Darbyism: Its Rise and Development/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
We have now to trace schism unrepented of developing itself into heresy, and that no longer accidentally brought in, but systematically maintained. It was, as we have seen, about twenty years ago that Mr. Darby commenced his attack on Mr. Newton on the ground of heresy, and now we find two of his leading followers, Mr. Dorman and Captain Percy Hall, leaving him for holding views which they regard as identically the same.[1] We had heard of these views put forth by Mr. Darby, as has been already alluded to, but we had hoped that they were rather hastily written thoughts than firmly rooted opinions, for the maintenance of which he was prepared again to sacrifice his party of “the one assembly” on the altar of his ambition. From various quarters have been heard rumours of dissatisfaction amongst his followers because of views promulgated by their chief and re-echoed by others; but we were unprepared for the state of things which the pamphlets written by Mr. Dorman and Capt. Hall bring to light. The pamphlets reveal nothing new in regard to Mr. Darby’s own views, to those who have seen what has been going on among the party of late, but they reveal a state of things in the body that is sad to contemplate, and such an advance in the downward path of false doctrine which, however, need cause no surprise to those who know whereunto allowed evil will grow. But God is speaking, and may we all hear. But a few years have passed away, and the unrighteous course pursued towards Mr. Newton has not been forgotten by the Holy God, and now He who makes those, who are wise in their own craftiness, fools, permits the accuser to stand where the accused stood, and allows Mr. Darby to occupy the place of the heretic. His own discipline, righteously carried out, would at once excommunicate not only him, but all those who maintain fellowship with him.
It is no uncommon thing for those guilty in any matter to attempt to conceal their own departures from truth and uprightness by an unusual zeal against the delinquencies of others, supposed or real, and so we find Mr. Darby while lying under the imputation of having put forth unsound statements, writing of Bethesda in the letter to Mr. Spurr already quoted from in page 63 as follows:—
“The evil at Bethesda is the most unprincipled admission of blasphemers against Christ, the coldest contempt for him I ever came across. All their efforts to examine and hide it only make the matter worse; all who do not abhor the whole system and all connexion with it, are already entangled and defiled. It is, I am satisfied, a mere net of Satan, though many christians may be entangled in it. Every question of churches and unity disappear before the question of Bethesda. It is a question of Christ. Faith governed my path as to it, but I have seen its fruits in America, the West Indies, France, Switzerland, and in a measure in India. I have seen it the spring and support everywhere of unprincipledness and evil, and all who were under its influence turned from uprightness and truth.”
The man who here accuses others of admitting blasphemers, is accused by his own followers of maintaining the very same blasphemies, which he falsely says that Bethesda has admitted; is himself defiled, and has himself been turned from uprightness and truth, by the shewing of his own friends! How easy to charge others with unprincipledness! and were it our purpose we could retort the charge accompanied with facts known to some. There is a wickedness in this style of writing that its parade of the name and honor of Christ only makes the more intensely evil; those who can lift the veil and read what lies written, not on the surface but underneath, loathe and abhor the unholy proximity with which the Most Holy is brought into connexion with the unhallowed, profane actings of pride; but there are those who are led by their feelings and whose judgment is blinded, and this display of holy zeal at once deludes and deceives such. We allude to this here, where faith is claimed for the perpetration of actings of the greatest church wickedness, considering the light possessed, that has darkened the page of church history for many a long year. But God’s estimate of the faith claimed is to be read in the light of the delusions of all kinds, into which he has allowed him and his followers to be led; into the assumptions of “The one Assembly”; into false teaching on the sufferings of Christ; into a proud schismatic discipline separating from those who bow not down to their idol. It is God who has cast them down, not man; it is God who has hardened and blinded, as he ever will, the wilfully hardened and blinded, who have already refused to feel and refused to see. Let the spirit and tone of the extract given, be examined in the light of present events and passing revelations, in which God would have us learn that “he shall have judgment without mercy that shewed no mercy,” for he would teach us that “mercy rejoiceth against judgment.”
It is not our purpose here to go into Mr. Darby’s speculations[2] into what he calls “this third kind of suffering,” which, as he says, it is “difficult to get hold of,” speculations which bring the Holy One of God into the moral condition of an unsaved Jewish remnant, of such as are under the punishment of that blood-guiltiness which the nation called down upon them and upon their children, when they crucified their King, and thus bringing the Victim into the moral place of the murderer! Of this remnant Mr. Darby writes, “They are under the law; they do not know what it is to be reconciled to God, but they come into awful conflict with Satan, Antichrist, and the terrors of that day. They will be under the sufferings which come from the full letting loose of Satan upon them, without the knowledge of God’s favour resting on them” (Bible Treasury, Vol. II, 157), of which passage Mr. Dorman fitly remarks, “It is a strange scene whence to deduce the experiences of the Lord Jesus!” It matters not whether these experiences belong to elect sinners or to others; they are experiences of sinners as such, in moral and spiritual alienation from God, and into these experiences the Son of God, we are told, enters, that He might be able to sympathize with certain persons when passing through judgment for their sins. In the first place, the Son of God need not to enter into the sinner’s place to enable Him to sympathize; a remark which is often repeated by advocates of this heresy, as it was by E. Irving. He, the maker of man, knows of what he is made, and sympathizes with man in His Godhead, because He knows what is in him. In the second place, the position taken by the blessed Lord was a real one, and never a fictitious one. He stands really as the Holy One, ever doing the will of the Father, ever rejoicing in Him, and ever rejoiced in by Him; and He stood the sin-offering unto God when the judgment of sin came down upon Him, and the penalties of a broken law rested on Him as consuming fire, and this He endured God-wards. But in Mr. Darby’s views of the sufferings, we have wrath coming down on Him personally, not as the sin-offering, on Him the holy obedient child not in atonement unto God, but in regard to certain circumstances in which God had placed Him , or to certain future circumstances, which are, we are told, to arise in the history of Israel hereafter. This at once demoralizes all right apprehension of the justice of God, as if, except in atonement and vicariously, He could ever treat the righteous as the wicked. This Abraham knew was far from God, and so will it ever be. When contending against Mr. Newton, Mr. Darby was keen enough to discern the danger of connecting the judgment of God’s wrath with the Lord, in any other way than in atonement, and observes, “It is the pure unmingled heresy of wrath on Christ which was not vicarious;” and yet it is this very unmingled heresy which Mr. Darby has been introducing in a form so very similar to that formerly held by Mr. Newton, that no one unacquainted with the controversy could discern the difference that may lie between them.
