Crown and Covenant Series

O.K., this is my favorite book series ever. The kids loved them, especially Gabriel!! These books were so amazing that I can not begin to do it justice with my words!! This series is written for 10-14 year old boys and was a historical fiction book about the Covenanters (Presbyterians) in Scotland during the 1600's. It was a period of history I had never heard of before. The Covenanters called it "the killing time". Well, I may have read about the Covenanter martyrs in The Story of Liberty and just not realized that is who they were talking about.

This book chronicles the story of the M'Kethe family and their sincerity and devotedness to King Jesus in a time when the king of England wanted loyalty to him and his pope-ish miserable men that he put in the pulpit. The price of loyalty to King Jesus was torture and death and the book did not shy away from the description of torture and death. Yep, another heart wrenching book!!! but so good. I never cried until the second to the last chapter in the last book and I lost it. There is so much good to say about these books. The Scripture used throughout, the beautiful Psalms, the great family example, the always looking to Scripture for the answers. Beautiful. Rebel's Keep is the end of this series but it paves the way for the next series which they all come to America to escape the persecution . . . Good thing, we will be bummed when these books are done. These books really are for boys . . . or girls that have grown up around boys and have a stiffer inside.

Excerpt: "How to honor the king-and honor the King of kings all at the same go. Figure that out and ye have what Holy Scripture calls sanctification-holiness, without which no man shall see the King in all his glory and splendor on the Great Day. But, God be praised, we aren't left to figure it out on our own. We have the Word of God and we have the Spirit of God showing us the way of holiness. But donnae let's go expecting that the way to glory will be trod without suffering, without our being beset on every side by God's enemies." From where Angus's father sat at the trestle table, candlelight now flickered and cast his broad shadow behind him against the stones of the wall. A hush had come over the room, and only Angus's mother continued her knitting, slower now than before. Sandy M'Kethe [the father] reached for his big Bible as he continued. "If our Lord and Redeemer, the author of our salvation, was made perfect through suffering, who are we to go around all surprised at our sufferings. Ours are ordained by a loving heavenly Father that we might learn perseverance, that we might learn to lay our troubles at the all-capable feet of one who promises to bear them all for us."


The only pause in these books was in the first book on page 158 and there speaking on the election of man. It is a bit Calvanistic but that whole topic of election is hard for my mind to grasp it just sounded a bit extreme to me. Other than that the books were great.  Again, they were really graphic and that is NOT an exaggeration of any sort but so packed full of wonderful examples and principles.