Excerpt
PREFACE.
The Reformed Presbytery, at a meeting in Philadelphia, October 6th 1880, "Resolved, That another edition of the Auchensaugh Deed be published," and appointed the undersigned a committee "to attend to this business with all convenient speed."
This Presbytery, after forty years' experience, during which opportunities have been afforded for examining the opinions and practices of all parties, professing any regard for the Covenanted Reformation, is still deeply impressed with the conviction that the transaction at Auchensaugh 1712, is the only faithful renovation of our Covenants, National and Solemn League. The fidelity of our fathers in that hazardous and heroic transaction, it is believed, has ever since been the occasion (not the cause) of all opponents manifesting their hostility to the whole covenanted cause, by first assaults upon that detested Bond. And that this is the real state of the case we proceed to prove by the following historical facts. First.—In connection with remodeling the Testimony; or rather by supplanting it in 1806, the Terms of Communion, without submitting an overture, were also changed to harmonize with Reformation Principles Exhibited, by excluding the Auchensaugh Renovation from the fourth Term, where it had stood for nearly a century. The same party have for years excluded from their abstract of Terms the Covenants themselves. Second.—In Scotland this faithful document was expunged in 1822, obviously to prepare the way for the adoption of a "New Testimony"(!), which appeared 1837-9. The majority of the actors in that work who survive, are now in the Free Church! Third.—At the time when defection was progressing in the R.P. Synod of Scotland, the sister Synod of Ireland strenuously resisted an attempt to remove the foresaid Bond from its place in the Terms. The Rev. Messrs. Dick, Smith and Houston in 1837, were faithful and successful for the time in resisting that attempt. Mr. Houston "would ever resist any alteration in respect of the Auchensaugh Bond, regarding the objection laid against it as in reality aimed at the Covenants themselves." Yet as a sequel to their Renovation of the Covenants at Dervock 1853, the Auchensaugh Bond was subsequently "shown to the porch"—removed from the Terms! Fourth.—At what was called covenant-renovation at Pittsburgh 1871, we believe no one spoke in behalf of their fathers' noble achievement in 1712. Indeed this could not be rationally expected in a body who could tolerate members vilifying the very Covenants which they pretended to renew. Fifth.—Other parties farther removed from the position of their reforming progenitors; but who still claim ecclesiastical affinity with John Knox, and commonly prefix to the symbols of their faith the historical word Westminster, give very strong expression to their feelings of hostility—not to the Auchensaugh Bond, of which probably they never heard, but to the British Covenants expressly; yea, to the very ordinance of public social covenanting itself....