what, under great excitement, he represented it at the meeting in question as having been; all those whom he left can unite with me fully in this testimony.”
This general agitation must be borne in mind in examining the various “confessions”. The penitent teachers all affirm that they had not contemplated the consequences of their principles, while they justly blame themselves for want of the care due in so sacred an enquiry; yet their language is strong enough to have met the occasion if they had been responsible for all that their adversaries sought to fasten on them. But there is no confession whatever of moral obliquity in any one of the three. Darby had just written, “I can only say, not speaking now of Mr. Newton, but of Messrs. Dyer, Soltau, Clulow, and Batten, that I have never met with such wretched trickery, or such bold untruth, as in the printed documents they have circulated.”[1] But even in the depths of their humiliation, Dyer, Soltau and Batten have nothing to say that gives countenance to this accusation.
To some extent they justified Darby’s charges of “clericalism” and “sectarianism”; and they all plead guilty to party spirit, and to having, in excessive measure, subordinated other duties to the maintenance of the peculiar system that they identified with “the truth”. Dyer treats the subject the most fully.
“This led many to charge ‘clericalism,’ and practically there was something which warranted this charge. Not, I think, from any effort to elevate those who ministered in the word, as such, (which, I suppose, would properly be ‘clericalism’) but from the way in which the ministry of individuals was acted on by the aiming at a special object. … Exclusiveness has thus been pro- duced both as to persons and doctrine. …
