the power committed to her by the Lord Jesus Christ, without dependence on the civil power.  This is agreeable to scripture, Matth. xvi, 19, and xviii, 18, 19, where the apostles receive the keys immediately from the hands of Christ their Lord and Master.  And as one principal part of that trust Christ has committed to his church, this has been the constant plea of the reforming and reformed Presbyterian church of Scotland.  Let us hear what that renowned and faithful minister, and venerable confessor for Christ, the Rev. Mr. John Welsh, says to this particular, in his letter to the Countess of Wigton from Blackness, 1606, when a prisoner for this same truth.  Having asserted the independence of the church, the spiritual kingdom of Christ, upon any earthly monarch, and her freedom to meet and judge of all her affairs; he adds, “These two points, 1st, that Christ is Head of his church; 2d, that she is free in her government from all other jurisdictions, except Christ’s.  These two points, I say, are the special causes of our imprisonment, being now convicted as traitors for maintaining thereof.  We have been ever waiting with joyfulness to give the last testimony of our blood in confirmation thereof, if it should please our God to be so favorable as to honor us with that dignity.  Yea, I do affirm, that these two points above written, and all other things that do belong to Christ’s crown, scepter and kingdom, are not subject, nor cannot be, to any other authority, but to his own altogether:  so that I would be glad to be offered up as a sacrifice for so glorious a truth.”  So far he.  But now this assembly of treacherous men, by settling themselves upon such a constitution have openly given up this scriptural truth and Presbyterian principle handed down to us, sealed with the sufferings and dearest blood of the faithful Confessors and Martyrs of Christ, and have consented that it is unlawful for the office-bearers in the Lord’s house to exert their proper power in calling and appointing general assemblies, however loudly the necessity of the church may call for them, unless the king authorize their diet of meeting, which he may, or may not do, according to his pleasure.

Again, it is evident, that the revolution church is constituted in the same Erastian manner with the late Prelacy in Scotland.  For proof of which, observe, that as Prelacy was never ecclesiastically asserted to be of divine authority, neither has Presbytery, by any explicit and formal act of Assembly, at or since the revolution.  As the prelates’ high ecclesiastical court was called, adjourned and dissolved, in the king’s name, so likewise are the assemblies of the Revolution Church.  As the Episcopalians owned the king, in the exercise of his Erastian supremacy over them, so the Revolution Church, instead of opposing, did take up her standing under the covert of that anti-christian supremacy, and has never since declined the exercise thereof.  And,