Religion & morality > Cloud of witnesses, for the royal prerogatives of Jesus Christ, or, The last speeches and testimonies of those who suffered for the truth in Scotland, in the years 1681-1688, with an appendix, containing the Queensferry paper, Torwood excommunications, &c

PREFACE.
The glorious frame and contrivance of religion, revealed
by the ever blessed Jehovah, in the face or person of Jesus
Christ, for the recovery of lost mankind into a state of favor
and reconcilement with himself, is so excellently ordered in
the councils of infinite wisdom, and exactly adjusted to the
real delight, contentment, and happiness of the rational
world, that it might justly be wondered, why so many men,
in all ages, otherwise of good intellectuals, have not only
had a secret disgust thereat themselves, but labored to
rob others of the comfort and benefit of it, and make the
world a chaos of confusion, by persecutions raised against
it; had not the Holy Spirit, in the scriptures, laid open the
hidden springs of this malice and enmity, which exerts itself
in so many of the children of men. We are told in these
divinely inspired writings, that the first source of this op¬
position that the true religion meets with in the world, flows
originally from Satan, that inveterate enemy of God’s glory,
and man’s happiness ; who having himself left his original
state of obedience to, and enjoyment of God, his creator,
hath no other alleviation of his inevitable miseries, but to
draw the race of mankind into the like ruin, which is the
only satisfaction that malicious spirit is capable of. This
restless adversary, perceiving that through the grace and
love of God manifested in Christ, a great number of those
whom he thought he had secured to slavery, are redeemed,
and called by the gospel out of that intolerable servitude,
into a glorious liberty, and secured by faith to salvation;
labours by two great engines of open force, and secret fraud,
to keep them in, or regain them to his obedience ; hence,
the sacred scriptures describe him, both as a dragon for
cruelty, and a serpent for subtilty. But because he either