All saints adoringly acknowledge with more or less distinctness the blessed sympathy of Jesus with His mystic body, for wherein one member suffers all suffer, and in that sense the sufferings of a Father’s chastening and of a Father’s smiting, that come down on any of His children with no atoning reference, can be borne in sympathy by Jesus. In this sense of mystic oneness, we often hear the Lord Jesus, the Head of the body, making allusion to the hand of God as being stretched out. This principle is illustrated in 2 Sam. vii, where, after God says of Solomon and his Antitype, “I will be his Father, and he shall be My son.” He continues, If he forsake My law and walk not in My covenant, I will chasten him with the rod of men; but My mercy will I not take from him.” The former part of this verse is in Heb. i, 5 quoted of our Lord in resurrection, and the latter can only have an application to Him, when looking at Him as the impersonation of the heavenly body, of which He is the Head; or as King of Israel, the Head of His faithful people in the latter day, when the remnant of Israel, having learnt grace, and having the spirit of supplication poured on them from on high, will look on Him whom they pierced, and mourn, worshipping at the feet of Him whom they crucified and slew. This explains that which meets us so frequently in the Psalms, for the interpretation of which this third class of sufferings and experiences has been invented, whether by Mr. Newton or by Mr. Darby. We allude to this, because there is much sweetness and comfort to the child of God in realizing that his Jesus thus gives utterance to the groanings and sorrows of all His redeemed ones, whether in their sorrows from the ungodly, or in their suffering under the loving discipline of their Father in heaven, and of this we would seek by all means not to rob any of the saints. We are commanded to weep with those who weep, and this none the less because the tears are often the result of the chastenings of a Father; and so Jesus weeps with those that weep, and rejoices with those that rejoice, and the expression of all this we find in those beautiful experiences of the Psalms, which have only to be rightly understood to prove a feast of fat things to the saints of God.
There is, however, all the difference imaginable between experience so entered into, and the ascribing to him what is conveyed under the following or similar sentences, when personally he is said to have come “under the exercises of a soul learning when a sinner the difference of good and evil.” It is this false experience which is attributed to Christ that has the terrible danger of undermining the whole work of the cross. Mr. Newton was doubtless at heart sound, even when intellectually we find him overwhelmed with the subtleties of a speculative teaching that aroused the attention of godly sober-minded Christians, and led the brethren in Bethesda to feel justified in the extreme measure of separating from him. And if Mr. Darby and his followers had not excommunicated themselves from all but themselves, that which justified the course pursued towards Mr. Newton in 1848, would necessitate a similar course towards Mr. Darby in 1866. The doctrine is identical in this, its main feature, that Christ is personally placed under the judgment of God, otherwise than atoningly. This was the real poison in the doctrine of the one, and it is the real poison in that of the other. We do not consider Mr. Newton to have been fundamentally unsound himself, having a reservation in his own mind which kept the noxious doctrine from undermining the foundations of truth in his own soul; the same may, we would hope, be true of Mr. Darby likewise; but when we have to meet false doctrine, we have to meet it without these reservations; and when it is taught, it will be learnt without them, and therein lies the danger, of these destructive teachings to those who, not having their senses exercised, are unable to discern between the good and the evil, and who will remember what they hear often rather in its error than in its truth. “Exorbitances of doctrine;” writes one, “when advanced by men of powerful or richly furnished minds, conceal their deformity and evil tendency beneath the attraction of intelligence. But the very same extravagancies and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty but of decency, and show themselves in the loathsome nakedness of error.“[3] The unwary, the uninstructed, the fascinated, seeing the beauty of the garb in which error is thus dressed up, call it “precious truth”—precious only because they have not dug down to its foundation. This led many godly and devoted saints in 1848, to follow the false teachings of one teacher, and the same has led many since with far less excuse to follow the false teachings of another, and the result has been the same; and the ultimate tendency of the doctrines will have to be learnt in the teachings of those who have not the power to cover over the nakedness of the error. We will illustrate what we mean by two quotations from late periodicals belonging to the party.
