bout with a firm purpose and resolution (through grace enabling
us) to adhere to our covenant engagements, notwithstanding whatever
opposition and persecution we may meet with from the world for so doing,
and whatever difficulties and discouragements may arise from the
multitude of those, who prove unsteadfast in, or foully forsake their
covenant. We must stand to our covenant, as it is said of Josiah, 2
Chron. xxxiv. 32, that "he caused all that were present in Judah and
Benjamin, to stand to" the covenant, which implies as well a firm
resolution to perform, as consent to engage, as in the latter part of
the verse, it is remarked, that "the inhabitants of Jerusalem did
according to the covenant of God, the God of their fathers;" where
_doing according to the covenant_ is exegetical of _standing to it._
David also joins the resolution of performance with swearing; Psal.
cxix. 106. "I have sworn, and I will perform, that I will keep thy
righteous judgments."

From the doctrine thus confirmed and explained, he drew this inference,
by way of information, that seeing it is a people's duty, who have
broken covenant with the Lord, to engage themselves again to him, by
renewing their covenant, that it is not arbitrary for us (as many are
apt to think) to renew, or not to renew our covenant; but that there is
a plain and positive necessity for our repenting and returning again to
the Lord, by entering anew into covenant with him, whether personal made
in baptism, or at the Lord's table, or under affliction and trouble, or
national vows and covenants entered into by ourselves or our fathers.
And in a use of lamentation, he bewailed the backwardness of these
lands, and particularly of this nation, to this duty; in that, now after
sixty years and upwards of great defections from, and grievous breaches
of our covenants by people of all ranks; yet there appears so little
sense of either the obligations or breaches of them, and of a
disposition to reviving them, even amongst those who not only profess
some love to the reformation of religion, but even some belief of their
perpetual binding obligation; and that notwithstanding, as the Prophet
Isaiah saith, concerning Judah, chap. xxiv. 5, "The earth (or the land)
is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed
the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant;" our
land having been denied with Popery and Prelacy, and with a flood of
abomination