which have attended and followed the many gross breaches and violations of these covenants and departures from God, are no less evident discoveries, undeniable signs and pregnant convictions of the Lord's most just displeasure and indignation with the bypast and present courses of revolting and backsliding from him; which courses of declension and grievous apostatizing from God and his covenant, all the three kingdoms and in special this nation, and every individual therein capable of such a work, are, without all controversy, called to bewail and confess before God, and by speedy amendment to turn from them, in order to avert judgments, and turn away justly impendent wrath and long threatened strokes.

The consideration of these blessings and benefits, on the one hand, which followed the zealous entering into, and sincere performing of these sacred oaths; and upon the other hand the sense we desire to retain of the plagues and curses, threatened by God in his word against covenant-breaking inflicted upon covenant-breakers in former ages, and foreign nations, and visibly impending upon us in these nations, for our perfidious dealing in God's covenant; hath moved us a poor insignificant handful of people, unworthy indeed to be called the posterity of our zealous reforming ancestors, though heartily desirous to be found adhering to the same standard of doctrine, worship, discipline and government to which they adhered, to attempt this solemn and weighty duty of renewing (in our capacities and stations) these covenant obligations, that we might at least give some discovery of our respect to the cause of God, for the advancement and preservation whereof these covenants were first entered into, and afterwards again and again renewed by our religious progenitors, and by the whole representative body of the three kingdoms, who had any zeal for the interest of religion. And that we might, for our parts, be in some measure instrumental to transmit a testimony for the work of God in our land to the succeeding generation. Neither do we want, besides these general motives, some special inducements to this undertaking. As 1. Because these national covenants, having been nationally broken, and their funeral piles erected by wicked and perfidious rulers in the capital cities of the kingdom, with all imaginable ignominy and contempt, have long lien buried and (almost) quite forgotten under these ashes; most people either hating the very name and remembrance of them, or at least being ashamed honorably to avouch their adherence to them, 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 Lord, and one to another in a zealous prosecution of covenanted duties, that the covenant might be as a hedge to keep us from running out into the paths of destroyers. 5. We being sincerely desirous and having an earnest longing to celebrate the sacred ordinance of the Lord's Supper, whereof many had unjustly called us despisers and contemners, and finding it to have been the laudable practice of the church of Scotland formerly, that all such as were admitted to that holy table should swear and subscribe the covenant before their coming thereunto; we judged it a fit preparation for our receiving a sacramental confirmation of God's covenanted love and favor to us, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that we should avouch Him for our God, and testify our adherence to His cause and truth, by our renewing our national covenants with Him.

Upon these and the like weighty considerations we resolved to set about this solemn and tremendous duty; and being assured that we have no sufficiency in ourselves for any such undertaking, after frequently imploring the Lord for light and direction, strength and assistance, and seeking for ourselves a right way in the performance of the duty, upon days of humiliation, both in our private societies and publicly in the fields, we did condescend upon the following acknowledgment of sins, the more to enable us to remember our own and the land's breaches of covenant, in our solemn public confession thereof; and did draw up the following engagement to duties, not to superadd any new oath and obligation to the covenants, but only to adjust the articles of the covenant to the circumstances of the time, and to explain in what sense the covenant binds us against the present evils that are now prevalent in the land, and to the contrary duties. As for the covenants themselves, we made no material alteration in them, as judging it a work more proper for an assembly of divines, or representative body of church and state (had they been upright and faithful in this cause) than for us, who, as we are called by others in contempt, must own ourselves in truth to be, but a handful of weak and most illiterate people, and but as babes in comparison of the first framers of our covenants; only that we might make them in some measure accomodable to the present lamentable circumstances, whereinto we are involved by our iniquities, we have annotated some few necessary alterations upon the margin, wherein the judicious will find that we have in nothing receded from the scope and substance of the covenant, but only in the phrase; for instance, where the covenant binds to the defence and preservation of the king's majesty and government, in regard we have no king nor supreme civil magistrate so qualified, as God's law and the laudable laws of this realm require, to whom we might, for conscience sake, subject ourselves, in a consistency with our defending the true reformed religion in all its parts and privileges: Therefore, we can only bind ourselves to defend and preserve the honor, authority and majesty of lawful sovereigns, or supreme magistrates, having the qualifications aforesaid, when God shall be pleased to grant them to us. Where no judicious person will say that there is any substantial alteration as to