to prescribe from his holy
mountain a lively pattern, according to which his own tabernacle should
be formed: Remembering always that there is no absolute and undoubted
authority in this world, excepting the sovereign authority of Christ the
king, to whom it belongeth as properly to rule the kirk according to the
good pleasure of his own will, as it belongeth to him to save his kirk
by the merit of his own sufferings. All other authority is so intrenched
within the marches of divine commandment, that the least overpassing of
the bounds set by God himself, bringeth men under the fearful
expectation of temporal and eternal judgments. For this cause, my lords,
let that authority of your meeting in this present parliament, be like
the ocean, which, as it is greatest of all other waters, so it
containeth itself better within the coasts and limits appointed by God,
than any rivers of fresh running water have done.

Next, remember that God hath let you to be nursing fathers to the kirk,
craving of your hands, that ye would maintain and advance, by your
authority that kirk, which the Lord hath fashioned by the
uncounterfeited work of his own new creation, as the prophet speaketh,
_He hath made us, and not we ourselves_; but that that ye should presume
to fashion and shape a new portraiture of a