as the civil power prescribed limits unto, and at pleasure altered, the prelatic church, so this church has accepted of a formula, prescribed by the civil power, requiring that all the ordinances within the same be performed by the ministers thereof, as they were then allowed them, or should thereafter be declared by their authority, as Act 23d, Sess. 4th, Parl. 1st, 1693, expressly bears.  By what is said above, it may appear, that this church is Erastian in her constitution.  But it is further to be observed, that the present constitution is no less inconsistent with the scriptural and covenanted constitution of the church of Scotland, in regard that the retrograde constitution, to which the church fled back, and on which she was settled at the revolution, was but an infant state of the church, lately after her first reformation from Popery, far inferior to her advanced state betwixt 1638 and 1649 inclusive.  It was before the church had shaken off the intolerable yokes of Erastian supremacy and patronages; before she had ecclesiastically asserted, and practically maintained, her spiritual and scriptural claim of right, namely, the divine right of presbytery, and intrinsic power of the church, the two special gems of Christ’s crown, as King on his holy hill of Zion; before the explanation of the national covenant, as condemning episcopacy, the five articles of Perth, the civil power of churchmen; before the Solemn League and Covenant was entered into; before the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Catechisms, larger and shorter, the Directory for worship, Form of Presbyterian church government and ordination of ministers, were composed; and before the acts of church and state, for purging judicatories, ecclesiastical and civil, and armies from persons disaffected to the cause and work of God, were made; and all these valuable pieces of reformation ratified with the full and ample sanction of the supreme civil authority, by the king’s majesty and honorable estates of parliament, as parts of the covenanted uniformity in religion, betwixt the churches of Christ in Scotland, England and Ireland.  And therefore, this revolution constitution amounts to a shameful disregarding—­yea, disclaiming and burying—­much (if not all) of the reformation attained to in that memorable period, and is a virtual homologation and allowance of the iniquitous laws at the restoration, anno 1661, condemning our glorious reformation and sacred covenants as rebellion; and is such an aggravated step of defection and apostasy, as too clearly discovers this church to be fixed upon a different footing, and to be called by another name, than the genuine offspring of the true covenanted church of Christ in Scotland.