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A SOLEMN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF PUBLIC SINS, AND BREACHES OF THE NATIONAL COVENANT AND SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT.

We all and every one of us—­being by the good hand of our God upon us, now, after a long and due deliberation, determined to testify to the world, for the glory of God, and the exoneration of our consciences, in the matter of our duty, our adherance to the whole of our attained Reformation, by renewing these our vows and Covenant-engagements with God, and knowing that it is a necessary preparative for the right performance of that so great and solemn a duty, that we be duly sensible of, and deeply humbled for the many heinous breaches thereof, which these nations, and we ourselves in particular are guilty of; do therefore, with that measure of sorrow and repentance which God of his mercy shall be pleased to grant us, desire to acknowledge and confess our own sins and violations of these vows, and the sins and transgressions of our fathers; to which we have also an example left us by the Cloud of witnesses, which through faith and patience have inherited the promises, ever since the Lord had a visible national church upon earth, and more especially by our progenitors in this nation; as, for instance, in the year 1596, “Wherein the General Assembly, and all the kirk judicatories, with the concurrence of many of the nobility, gentry and burgesses, did with many tears acknowledge the breach of the National Covenant, and engaged themselves into a reformation, even as our predecessors, and theirs, had done in the General Assembly and Convention of Estates in the year 1567.”  As also the more recent practice of the godly renewing the National Covenant, and acknowledging the breaches of it, both before they obtained the concurrence of civil authority, in the year 1638, and again, by authority, in the year 1639.  And that noble precedent of that National Solemn acknowledgment of Public Sins and Breaches of the Solemn League and Covenant, and Solemn Engagement to all the duties contained therein, (which we are here taking for our pattern, and enlarging the same as the sad sins and transgressions since that time committed, and the circumstances of time give occasion) condescended upon, “by the Commission of the General Assembly, and approven by the Committee of Estates, and publickly owned in all the churches, at the renewing of the Solemn League, Anno 1648, and 1649, together with that solemn renovation thereof accompanied with such confession of sins as did best suit that time, by that small company of the Lord’s people at Lanark, before their discomfiture at Pentland hills.  And perceiving by the foresaid instances, that this duty, when gone about out of conscience, hath very often been attended with a reviving out of troubles—­or at least out of deadness, security, and formality, under which we and the land are at present sinking, and with a blessing and success