and afraid to endeavor a vigorous and constant prosecution of the duties
contained in them: So that it is high time that every one should do his
utmost towards a reviving of them. 2. Because many openly declare their
sorrow and grief that ever these covenants should have been entered
into: malignants calling them a conspiracy, attributing every
miscarriage of the persons engaged in them to the covenants themselves
as their native effects; and others, who would take it ill to be called
malignants, making them the causes of all the tyranny, rapine, bloodshed
and persecution of the late reigns, as having raised the spleen of the
enemies of religion, and accounting it safer that they should lie still
in their graves, than that they should irritate malignants any more by
their resurrection.[4] Therefore we judge it our duty to renew them,
that we might evidence, that notwithstanding all these malicious
calumnies and false consequences cast upon them, we are still of the
same judgment with our reformers, that they are the most sovereign
means, under the blessing of God, for the reviving and preserving the
work of God in the land. 3. Because of the courses that are carried on
in direct opposition to these covenants; the nations, formerly cemented
in peace and love in conjunction with truth and righteousness, having
broken these bonds, and united themselves upon another footing, by the
late sinful incorporating union: and imposing new oaths in opposition to
the covenant; such as abjuration, &c. granting license, protection and
toleration to all the evils abjured in the covenant; as heresies and
errors in doctrine, superstition in worship, Prelacy and Erastianism in
government, and overthrowing all good discipline. 4. Because of our own
sinful miscarriages in, and woful declinings from our covenanted duties,
our proneness to break covenant with God, and to be indifferent, lax,
negligent and unsteadfast in the cause and work of God, and to be led
away with the error of the wicked, and to fall from our steadfastness;
wherefore we thought it necessary to bind ourselves by a new tie to the