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 and profanity, the natural consequent of perfidy, the ordinances having been changed, perverted and corrupted, and the covenant not only broken, but burnt ignominiously, and the adherence to it made criminal; yet, for all this, there has not been a time found for renewing them these twenty-three years; and that ministers, at whose door it chiefly lay to stir up the land to this work, have many of them been as careless as others, waiving and putting off a stumbled and offended people, expressing some concernedness for this duty, with these and the like pretexts, that it was not a fit time, nor the land in a case for it (too sad a truth), but not laboring to get the land brought to be in a case and disposition for it, by pressing the obligation, and plainly discovering the violations thereof; so that, instead of being brought to a fitter condition for this duty, the covenants are almost forgotten and quite out of mind, so that the succeeding generation is scarce like to know that ever there was a covenant sworn in Scotland.  And more particularly, that the godly, who are dissatisfied with, and dissent from the defections and corruptions of the times, have discovered so little concern about the work of reformation, and cause of God, which the covenants oblige us to own, defend, and promote.  All which laxness and remissness is for a lamentation, and ought to be lamented and mourned over by the people of God.

In the exhortation, he pressed upon us who are embodied together to renew our covenant-engagements, by giving an open and public testimony of our adherence to the covenants, national and solemn league, that we should labor to attain a suitable frame, and serious consideration of the weightiness, solemnity, and awfulness of the work we were then undertaking:  enforcing the same by several cogent motives, as namely, because in renewing these covenants we are called to remember our baptismal and personal vows, whereby