The spiritual mind receives the answer in the contemplation of the idea, life as ‘deitas diffusa’.  We can set the life in efficient motion, but not contrary to the form or type.  The errors and false theories of great men sometimes, perhaps most often, arise out of true ideas falsified by degenerating into conceptions; or the mind excited to action by an inworking idea, the understanding works in the same direction according to its kind, and produces a counterfeit, in which the mind rests.

This I believe to be the case with the scheme of emanation in Plotinus.  God is made a first and consequently a comparative intensity, and matter the last; the whole thence finite; and thence its conceivability.  But we must admit a gradation of intensities in reality.

Chap.  XVI. p. 247.

“When governors and rulers are enemies to God’s word, then our duty is to depart, to sell and forsake all we have, to fly from one place to another, as Christ commandeth; we must make and prepare no uproars nor tumults by reason of the Gospel, but we must suffer all things.”

Right.  But then it must be the lawful rulers; those in whom the sovereign or supreme power is lodged by the known laws and constitution of the country.  Where the laws and constitutional liberties of the nation are trampled on, the subjects do not lose, and are not in conscience bound to forego, their right of resistance, because they are Christians, or because it happens to be a matter of religion, in which their rights are violated.  And this was Luther’s opinion.  Whether, if a Popish Czar shall act as our James ii. acted, the Russian Greekists would be justified in doing with him what the English Protestants justifiably did with regard to James, is a knot which I shall not attempt to cut; though I guess the Russians would, by cutting their Czar’s throat.

Ib.

’But no man will do this, except he be so sure of his doctrine and religion, as that, although I myself should play the fool, and should recant and deny this my doctrine and religion (which God forbid), he notwithstanding therefore would not yield, but say, “If Luther, or an angel from heaven, should teach otherwise, Let him be accursed."’

Well and nobly said, thou rare black swan!  This, this is the Church.  Where this is found, there is the Church of Christ, though but twenty in the whole of the congregation; and were twenty such in two hundred different places, the Church would be entire in each.  Without this no Church.

Ib. p. 248.

“And he sent for one of his chiefest privy councillors, named Lord John Von Minkwitz, and said unto him; ’You have heard my father say, (running with him at tilt) that to sit upright on horseback maketh a good tilter.  If therefore it be good and laudable in temporal tilting to sit upright; how much more is it now praiseworthy in God’s cause to sit, to stand, and to go uprightly and just!’”

Princely.  So Shakspeare would have made a Prince Elector talk.  The metaphor is so grandly in character.