apt to think) to renew, or not to renew our covenant; but that there is
a plain and positive necessity for our repenting and returning again to
the Lord, by entering anew into covenant with him, whether personal made
in baptism, or at the Lord's table, or under affliction and trouble, or
national vows and covenants entered into by ourselves or our fathers.
And in a use of lamentation, he bewailed the backwardness of these
lands, and particularly of this nation, to this duty; in that, now after
sixty years and upwards of great defections from, and grievous breaches
of our covenants by people of all ranks; yet there appears so little
sense of either the obligations or breaches of them, and of a
disposition to reviving them, even amongst those who not only profess
some love to the reformation of religion, but even some belief of their
perpetual binding obligation; and that notwithstanding, as the Prophet
Isaiah saith, concerning Judah, chap. xxiv. 5, "The earth (or the land)
is defiled under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed
the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant;" our
land having been denied with Popery and Prelacy, and with a flood of
abomination and profanity, the natural consequent of perfidy, the
ordinances having been changed, perverted and corrupted, and the
covenant not only broken, but burnt ignominiously, and the adherence to
it made criminal; yet, for all this, there has not been a time found for
renewing them these twenty-three years; and that ministers, at whose
door it chiefly lay to stir up the land to this work, have many of them
been as careless as others, waiving and putting off a stumbled and
offended people, expressing some concernedness for this duty, with these
and the like pretexts, that it was not a fit time, nor the land in a
case for it (too sad a truth), but not laboring to get the land brought
to be in a case and disposition for it, by pressing the obligation, and
plainly discovering the violations thereof; so that, instead of being
brought to a fitter condition for this duty, the covenants are almost