Darby, without naming him, to the effect that Christ (apparently in the Wilderness of the Temptation) “could not take the place of Adam in the midst of all that which would have sustained His soul; it is the place rather of Cain; the place of estrangement from God, in the absence of all sustaining power from without”. Vindex tells us that some people deemed this “the worst thing in the (so-called) Heretical Remarks,” until it transpired that it was a quotation from Darby, when they discovered that “it meant something ‘quite different’”. Darby himself allowed that “the expression about Cain was unfortunate,” but none the less affirmed in his Observations that the quotation of his words by Newton showed “the way in which statements of truth are made to sanction the teaching of error”. Most significant of all is it that, some ten years later, Darby proved totally unable to keep clear of errors that, in the judgment of several of the foremost of his own adherents, were essentially the errors charged against Newton. Most of the early Brethren seem to have chafed at the self-restraint of the four Gospels, and to have been led to seek in the Psalms for personal experiences of Christ that are unrecorded and unsuggested elsewhere. Under these circumstances the wonder is that things were no worse.
Newton’s later attitude towards his former associates was one of intense and somewhat extravagant antagonism. He thought their theology quite as heretical as they thought his. But he is entitled throughout to the credit he claimed for himself in the hapless “letter to Clulow”; his “hostility is against a system, not against individuals”.[1] The execrations of his adversaries pursued
- ↑ I desire to withdraw, as susceptible of a very unjust construction, a statement I made in the British Weekly for December 28, 1900. I then wrote: “When he [Newton] became the