In The Present Testimony, for August, 1866, we read as follows:—
“To Him, too, as an Israelite, the Messiah and King of Israel, the perfect Israelite, the cross (a Gentile death, and a cruel one) must have been far more sorrowful than to the two thieves. They, of course, felt the pain of the kind of death, and the death itself, in a bodily way; but besides feeling much more acutely than they did, His mind, His heart, His zeal for God, His love for Israel, His pity for the sinners and for Gentiles, all gave their tribute to His weight of sufferings. His mother, His disciples, all enlarged its dimensions too. There was too, to Him, in addition to the pain of the death, the legal curse appended, by God’s righteous judgment as King of Israel, to the form of death; as it is written, ‘Cursed is every one that hangeth upon a tree.’ But this curse of the law was not the same thing as the wrath, when he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!’ The thieves bore it as He did; that thief, too, who went with Him to Paradise the same day, and who could go there to be with his Lord, because He, the Prince of Life, had borne the wrath due to sin in His own body on the tree. But the cross had been endured by many an unrepentant rebel against man and God; and the cross in itself would not take away sin. Yea more, while the time in which he endured the cross was the period in part of which the wrath came on Him (when He endured the wrath of God’s judgment against sin), He only, of the three that were crucified together, could or did bear that wrath; and the agony of that wrath, if His alone of the three then and there crucified, was distinct from, though present to Him at the same time as the agonies (infinitely lesser) of the cross of wood.”[4]
There is in this quotation that which is so profane, that we scarce like to comment on it—a linking together of the Spotless One and the malefactors crucified with him, that the heart shudders in reading it, and cannot but feel that such teaching will fast turn those who sit under it to infidelity “The Cross to Christ,” we are told, “must have been far more sorrowful than to the two thieves,” for his bodily sensibilities were keener!! There is in remarks of this nature an unholy familiarity in treating those holy and awful sufferings of the Son of God, which robs the cross of its unutterable glory, and the person of the Sufferer of that reverential adoration which is his due at the hands of those who are healed by his stripes. What was this “legal curse” which “was not the same thing as the wrath, when He cried out ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’”? What is this curse which we are told “the thieves bore as He did”? According to this, the curse he bore had nothing to do with those of whom we are told that he died to bear their sins in his own body on the tree—it was not the sinner’s curse, but a legal curse appended by God governmentally to the death of the Cross, and the Cross becomes no emblem of atoning grace and love, but the emblem of something that thieves endured as well as He!!
This same way of treating of the sufferings of the Holy One of God we find in the September number of the Bible Treasury for the current year, which is alike revolting to all spiritual apprehension of the awful mysteries of the Cross of which we know so little, and to all scriptural revelation concerning Christ and his atoning death. The writer there says:—
“Now that which was properly expiation or atonement was not the pure, however precious act of Christ’s death. Of course death was necessary for this and for other objects in the counsels of God; but it is what Jesus went through from and with God, when made sin, it is what He suffered for our sins not only in body, but in soul under divine wrath, that the atonement depends on. Many besides Jesus have been crucified; but atonement was in no way wrought then. Many have suffered horrors of torment for the truth’s sake in life and up to death; but they would have been the first to abhor the falsehood that their sufferings atoned for themselves any more than for others.”
What means the allusion made to the non-atoning character of the sufferings of others? It is as if it were altogether forgotten that the atonement of the Cross of Christ was not the result of death in the abstract, but the result of the victim being what he was, the Anointed One of God, the Only-begotten of the Father. It is hard to conceive where the heart and conscience of any one could be, who could pen the last sentences in the quotation we have made; as if all the merits of the Cross arose not out of the wonderful fact that it was God who was making the propitiation. Had this stupendous thought been pervading the writer’s thoughts, could he have written that saints who suffered for Christ would “abhor the falsehood that their sufferings atoned.” Truth has lost its power when such truisms are uttered, as that a sinner cannot by suffering atone for a sinner. The heresies of 1848 left the cross very much untouched—the precious blood remained still the simple and single ground of atonement before God, and the only power of cleansing for the conscience to the sinner. The writer here says, “it was not the pure death of Christ that was expiation,” but it was what he suffered for our sins “in body and soul under the wrath of God.” What can the tendencies of such teaching as this be, but to under mine confidence in those very foundation truths which are reiterated again and again in the Scripture of truth, where we are ever reminded that it was the blood, and the blood alone, which settled every question between the believing sinner and his God.
Let us hear what scripture says on this all important matter. We are told that:—we are “justified by his blood” (Roman v. 9); “have redemption through his blood” (Eph. i. 7); that we are “made nigh by his blood” (Eph. ii. 13); that we have “peace through the blood of His cross” (Col. i. 20); that we have “cleansing of conscience through the blood of Christ” (Heb. ix. 14); that we have “boldness to enter into the Holiest by the blood of Jesus.” It is to the “blood of sprinkling” that we draw near in the heavens (Heb. xii. 24); and the standing of the believer here is in the same “sprinkling of the blood of Jesus” (1 Peter i. 1); for he knows that God has redeemed him “with the precious blood of Christ as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot.” It is “the blood of Christ, God’s Son, that cleanseth from all sin,” and before the throne it is the blood of the Lamb that gives title to a place there (Rev. vii), and that alone. Of the death of Christ it is said that we are “reconciled by the death of God’s Son” (Romans i. 10, Col. i. 21, 22), and the Cross is given as that which, being the emblem of sacrificial death , becomes therefore the ground of reconciliation, so that it is said of Christ, “that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross” (Eph. i. 16). The Cross is the watchword of the Church and the only ground of glorying; for we are to glory in nothing else, and Paul looked on those who received not Jesus by faith, as “enemies to the Cross.”
