Fragments

1. If the old Roman earth is to be formed again,- must not Austria be broken, so to speak, in half?
2. The great impeder of the Bible, has been Austria, with its old-world theory of " the Papacy and Superstition." Should it master Sardinia, it will drive the Bible thence. Is infidelity, and its theory of man's rights, better than Superstition, with its mandate of blind submission? Thank God! we have not, as Christians who have the word of God and His grace, to answer such questions. Yet God can use an Emperor and a Czar, if He wills (though Infidelity and man's rights be in the wake), to break the iron of a Kaiser's support of Superstition. Who shall say to Him: What doest THOU?

Fragments
1. The Keys.-The key has, from of old, been the symbol of authority (Is. xx. 22) and power (Job 12:14; Rev. 3:7). In this sense, a mountain-pass, or a strait of the sea, is sometimes, even in modern language, called the key of a kingdom. Possess it, and the whole that lies within is yours. There is harmony of ideas, too, in applying it to a house; he that has the key of a house is the master. But there seems no congruity, no sense, in applying it to the human body. In it the head has all the directive power; and in that spiritual body, of which Christ is the Head, it is so also.
2. A creature, as such, ought to keep its first estate, as assigned to it by God. No creature, because a spirit, had the right to leave its first estate (Jude 6) any more than had Adam to leave his. When the Creator sets what He has created in a given sphere, that is its estate. But the Son of God had the right and title to leave any sphere, for He is God. Yet when (Phil. 2) He left the divine glory on high, it was in the perfect character of one, taking a new sphere, as entirely subserving the glory and will of God and the Father. His having the right to leave the divine glory on high, to become seed of the woman, proved that He was God; and the object with which He left it, and His whole way afterward proclaimed the same.

Fragments
" There are still Christians who believe that God in supreme love became a man, and so died for them in love:-that the first of duties, the truest affection-without which all others are vile-is to appreciate Him who did it as we ought; that the first of all obligations is to the Savior; and that to slight that, and to attempt to sustain love in despite of that, is the chiefest wickedness and the worst of all dispositions. We owe some-thing to Christ; and if He be dishonored and slighted, I may seek to win, but I cannot be the loving companion of one who has denied my Lord deliberately. 'To me to live is Christ.' To own Him and dishonor Him, is worse than heathenism; it is to own and acquiesce in His dishonor when I know better. The man who believes Christ to be God, and is the professed Christian companion of him who denies it, is worse than the latter. We may all, alas, err; but he who knows the truth, and accepts what he knows degrades Christ, is deliberately preferring ease and companionship to Him, though he may dignify it with the name of love. Every effort to recover is right; but a step in acquiescence is a step in disloyalty to One, whom no one would have dared to dishonor if He had not come down in love.
" Christ, not opinion, is the center of union; but I never meant, nor do I mean that a true Christ and a false one were equally good as a center, provided people are amiable one with another; for that means that union is man's amiability and the denial of Christ. What do I want of union, if it be not union in Christ, according to the power of life, through the Holy Ghost.
" The business of those united is Christ's glory. If Christians ever unite on a condition of that not being essential, their union is not Christian union at all. I have no reason for union but, Christ, the living Savior. I do not want any union but that which makes Him the center, and the all and the hope of it. 'We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren;' but to make that a plea of indifference to Christ's personal glory in order to be one with him, who, calling himself a brother, denies and undermines it, is, in my mind, wickedness."