It is of the utmost consequence that Newton from first to last with unfaltering voice affirmed the catholic doctrine of the Person of the Saviour. Christ was to him very God of very God, yet truly man, free from all taint cleaving to fallen nature, having no sin, original or otherwise. Newton never remotely hinted even the abstract peccability of Christ, and the analogy of his system to Irvingism was only fanciful; and when his accusers suggested an affinity to Arianism or Socinianism, they might just as well have suggested an affinity to Deism. It is no less important that Newton constantly affirmed that Christ as man, in the days of His flesh, was always perfectly well-pleasing to God. Suppose that in this he were inconsistent, are we to give full weight (and often much more than full weight) to every exceptionable statement, while we explain his orthodoxies as deliberately designed only to give currency to his errors ? This exactly describes Darby’s conduct, and remains a deep blot on his reputation.
On the 26th of November, Newton issued A Statement and Acknowledgment respecting certain Doctrinal Errors. In this he withdrew, unreservedly, and with many penitential expressions, the doctrine that Christ was born under the “federal headship of Adam”. He claimed indeed the benefit of “the limitations by which this doctrine was guarded” in his own mind and teaching; but he acknowledged that many of the injurious “deductions,” though he had not drawn them, had yet been legitimately drawn. “I wish,” he says, “explicitly to state that I do not ascribe any of Christ’s living experiences to the imputation of Adam’s guilt, nor ought I to have made any statements or used any words which did so ascribe any of His sufferings to anything imputed to Him; nor yet that He had by keeping the law or by