It seems strange to have to write what all must know, and which those who hold to the statements on which we are commenting, would not deny; but we assert that which appears to be distinctly denied in the passage under review, namely, that the “pare” and only ground of atonement is the blood—shedding. Remission of sin rests exclusively on that which we see and know, and nothing added to it. It is this, which blessed be God, we know on His own testimony, and not any thing that came down on the soul of the Holy Sufferer, of which we know nothing, that is the ground of the justification wrought out on the cross. Mental sorrows there doubtless were, soul agonies of which God has said very little to us; but our peace, our rest, our hope, is on the ground of what we see on the cross. To this John alludes, when having witnessed the death of Jesus, he wrote under the teaching of the Spirit, as follows:—“One of the soldiers pierced his side, and forth with came there out blood and water. And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true; and he knoweth that he saith true that ye might believe.” Where fore this reiteration? so unusual in God’s Word, but to show that all atonement rested on what God here bears witness to by His Spirit. Over all the exercises of soul of the blessed Lord during those three hours of darkness, God has drawn the impenetrable veil of a miraculous darkness, when the Son of man entered into the “horror of great darkness,” out of which He was to rise, Himself the sun shining in His strength. God has drawn the veil, and this veil profane hands would lift, but it will end in their confusion. Is there nothing to be learned morally from the fact that the sun was darkened, thereby casting the mantle of a supernatural mid night around the sin-offering, hiding from view all that was passing within and around? Well may we tremble as we contemplate what we cannot fathom, and ponder on that into which even in thought we cannot enter, the Victim alone with God, bound by God, smitten by God, and the sword of God entering into His soul; and when thus smitten and forsaken, God’s face turned away from Him, who had ever walked in the sunshine of His countenance, and whose countenance had till then ever shone upon Him.
What have these teachings given us for our confidence as to atonement, when the sole visible ground of confidence borne witness to by the Holy Ghost is taken away from us? When the gracious word, “When I see the blood I will pass over you,” spoken by God, can no longer satisfy the burdened soul; when the fact of the cross and the death upon it is removed as the sure and certain, because the only ground of peace and rest, what, we ask, do these writers give us instead? They say the death was necessary, but that it was not enough; they say the atonement rests in this, that Christ suffered in soul as well as in body, under divine wrath. This suffering in soul under divine wrath is thus made a necessary component part of the atonement, and if so, the poor sinner needs to know it ere he can rest in peaceful assurance that atonement has really been made. Now, where in the New Testament are we told that divine wrath came down upon the soul of Christ? Is wrath ever said to come down upon Him? To say the effect of the wrath due to the sinner came on Him would be correct, but to say that divine wrath came down on him, is abhorrent to all we know of Him who was ever the delight of His Father, whether in death or in life; whether in the manger or on the cross; and this is proved in that after the three hours darkness, just before his death, the Lord said, “Father, into Thy hand I deliver up My spirit.” Some have gone so far astray as to say that atonement was effected before death, and assert as a ground this verse and that other utterance on the cross, “It is finished;” by which argument, John xvii, where Jesus says, “I have finished the work Thou gavest Me to do,” would prove atonement was effected before He came to the cross at all. The consciousness that sin had been laid on Him, took not away from His soul the sweet assurance that the Father was much pleased, or for a moment brought the thought to Him that the wrath of God rested on Him. It could not. It was impossible. He stood there obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, obedient to the will of Him who sent Him. It will be replied, this is held by all. We believe it to be held by all humble and simple-minded believers, but we doubt whether the constant habit of speaking of the wrath of God resting on Christ, has not far and wide, among many of various religious views, undermined that essential truth which we find so frequently brought into prominence in the Word, that Jesus while standing before God as a sin-bearer, stood not there in the first place, on behalf of the sinner and as his servant, but on behalf of God and His servant in reference to Sin. This is the first place occupied by Christ, and as a faithful servant, and a loving obedient child, He bore sin because God put it on Him, and left Him alone and unaided to bear the tremendous load, and hence the awful cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me.” The secondary consideration of the cross, is its reference to the believing soul, who is able to look back there and read its title to life in the fact that God points to the crucified Jesus, and says, “Whosoever believeth in Him shall have eternal life.” Christ stands as God’s propitiation for sin; He comes under the load as God and man on behalf of God in the first place, and on behalf of man in the second, that He might redeem all who believe. And it appears to us that many of the difficulties that arise on the mysterious subject of the sufferings of Christ, arise from the aspect of the cross Godwards being too much lost sight of. A word may not be out of place here relative to the words wrath and judgment, which with many are often unjustifiably interchanged.
