lived. The Banner for Christ's Crown and Covenant was
still waved by them through the blood-stained land. Oftentimes they
issued declarations and protests against the tyranny of their
oppressors, many of which concluded with those inspiriting words at the
close of the last of them, "Let King Jesus reign and all His enemies be
scattered." The most famous of these papers was the Sanquhar
Declaration. On the 22nd of June, 1680, twenty horsemen rode into the
burgh of Sanquhar, and at the market cross read their declaration, in
which they "disowned Charles Stuart that has been reigning (or rather
tyrannizing as we may say) on the throne of Britain these years bygone,
as having any right, title to, or interest in the said Crown of Scotland
for government, as forfeited several years since by his perjury and
breach of Covenant both to God and His Kirk, and usurpation of His Crown
and Royal Prerogatives therein." That courageous act of those twenty
patriots proclaimed the doom of the House of Stuart.

"Men called it rash, perhaps it was crime:
Their deed flashed out God's will, an hour before the time."

A few years afterwards, the nations of England and Scotland endorsed the
action of Richard Cameron and his compatriots. The blood of Guthrie, and
Cargill, and MacKail had cried for vengeance, and the God of the
Covenanters hurled the Stuart dynasty from the throne. "Alas! is it not
true?" writes Carlyle in his _Heroes_, "that many men in the van do
always, like Russian soldiers, march into the ditch of Schwiednitz, and
fill it up with their dead bodies, that the rear may pass over them
dry-shod, and gain the honour? How many earnest, rugged Cromwells,
Knoxes, poor peasant Covenanters, wrestling, battling for very life, in
rough, miry places, have to struggle and suffer and fall, greatly
censured, bemired, before a beautiful Revolution of eighty-eight can
step over them in official pumps and silk stockings, with universal
three-times-three!"

The stedfast followers of the Covenanters expected that, on the
cessation of the persecution, there would be the restoration of the
whole Covenanted Reformation in Church and State. But their just
expectations were doomed to bitter disappointment. Neither by Church nor
State was any proposal ever seriously entertained of renewing the
national Covenants with God, as at the commencement of the Second
Reformation. Instead, the Acts Rescissory were permitted to remain on
the Statute-