Most Scots have heard of the National Covenant subscribed in Edinburgh around the end of February 1638. Few, by contrast, know anything about the five acts or articles (requiring the observation of holy days, episcopal confirmation of the laity, kneeling in the act of receiving the eucharist, and permitting the celebration of both communion and baptism in private) passed by a general assembly of the Church at Perth twenty years earlier. Yet those who took time to read the Covenant through would find that its signatories were, among other things, renewing a fifty-year-old pledge to resist all ‘vain allegories, ritis, signes, and traditions brought in the Kirk, without or againis the Word of God and doctrine of this trew reformed Kirk’, and were agreeing more immediately to refrain from the ‘practice of all novations, already introduced in the matters of the worship of God’ until they could be ‘tryed & allowed in free assemblies, and in Parliaments’. Those who examined the aftermath of the Covenant would also learn that it was one of the first acts of the general assembly convened at Glasgow later in 1638 to abjure the Perth Articles. If the National Covenant remains a crucial component of Scottish national consciousness, few Scots, for all the talk of Laud's Liturgy and Jennie Geddes, have much awareness of the debate about church ceremonies that helped to form the context in which the Covenant was produced.