Wrath is the expression of a moral sentiment of a moral being against a sin as such, or against the sinner as such; it contains within itself no judicial expression or action. Judgment, on the other hand, is the delivery of the object of wrath to the experience of the judicial consequence of his misdeeds. Wrath pertains to God as the holy One, who abhors sin; and judgment to Him as the just and righteous One, who is the avenger of sin, and the awarder of evil to the evil-doer. Now when we contemplate Christ as the sacrifice for sin, we see one perfectly and essentially holy, holy as God is holy, in all the infinite heights and depths of His nature, and yet coming to the cross as appointed by God to bear the full judgment of sin, the absolute forsaking of God, and the endurance of the full power of the infinite holiness of God, when from Him the uttermost exaction of that holiness was made, and the utmost requirement met and discharged by Him who was the eternal light, who tabernacled in flesh. In all this He was God’s infinite delight, alike when judicially forsaken as when dwelling in the bosom of the Father. Now this doctrine of wrath coming on Christ, whether vicariously or otherwise, places Him in the place of that which was morally abhorrent and intolerable to God. Can this be? He stood as the sin-bearer in the place of deepest humiliation, but yet at same time in the place of the most absolute and perfect delight and acceptance to Him, who, as the avenger of sin, made to meet on Him the iniquities of us all; in consequence of which the judgment fell on Him likewise, that was due to such iniquity. To contemplate Christ, the Holy One of God, as abhorrent to God, and as an abomination to His holiness, which is to place Him under the wrath of God, is impossible, and yet this is unwittingly done by many. Some will say the distinction we draw is immaterial; we believe it to be of essential importance, and again repeat it, that the word wrath is in no instance said to come on Christ in connexion with His atoning work, in the New Testament, and much less in relation to any of His other sufferings.
We cannot enter at length into these speculations of Mr. Darby and his followers, from which may the God of grace keep us, enabling us as humble worshippers, to speak of the sufferings of Immanuel, such things only as God has unmistakably revealed to us, in his records of those things which are to be most assuredly believed among us. Well may Captain Hall write, in contemplating these departures from sacred fundamental truth, “The Cross, the awful yet glorious symbol of divine love in its heights and depths, and of an eternal redemption from the curse and wrath justly due to us, is taken from us altogether; it ceases to be the symbol of the first class of our Lord’s sufferings, atoning sufferings for our sin, received and accepted by all christians, and is used as the symbol (and confirmation) of a third class of sufferings under an unatoning curse and wrath. Alas! They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him.”[5]
We would again warn all of the fearful delusion into which many fall, who are contented to seek a protection and a safeguard from heresy in the spirituality of much else that is taught at the same time. God has shewn that teaching is to be judged of by fruits, and not by words, and one painful feature in the present apology made by many involved in these errors, is, that they seek a shelter from evil and false doctrine in the uncertain, fallacious argument of beautiful teaching, which may only be the more delusive because the more beautiful; and when added to this a natural infallibility is assumed and acted on, what will the end be but as one wrote in regard to it, “It will be Princeism or something worse.” We could make godly hearts shudder in the recital of much, that in the utterance bespeaks the most heavenly realizations of that which is the most intensely spiritual, uttered by those in bondage to some of the darkest delusions that have darkened the checkered history of the professing church. God teaches us, by permitting such things to arise, that we must cultivate not an ideal and pictorial christianity, but one that makes all the lovely pictures living figures. The church has to learn that the belief in any doctrine is a dead thing going to corruption, unless it be brought into the living activities of obedience. It becomes us all to bring the principle of justification by works as spoken of in James, more practically to bear on all that we believe, for it concerns not the first act of saving faith alone, it concerns every act in the life of him who is born of God, for by the living actings of a living faith we are told “The scripture was fulfilled, which saith he believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness.” That which is reckoned for righteousness, needs to become a fruit fulfilled in righteousness, and thus the mighty act of Abraham’s faith recorded in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis fulfills the glorious announcement of God concerning him in the fifteenth chapter. The Lord enable all to seek after having all that we believe fulfilled in us, and then shall we stand before the church of God and before the world as the friends of God, and the second chapter of James will be fulfilled, in the fifteenth of John realized.
We cannot close this subject without a few remarks on Mr. Darby’s conduct in reference to it. He had frequently been spoken to by those of his followers who had courage to do so, on the similarity between his views and those held formerly by Mr. Newton. This was a subject spoken on at a meeting in Portsmouth some few years back, when Mr. D. replied, that those who could form such a comparison, were either “fools or knaves”!! Mr. Dorman tells us how again and again he brought the subject before him, and he seems at one time to have received “assurances of his willingness to correct any faulty expressions in the writings complained of”; but whatever promises may have been held out by Mr. Darby, they were not to be realized. Strong representations had been made to him by others while abroad as to the painful effects his teachings had had on the minds of many in fellowship with him, but he returns to London from the continent, and rather than retract or alter anything he had written he determines to leave his party if necessary. This they could not allow. The result was that the whole question was hushed up, there was no examination, no retractation, and the doctrines in question virtually received the sanction of the leaders of the party, nine of whom, including Mr. Wigram, wrote the following letter to Mr. G. B. Gilpin, who had written strong letters of remonstrance against the allowance and tacit consent given to Mr. Darby’s views.
“Dear Brother in the Lord,
“We have read and considered your letter to our brother Mr. J. N. Darby, and his letters to you. We are not aware ‘that the subject of the sufferings of Christ is everywhere rife, or at least in many places or in many minds.’ So far as we know this statement is unwarrantably strong. Here the state of things is the very contrary, and we cannot be content to allow our brother J. N. D. to withdraw himself from us under such plea, to us not true, in the place where we are. We know not of any consciences so troubled, nor is there any thing in the writings referred to which has affected our own consciences.
