They further reject and condemn that sectarian principle and tenet, whether in former or latter times maintained, that a kirk session, or particular congregational eldership, is vested with equal ecclesiastical power and authority, with any superior judicatory, and is neither subordinate nor accountable to them (in the Lord) in their determinations.  They likewise reject as sectarian, That the community of the faithful or professing Christians, in a private station hath any scriptural warrant for public teaching, or judicative determination in the church; both which opinions are not only expressly contrary to scripture, Acts xv, throughout, and xvi, 4; I Cor. v, 4; 1 Tim:  v, 17; Heb. v, 4, and xiii, 17, &c, but also have been found hitherto most hurtful and dangerous to the church of God, depriving her ministers and members of just and necessary recourse to superior judgment and decision in matters difficult, discrediting and prostituting the sacred office of the ministry, and tending to overthrow a standing ministry in the church of Christ, and subvert that comely and beautiful order he hath prescribed therein.

In like manner they reject and condemn that gross invasion and encroachment upon the church’s liberties, by the intrusion of popish patronages, whether imposed as a law by civil, or executed by ecclesiastical powers.  Of the latter of these, the ministers and judicatories of the now corrupt, harlot Church of Scotland, cannot but be more egregiously guilty.  The nature of their sacred function and trust obliges them to preserve inviolate the church’s freedom and liberties:  but in place of this, their hands are chief in the trespass, in an authoritative and active enforcement of this wicked act—­an act evidently destructive of the very nature and essence of that mutual relation between pastor and people, and which has the native and necessary tendency to schism in the church, spiritual leanness, and starving of the flock, by thrusting in idle, idol shepherds upon them, such as serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own bellies; feed themselves, but not the flock; and seek not them, but theirs, contrary to John x, 2, 9; Heb. v, 4; 1 Tim. iii, 3; 1 Cor. xii, 14, with many more; and to acts of both church and state, in times of reformation in these covenanted lands.

But, on the other hand, that the Presbytery, when thus condescending on particulars, pass not over in sinful silence, what stands opposite to the word of God and their declared principles, as above concerning civil authority, the administrators thereof, and subjection of the people thereto:  they reject, likeas they hereby reject and condemn that anti-scriptural principle and opinion, that the divine scriptural ordinance of magistracy has not its foundation in the moral preceptive law of God (wherein alone his will is revealed and declared unto his people, concerning the nature, use, and ends of all his ordinances), but in the subjective light of nature (even as corrupted), so confused and dark in its discoveries, so gross and selfish in its principles, motives, and ends, that neither the true nature of this, nor any other of the ordinances of Jehovah, as revealed in his word, can hereby be known, or the true use and ends thereof sufficiently discovered or obtained.