light and liberty; or a violent and public death, for the kingdom of heaven consists in a fair company of glorified martyrs and witnesses, of whom Jesus Christ is the chief witness, who for that cause was born, and came into the world. Happy are you, if you give testimony to the world of your preferring Jesus Christ to all powers; and the world make the innocency and Christian loyalty of his defamed and despised witnesses in this land to shine to after generations, and will take the Man-child up to God and to his throne, and prepare a hiding place in the wilderness for the mother, and cause the earth to help the woman. Be not terrified; fret not; forgive your enemies; bless and curse not; for though both you and I should be silent, sad and heavy is the judgment and indignation from the Lord, that is abiding the unfaithful watchmen of the Church of Scotland. The souls under the altar are crying for justice, and there is an answer returned already: the Lord's salvation will not tarry. Cast the burden of wife and children on the Lord Christ, he cares for you and them: your blood is precious in his sight. The everlasting consolations of the Lord bear you up, and give you hope: for your salvation (if not deliverance) is concluded. Your own brother,

St. Andrews, Feb. 15, 1661.

S. R.

To ABERDEEN.

Reverend and dearly-beloved in the Lord,

GRACE be to you, and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ. There were some who rendered thanks, with knees bowed to him, "of whom is named the whole family in heaven and earth, when they heard of your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus;" and rejoiced not a little, that where Christ was scarce named in savouriness and power of the gospel, even in Aberdeen, that there Christ hath a few precious names to him who shall walk with him in white. We looked on it (he knoweth, whom we desire to serve in our spirit, in the gospel of his Son) as a part of the fulfilling of that, "The wilderness and solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose;" but now it is more grievous to us than a thousand deaths, when we hear that you are shaken, and so soon removed from that, which you once acknowledged to be the way of God. Dearly beloved, the sheep follow Christ, who calleth them by name; a stranger they will not follow: but they flee from him, for they know not the voice of a stranger. You know the way, by which you were sealed to the day of redemption; and you received the Spirit by the hearing of faith: part not with that way, except you see there be no rest for your soul therein; neither listen to them that say, Many were converted under Episcopal as well as under Presbyterial government:

and yet the godly gave testimony against the Bishops; for the instruments of conversion loathed Episcopacy, with the ceremonies thereof, and never sealed it with their sufferings. But we shall desire instances of any engaged by oaths, and by the sufferings of the faithful messengers of God, and the manifestation of the Lord's presence, in the way you now forsake, who yet turned from it, and went one step toward sinful separation, and did it in that way you now aim at, and did yet flourish and grow in grace; but we can bring proofs of many who left it, and went further on to abominable ways of error. And you

have it not in your power, where you shall stop, having once left the way of God; and many we know lost peace and communion with God, and fell into a condition of withering, and, not being able to find their lovers, were forced to return to their first Husband. We entreat you to consider what a stumbling it is to malignant opposers of the way and cause of God, who with their ears heard you, and with their eyes saw you, so strenuously take part with the godly in their sufferings, and profess yourselves for religion, truth, doctrine, government of the house of God, his covenant and cause; if now you build again what you once destroyed, and destroy what you built; and shall you not make yourselves, by so doing, transgressors? How shall it wound the hearts of the godly, stain the profession, darken the glory of the gospel, shake the faith of many, weaken the hands of all, if you, and you first of all in this kingdom, shall stretch out the hand to raze the walls of our Jerusalem, by reason of which the Lord made her

terrible as an army with banners? for, when kings came, and saw the palaces and bulwarks thereof, they marvelled and were troubled, and hasted away; fear took hold of them there, and pain as of a woman in travail. And we, shall be grieved, if you shall be heirs to the guiltiness of breaking down the same hedge of the vineyard, for the which the sad indignation of God pursueth this day the royal family, many nobles, houses great and fair, and all the prelatical party in these three kingdoms. And when your dear brethren are weak and fainting, shall we believe that you will leave us, and be divided from this so blessed a conjunction? The Lord Jesus Christ, we trust, shall walk in the midst of the golden candlesticks, and be with us, if you will be gone from

us.

Beloved in the Lord, we cannot but be persuaded of better things of you; and we shall not conceal from you, that we are ignorant what to answer, when we are reproved on your behalf, in regard that your change to another gospel-way (which the Lord avert) is so much the more scandalous, that the sudden alteration, unknown to us before, now overtaketh you, when men come amongst you, against whom the furrows of the field of Scotland do complain. Forget not, dear brethren, that Christ hath now the fan in his hand, and this is also the day of the Lord, that shall burn as an oven; and that Christ now sitteth as a refiner of silver, purifying the sons of Levi, and purging them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering of righteousness: and these that keep the word of his (not their own) patience, shall be delivered from the hour

of temptation, that shall come on all the earth to try them. If you exclude all non-converts from the visible city of God, in which daily, multitudes in Scotland, in all the four quarters of the land, above whatever our fathers saw, throng into Christ, shall they not be left to the lions and wild beasts of the forest, even to Jesuits, Seminary-priests, and other seducers? for the magistrate hath no power to compel them to hear the gospel, nor have you any churchpower over them, as you teach: and they bring not love to the gospel and to Christ out of the womb with them, and so they must be left to embrace what religion is most suitable to corrupt nature; nor can it be a way approven by the Lord in Scripture, to excommunicate from the visible church all the multitudes of non-converts, baptized, and visibly within the covenant of grace, which are in Great Britain, and all the reformed churches; and so to shut the gates of the Lord's gracious calling upon all these, because they are not, in your judgment, chosen to salvation, when once you are within yourselves; for how can the Lord call Egypt his people, and Assyria the work of his hands, and all the Gentiles (who for numbers are as the flocks of Kedar, and the abundance of the sea) the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ, if you number infants, as many do, and all such as your charity cannot judge converts, as others do, among heathens and pagans, who have not a visible claim and interest in Christ? The candlestick is not yours, nor the house; but Christ fixeth and removeth the one, and buildeth or casteth down the other, according to his sovereignty. We