Excerpt from Address From the Committee of Synod to the Office-Bearers and Members of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, on the Subject of the Commemoration of the Westminster Assembly

A few years before James left Scotland, he published several works. In one of them, he vindicates absolute and arbitrary power in the prince, and maintains the duty of passive obedience and non-resistance on the part of subjects, without any exception. He allows that the King should regard himself as ordained for the good of the people - but that, if he shall think and act otherwise, and choose to run the risk of Divine punishment, the people are not permitted to make any resistance but by flight, as we may see by the example of brute beasts and unreasonable creatures, among whom we never read or heard of any resistance to their parents, except among the vipers. In another of his works, en titled a Royal present, and intended as a code of instructions to his Son, James maintains that the office of a King is of a mixed kind, partly civil and partlyecclesiastical that a principal part of his func tion consists in ruling the Church that it belongs to him to judge when preachers wander from their text, and that such as refuse to submit to his judgment in such cases, ought to be capitally punished: that no ec clesiastical assemblies ought to be held without his consent that no man is more to be hated by a King than a proud puritan that equality amongst Ministers is irreconcilable With monarchy, inimical to order, and the mother of confusion: that equality in the Church should be banished, prelacy set up, and all who preached against prelates rigorous ly punished. At the very time when James entertained and printed these sentiments, he was publicly, and with apparent solemnity, decla ring to the Church and to the nation of Scotland, that he had no inten tion whatever of altering the government of the Church, or of introdu cing prelacy!

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