astical, which he had solemnly sworn to support. The first step towards the execution of this project was the passing of the Act of Supremacy, whereby the king was constituted supreme judge in all matters civil and ec- clesiastical. To this was afterwards added the Oath of Allegiance, which declared it to be treason to deny the supremacy of the sovereign both in Church and State. The crowning deed of treachery, however, which Charles perpetrated, was his prevailing upon his Scot- tish counsellors to pass the Act P.escissory, by which all the steps taken from 1638 to 1650 for the reformation of religion were pronounced rebellious and treasonable; the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant were condemned as unlawful oaths; the Glas- gow Assembly of 1638 was denounced as an illegal and seditious meeting; and the right government of the Church was alleged to be the inherent prerogative of the crown. The result of these acts was, that the ad- vances which the Church and the country had made during the period of the Second Reformation were com- pletely neutralized, and the Church of Scotland was subjected for a long series of years to the most cruel persecution and oppression. With such flagrant and repeated violations of the solemn compact into which Charles had entered with his subjects, it is not to be wondered at that, on high constitutional grounds, this body of the Covenanters, headed by Cameron, Cargill, and others, should have regarded the treacherous sov- ereign as having forfeited all title to their allegiance. They felt it to be impossible to maintain the principles of the Reformation, and yet own the authority of a monarch who bad trampled these principles under foot, and that, too, in violation of the most solemn oaths, re- peated again and again. The younger M'Crie, in his Sketches of Scottish Church History, alleges that the principle laid down by Cameron's party was, " that the king, by assuming an Erastian power over the Church, had forfeited all right to the civil obedience of his sub- jects— a principle which had never been known in the Church of Scotland before."' Such a view of the mat- ter, however, is scarcely fair to the Cameronians. It was not because Charles had usurped an Erastian au- thority over the Church that they deemed it their duty to renounce their allegiance, but because he had broken the solemn vows made at his coronation. On that oc- casion he had entered, as they held, into a deliberate compact with his subjects, and yet, in the face of all his vows, he had openly, and in the most flagrant manner, broken that compact, thus setting his subjects free from all obligation to own him as king. It is quite true, as the Westminster Confession of Faith alleges, that " in- fidelity or difference in religion doth not make void the magistrate's just and legal authority, nor free the people from their due obedience to him ;" but this remark does not meet the case as between Charles and the Came- ronian party. They renounced their allegiance not be- cause the sovereign was an infidel, or differed from them in matters of religion, but solely and exclusively because he had broken a civil compact entered into between him and his Scottish subjects on receiving the crown, and confirmed by a solemn religious vow. By his own de- liberate deeds the traitorous monarch had forfeited his right to rule before they had renounced their obligation to obey. Such were the simple grounds on which Cam- eron, Cargill, Renwick, and their followers considered themselves justified in disowning the authority of the king, and bearing arms against him as a usurper of the throne and a traitor to the country.
This earnest and intrepid band of Covenanters brought down upon themselves, by the fearless avowal of their principles, the special vengeance of the ruling powers. One after another their leaders perished on the scaffold, and thus the people who held Cameronian principles found themselves deprived of religious instructors, and wandering as "sheep without a shepherd." In these circumstances they resolved to form themselves into a united body, consisting of societies for worship and mu-
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHES 526 PRESBYTERIAN CHURCHES
tual edification, which were formed in those districts where the numbers warranted such a step. To preserve order and uniformity, the smaller societies appointed deputies to attend a general meeting, in which was rested the power of making arrangements for the regu- lation of the whole body. The firsl meeting ol these unit I'd societies was held on Dec. 15, IG81, at Logan House, in the parish ofLesmahagow, Lanarkshire, where it was resolved to draw up a public testimony against - and defections of tin- times. The name which this body of Covenanters took to themselves was that of the •• Persecuted Remnant," while the societies which they had formed for religious improvement led them to be designated the "Societj People." "They had taken up no new principles," as l>r. Hetherington well remarks: "the Utmost that they ran lie justly charged with is. merely thai liny had followed up the leading principles of the Presbyterian and Covenanted < Ihurch of Scotland to an extreme point, from which the greater part of Presbyterians recoiled; and that in doing so they had used language capable of being interpreted to mean more than they themselves intended. Their honesty of heart, integrity of purpose, and firmness of principle cannot he denied -and these are noble qualities; and if they did express their sentiments in strong and un- guarded language, it ought to he rememhered that they did so in the midst of tierce and remorseless perse- cution, ill adapted to make men nicely cautious in the selection of balanced terms w herein to express their in- dignant del est. -u ion of that unchristian tyranny which was so fiercely striving to destroy every vestige of both civil and religious liberty."