“Signed for the Nine,[6]
“G.V.W.C. Mc A.”
Those who had been waiting anxiously for some acknowledgment of error—some modification of statements that had been made, now saw but too clearly that nothing was to be expected. The evil had been wrapped up, and stereotyped on the party. Of this Mr. Dorman writes:—
“Instead of any modification of the doctrine or its withdrawal, as I had hoped, or any correction of the faulty statements, which had been solemnly promised, I found that now all was to be maintained. In addition to this I learned that nine of the leaders in London, had, in effect, countersigned the whole doctrine, and had thus sent it on accredited, as far as their names could accredit it, for currency among those who acknowledge Mr. D.’s rule.”
It was, indeed, scarcely to be supposed, that one who had been submitted to so implicitly by his followers hitherto, and been helped by them in carrying out what Mr. Dorman calls “his unrighteous decree,” would, when it came to the point, yield himself either to their entreaties or their dictation. Others had again and again been obliged to confess errors in doctrine, but they were not those of whom it would be written, “that it would be impossible he should hold any thing that was wrong,” they were not infallible. To retract, for the first time, to Mr. Darby would be at once to come down from the high pinnacle of infallibility, on which he had stood so long, the key stone of the arch of the system he had reared. This position was necessary to himself, and needful to his party. He had become a necessity to his followers, and they could not lose Him; and the threat of leaving them not only led them to leave the matter uninvestigated, but to endorse the doctrines advocated, for “they had not found any thing in the writings referred to which had affected their own consciences.” Thus have the London gatherings of the party given their sanction to that, for which these eighteen years they have been pursuing their brethren wifh “fire and sword.” The question evidently is not, what is the doctrine, but who teaches it.
We commend the following extract from Mr. Dorman’s Pamphlet (p. 36) to the consideration of our readers.
“This doctrine, whatever its character may be proved to be, is no barren metaphysical dogma: Mr. D. knows it well. The living, inexorable law of discipline which guards the grounds of fellowship of all who are especially associated with him, took its rise eighteen years ago in the rigid exclusion of the one doctrine; and it will be hard to show how it can be righteously maintained, in conjunction with the acceptance and maintenance of the other. At any rate it is impossible for me to regard any longer this law of exclusion as having anything whatever to do with purity of doctrine: on which ground it was at first ostensibly inaugurated. ‘The brethren’ κατ᾽ έξοχήν have now, strange to say it, completed a circle. Eighteen or nineteen years ago their polity and position were entirely remodelled on the ground of separation from ‘Bethesda’ on account of alleged laxity in dealing with false doctrine. They are now themselves in a position to be separated from on the score of the reception and sanction of false doctrine amongst themselves;—and that not on some other point of Christian truth, but on the very point from which what they condemned arose.”
Some following the London leaders, and the signers of the letter of the Nine, endorse these doctrines; while others are determined to follow the injunction given by some, “Do not touch it,” and seek to have nothing to do with the matter. The former, whatever we may have to say to their evil, are not chargeable with inconsistency. They have worshipped their idol, and they are determined to follow him wherever he may lead, and to carry out their exclusive discipline which at last embraces within its own bosom, the very evil it was originated to keep out. How has God blown on it all. The wall that they have been building, and the untempered mortar that they have been daubing it with, has been brought under the judgment of the righteous God, and the great hail-stones shall fall on it when the question will have to be answered, “Where is the wall, and they who have daubed it?”
But what shall we say of the sincerity of those who determine that they will not look into the matter, who, when Mr. Dorman proposed to have a church examination of the doctrine, replied, “It will be disastrous.” Mr. Dorman withdrew because he would not “introduce the element of strife amongst them.” All wished to keep the discussion of these matters, if possible, from those with whom they were in fellowship. We fully and heartily enter into the instinctive shrinking which any might have, against bringing such matters before a body of saints, the great majority of whom will never be able to enter into them. But do not those who refuse investigation now, remember that the opposition to Bethesda arose out of the refusal of the leaders to do the very thing then, which it is now thought would be disastrous to do in Orchard Street, and if so, what becomes of that “unrighteous decree,” that established the Bethesda test, and which originated the meeting, with which, until lately, Mr. Dorman was connected? Mr. Dorman, in justification of his course of separating from Orchard Street, writes:—
“My heart instinctively shrank from the thought of bringing abstruse speculations on the solemn subjects of the cross and the sufferings of Christ before young and immature minds. I could not bear to do what I was assured would only gratify that natural pruriency of many, which at all times I have sought to repress instead of awaken; and most especially when Christ’s person was in question. It was this which led me to retire in silence from my ordinary fellowship with the meeting at Orchard Street, Bristol; contenting myself by saying, in an informal way, that the doctrines of Mr. D. had compelled the step I had taken. I had then made up my mind to encounter any obloquy on account of my course rather than incur the responsibility of bringing on indiscriminate discussions, which I am satisfied would have resulted only in blighting the best and holiest feelings of the heart toward Christ and His suffering and cross. And besides this, I was anxious not to hinder Mr. Mackintosh’s labours in the gospel, by collision with him, as I knew that he took a contrary part.”—pp. 60, 61.
