them together; or that this has the remotest tendency to destroy that distinction which God in his revealed will has stated between what is immediately civil in its nature, and what is properly religious.  This, therefore, is a mere groundless pretense and evasion; and if it has any force at all, as a reason, it strikes against the reformers who compiled these covenants.  They are the proper objects at whom through the sides of others it thrusts; for they, at the framing of sundry of their covenants, and afterward at the renovation of their covenant, did it both without the ecclesiastical authority, and also without, and contrary unto, yea, at the hazard of suffering the greatest severities from the civil authority on that account.  And yet the ecclesiastical judicatories of the church of Scotland afterward found it competent for them, as such, to approve of these covenants, both as to the matter and form of them, without branding and exploding them as a blending of matters civil and religious together, as Seceders have done.  Again, as the covenants require no other than a lawful magistrate; and seeing Seceders acknowledge the present as lawful, and that it is their duty to be subject to, and support them as such, it is impossible to conceive any reason, why they have not honored the present rulers with a place in their new and artificial bond:  unless perhaps this, that they were aware that would have been so glaring a contradiction to these covenants they were pretending to renew, as would doubtless have startled and driven away from them a good many honest people, whom they have allured and led aside by their good words and fair-set speeches; and yet it is pretty obvious they have included the present rulers in their bond, and taken them in an oblique and clandestine way, by swearing to the relative duties contained in the fifth commandment, seeing they acknowledge them as their civil parents.  Again, as their bond is supposed to reduplicate upon the national covenants, and so to bind to every article in them, by native consequence, they swear to a prelatical government:  for seeing they have made no exception in their bond, it must be applied to no other, but the government, which presently exists; and this, in flat contradiction to the covenants, by which such a government is abjured.  So that their new bond is no less opposite to the national covenants, and is much mere deceitful, than if they had plainly and explicitly sworn allegiance to the present government therein; only the generality of their implicit followers do not so readily observe it.  Upon the whole, how strange is it, that they should have the assurance to father their deceitful apostasy, and wretched burying of the covenants upon our reformers, so injuriously to their character, and at the hazard of imposing a heinous and base cheat upon the world, while, notwithstanding all their vain pretensions, it is undeniably evident to those who will impartially, and without prejudice,