"By the National Covenant our Fathers laid Popery prostrate. By the Solemn League and Covenant they were successful in resisting prelatic encroachments and civil tyranny. By it they were enabled to achieve the Second Reformation... They were setting up landmarks by which the location and limits of the city of God will be known at the dawn of the millennial day... How can they be said to go forth by the footsteps of the flock, who have declined from the attainments, renounced the covenants and contradicted the testimony of 'the cloud of witnesses.'... All the schisms (separations) that disfigure the body mystical of Christ... are the legitimate consequences of the abandonment of reformation attainments -- the violation of covenant engagements."

Understanding where the faithful covenanted servants of Christ have been historically, not only helps individuals to separate between truly constituted churches and the those that are false (because they have constitutionally backslidden from Reformation attainments); but is a necessary component to the keeping the fifth commandment, as the Reformed Presbytery has pointed out, "Nor otherwise can a Christian know the time or place of his birth, or the persons whom God commands him to honor as his father and mother, than by uninspired testimony; and the same is true of his covenant obligation, if baptized in infancy.

Against all who ignorantly or recklessly reject or oppose history as a bond of fellowship, in the family, in the state, but especially in the church, we thus enter our solemn and uncompromising protest" (Excerpted from: The Act, Declaration and Testimony for the Whole of Our Covenanted Reformation... by the Reformed Presbytery, pp. 177-178 -- a SWRB rare bound photocopy [1761], reprinted 1995 from the 1876 edition).

This edition of The Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland: Its Origin and History, 1680-1876 also contains an introductory note by William Goold (the editor of John Owen's Works). In introducing this book Goold writes,