Thus in the providence of God are the tables turned; those who for these many years have been unrighteously associating Bethesda with heresy, are now placed before the church at large on their trial for the same heresy, as that on the ground of false charges connected with which, they have been dividing and separating the children of God so long. They have digged the pit; and even now, though at the eleventh hour, may the Lord lead them to repentance, and prevent their falling headlong into that which none can fathom.
We will now make a few general remarks before we conclude.
In the rise and progress of those fatal principles of which we have been writing, we have seen how the holier the truth, and the more heavenly the doctrine, the more terrible is the delusion to which those who maintain them are exposed if they cease to abide in humble dependence on Christ and His word. The magnitude of the evils developed will always be in proportion to the greatness of the truths professed; for the higher the pinnacle the greater the fall. The path entered on now well nigh forty years ago by many in much conflict and in much joy of the Holy Ghost has been through a tempestuous sea; but, because the voyage has been rough and stormy, let not the Lord’s people give up the truth the Lord may have taught them. The turmoil and confusion which have come in, have not arisen from God’s principles, but from man’s departure from them. Thank God, looking onward, courage can be taken, and while bowing before God in sorrow for the sin and shame that has come in, the faithful know full well there was a cause for that terrible chastisement which has been allowed to fall upon us all. The Lord has been righteous in all His ways, and none can separate himself from others, whose sins he deplores and whose pride he deprecates, as if their sin and shame were not his to bear in humble confession before the Lord. None can take a place of independency as if he had nothing to do with another’s fall, but all are called to realize that if one member suffer, all suffer, and if one sin all need to confess; let the faithful, therefore, amidst their sorrows and their tears, think of and pray for those who occupy so sorrowful a place in the church of God, and unfeignedly thank God, that the evil he saw as a secret poison working within, he has brought to light, in which the church shall know that He searcheth the hearts and trieth the reins.
It is ever needful to be on our guard, that God’s truth be not discarded, because the human medium through which it is presented, proves itself unworthy of the treasure committed to its trust. Rather must it be remembered that God has put His treasures into earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of His people. And what, if ever and again the earthen vessel is broken in pieces? It can but show of what the vessel is made, and while looking at the broken fragments, the people of God may mourn, they rejoice to be assured that that which is of God abideth for ever. To some these years may appear fraught with evil, but when looked at from within the veil, in the higher light of God’s wisdom and mercy, and when over the havoc and the storm the guiding star of infinite love is seen, the clouds are found big with blessing, even though human pretensions have been unmasked, high sounding words sifted, and lofty claims brought down. For all this God is unfeignedly to be praised, though many have proved themselves guilty, the measure and degree of which we leave Him to decide, who makes no mistakes, and who shows no partiality.
This period has, however, been marked with the busy handiwork of Satan. Roots of bitterness have been matured into trees of unrighteousness, seeds of discord have sprung up into a luxuriant harvest of unholy weeds, that have marred and choked much of the good seed of the kingdom; dormant evils have ripened into active agencies of Satan, and much that in the sowing was thought to be of God, has been proved in its fruits, to have been of the flesh, and confusion and corruption have been the result. But is this manifestation of evil, an evil? Is it a misfortune that what has been working amongst the Lord’s people has been seen, that the poisonous berries are no longer hidden, and rejoiced in as precious fruits of the Spirit, but manifested in all their native character, no longer able to deceive those who do not wish to be deceived by them? By no means! faith can look upwards, and though with sorrow and in tears can still lift up her eyes trustfully towards heaven, and say, “Father I thank thee,” for that is still revealed to the babes, which the wise and prudent ever have and ever will fail to see. The Lord amidst the candlesticks has been walking and speaking, and he who was in Ephesus, in Smyrna, in Pergamos, has been in Plymouth, in Bristol, in London, and the messages he has been sending to those whom they may concern, are not less plain. The approving word that says “thou art rich,” and the word of reproof that says “repent or I will fight against thee,” have alike been heard, and are still heard amongst us, but there are whispers of God that the wise can hear and the chastened soul understand, and there are voices in thunder that the unwise often read backwards to their own confusion.
When avowed principles of evil come in, the Lord’s hand is seen in scattering, that all may not be defiled, thereby enabling the scattered ones the better to keep their garments so that they may walk with him in white. In the present instance that foreseeing God, who knew full well whereunto these unholy principles of exclusiveness in the holy name of Jesus would tend, by the divisions made by Satan has graciously shielded thousands from their influence, who otherwise might have been led away, and by the very opposition those principles met from the brethren in Bethesda, have the eyes of multitudes been opened to see the magnitude of the evil, in which they might have been involved.
These events happen not in the church of God for the individual instruction of the few, but for the saints at large; not that any should boast but that all should fear, that all may find matter for self-judgment in what arises, wherein God triumphs over man’s weakness and wilfulness. God acts not in such a way but that those who wish not to see the signs of the times, will fail to see his working; God forces not conviction even on his children; if they know not the time of their visitation, as they are ever responsible for doing, they will reap the bitter consequences in broken projects here and lost blessing hereafter.
