In that same third Article, we are likewise bound to defend “The supreme magistrate’s person and authority, in the preservation and defence of the true religion and liberties of the kingdom:”  as in the National Covenant is expressed:  likewise, “to defend his person and authority, in the defence of Christ his evangel, liberties of our country, ministration of justice, and punishment of iniquity; and to stand to his defence, in the defence of the true religion, liberties and laws of the kingdom;” as the duty is qualified in scripture.

II Sam. v. 3.; II Kings xi. 17; II Chron. xxvi. 16, 17, 18, 21; Rom. xiii. 3, 4, 6; I Pet. ii. 13, 14.

As our fathers in their acknowledgments had reason to say, “Neither hath it been our care to avoid these things which might harden the king in his evil way; but, upon the contrary he hath not only been permitted, but many of us have been instrumental to make him exercise his power in many things tending to the prejudice of religion, and of the Covenant, and of the peace and safety of these kingdoms; which is so far from the right way of preserving his Majesty’s person and authority that it cannot but provoke the Lord against him unto the hazard of both.  Nay, under a pretence of relieving and doing for the king, whilst he refuses to do what was necessary for the house of God, some have ranversed and violated most of all the Articles of the Covenant.”

So, during the unhappy days of the late tyranny, it was the land’s sin and shame, and ought to be our sorrow, that men were mounted upon a throne of iniquity whose main design and practice was to subvert religion and persecute it, to introduce Popery itself and slavery, to destroy the nation’s liberties, suppress the evangel, and oppress its professors; who enacted and executed manifest injustice, stopped the ministration of justice against idolaters, adulterers, murderers, and other malefactors, and punished equity and duty, instead of iniquity; arrogated and obtained a monstrous prerogative above all rights and privileges of Parliaments, all laws, all liberties; a power to tyrannize as they pleased without control.  But, as it was their sin who inaugurated Charles II. after such discoveries of his hypocritical enmity to religion and liberty, upon his subscription to the Covenants, so when he burned and buried that Covenant, and degenerated into manifest tyranny, and had razed the very foundation upon which both his right to govern, and the people’s allegiance were founded, and remitted the subjects’ allegiance by annulling the bond of it:  it was the land’s sin that they continued still to own his authority when opposite to, and destructive of religion and liberty; and of those who appeared in arms at Pentland and Bothwell Bridge, that they put in his interest (with application of the words of the Covenant to him, though stated in opposition to it) into the state of the quarrel, in their declaration of war, for which (so far as the