t no man take thy crown."

"But we have been so far from such endeavours, that there hath been a
stupid submission to our rulers and great ones, breaking down and
ruining the whole work of reformation, razing the bulwarks thereof,
rescinding the laws in favour of the same, and not only breaking but
burning the covenants for preserving it, enacting the breaches thereof,
and declaring the obligation thereof void and criminal to be, owned;
and, upon the ruins thereof, setting up abjured Diocesan Erastian
Prelacy, with its concomitant bondage of patronages--a blasphemous and
sacrilegious supremacy and arbitrary power in magistrate over church and
state. There was little conscience made of constant endeavours to
preserve the reformation, when there was not a seasonable testimony
exhibited against these audacious and heaven-daring attempts; when our
ministers were by a wicked edict ejected from their charges, both they
and the people too easily complied with it. Albeit, in the National
Covenant, the land is obliged to defend the reformation, and to labour
by all means lawful to recover the purity and liberty of the gospel, by
forbearing the practice of all novations introduced in the worship of
God, or approbation of the corruptions of the public government of the
kirk: yet was there given all the approbation required by law of the
novation and corruption of Prelacy by hearing the Prelatic curates. Both
ministers and people, in a great measure complied with, submitted unto,
and connived at the encroachments of the supremacy and absolute power,
both in accepting and countenancing the former indulgences and later
toleration; the generalty took and subscribed oaths and bonds imposed
during the reigns of these tyrants, Charles II. and James Duke of York,
pressing conformity with the then establishments of church and state,
most contrary to the reformation which the nation had sworn to preserve;
some of these oaths and bonds restraining the takers from all endeavours
to preserve it, as those that renounced the privilege of defensive arms;
some of them abjuring the covenants expressly, and condemning the
prosecution of the ends of them as rebellion, viz., the declaration and
test; the most part did, Issachar like, crouch beneath all the burthens
of maintaining and defending an arbitrary power and absolute tyranny,
wholly employed and applied for the destruction of reformation, and paid
such subsidies and supplies as were declaredly