Many need to be cautioned against casting away truth because truth is troublesome, as it ever will be as long as we are in the body, for the truth has to bear upon the natural depravity of the natural heart. We know that “where no ox is the crib is clean, but much strength is in the labor of the ox.” Truth has to be looked at in the light of the Word, and not viewed through the weakness of the creature, so that no failure in the instrument can justify the rejection of that which God has revealed. Amidst all the confusion and noise of the conflict, a conflict between light and darkness, which takes place in the church (having a character of its own) as well as in the world, God’s voice is heard and truth triumphs in the truthful soul now, as it will triumph before all when He comes to make the crooked things straight, and to set all to His line and to His plummet. Let there be no hope of rest in any thing but in the truth as it is in Jesus, in all its fulness and in all its minuteness. There may be slumber, but there can be no rest found, but in following Jesus and in his bosom. We dare not give up even the smallest truth (smallest only in our estimation) because the path is not so plain and easy as it at first appeared. Had Abraham acted thus, when in obedience to the command “Get thee out” he went to Canaan, and was there met by “a famine in the land,” he would at once have gone back to Mesopotamia, assuredly gathering he had made a mistake. Nor must we with that holy man go to Egypt, because in the place to which God has sent us there is trial and disappointment. Our well springs are in Himself and not in His church, and if this is forgotten, it is a lesson that God will find many opportunies of sorrow to teach over again. The way has not been missed, because clouds darkened the sky, and the enemy has slain many in the struggle; the way is where it ever was, and what it ever was, the King’s highway of holiness and peace, where none can hurt, and none can destroy those who follow the footsteps of the Master, though thousands fall all around.
Many dreamed of a loving fellowship of saints on earth that would lead calmly and joyfully heavenward; they came into church fellowship and found to their dismay that church fellowship meant that they were called to bear and to forbear; it was not like Christ’s own fellowship, not like His holy faithful love, so that instead of finding rest, they found a heavy burden laid upon them, their hopes were blighted because ill-founded, and some have sought a refuge somewhere, where they might find less to bear. They mistook the character of the path they had to tread, they found they had got into a place where they had to follow the example of their Master, and bear the burdens, the weaknesses and infirmities of others, they had not counted the cost of thus following Christ into a closer fellowship of saints whom they would have to minister to, and not to be ministered unto, and whose feet they would have to wash, and where that most difficult and most blessed lesson taught in the life and ways of Christ has to be learned deeply, inwardly, and practically, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” This is a hard saying and who can hear it? and consequently this higher path, with its higher conflicts has been forsaken by not a few, for one easier to the flesh, where if less were given, there was less demanded. There are joys in christian communion, that are intense just in proportion to their reality, but there are sorrows connected with it likewise for which many are little prepared, and in consequence of which many are in great danger of going back into an isolated christianity, that God has not enjoined; for hardness has to be endured as a good soldier of Jesus, in the church, as in the world, and the former will always be the harder of the two.
Many have mistaken a name for a reality, and the high sound of godly phraseology has been mistaken for godliness itself. Satan has waged his war against the Lord and against his Church, by stirring up saints to act like Caiaphas in crucifying the Saviour out of zeal for the honor of God! for that which is done against the least of the Lord’s little ones, is done against the Lord himself. Do saints really remember this? Do they reflect on what the Lord says, “that whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a mill stone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” It is a terrible thing to sin against the Lord’s people, whom it is the duty of all to watch over and care for. The disciples of Jesus are called to love one another with no less a love, than that wherewith Jesus has loved them: a love so real and palpable that the world can take cognizance of it, for alas! there is much love falsely so called, that often thinks itself genuine, that the Lord will estimate very differently. The Lord give repentance to all who have sinned, and grace to seek that heavenly wisdom, that takes its inspirations from the bosom of Jesus, and seeks to wash the feet of the defiled one, rather than to cut him off. The proud heart wishes, to attain for itself a place of pre-eminence. To this there is one answer, and for it one cure, that contained in the Lord’s answer to Zebedee’s children, “Are ye able to drink the cup that I drink of, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” May we ever seek to walk in the footsteps of Him who “pleased not Himself,” and desired not to be ministered unto but to minister.
- ↑ Captain Hall, writing of Mr. Darby’s views, says, “So like are they to Mr. Newton’s doctrines, that even had they not been as bad in themselves as I judge them to be, I should be quite unable to maintain the place of what is called testimony against Mr. Newton while connected with those who hold what I think to be as bad.” We hope our brother will soon be led out of his testimony as against Mr. Newton or any one else, into a simple testimony for Christ, which would clear his path of many difficulties that seem still to encompass it.
- ↑ Those who desire further information relative to Mr. Darby’s doctrine on the “Sufferings of Christ,” are referred to Mr. Dorman’s Pamphlet, entitled “Close of Twenty-eight Years’ Association with J. N. D.”; and Captain Percy Hall’s “Grief upon Grief,” both published by Houlston & Wright, Paternoster Row, London.
- ↑ Quoted by Mr. Dorman in his pamphlet, p. 31.
- ↑ See The Present Testimony, p. 167, published by G. Morrish, Warwick Lane, Paternoster Row.
- ↑ “Grief upon Grief,” p. 51.
- ↑ The following are the names of the nine:—E. Cronin; George Owen; C. McAdam; Butler Stoney; Wm. Kelly; E. Denny; Andrew Miller; H. McCarthey; and G. V. Wigram. See “Cause of Withdrawal,” sold by Caswell, Birmingham.