him to his distant grave, but not once in half a century did they avail to provoke retaliation. His name to this day is regarded with absolute loathing by thousands who have never troubled to read a single tract of all that he has written; and there are certainly hundreds, scarcely a whit better informed, who have made it one of their chief objects to perpetuate the frantic prejudice. But none of the leaders of the campaign of calumny, and none of their dupes, have ever, so far as I can learn from an extensive enquiry, been assailed by Newton with one angry word of a personal character, or with one uncharitable imputation. With Newton’s ecclesiastical course I have no sympathy. He contracted the limits of orthodoxy till there can scarcely have been five hundred sound Christians in the world, and he taught principles of church-fellowship that were actually narrower than those of Darby himself. On these points I have myself spoken strongly in the past; if I refer to them now, it is to lend weight to the testimony that I gladly bear to
object of a very fierce, and it is to be feared (at least in Darby’s case) rather unscrupulous persecution, he seems to have conducted himself with a great deal of the meekness of wisdom. Subsequently he abandoned the distinctive principles of Brethrenism, and was accustomed to refer to his former associates with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence of disapprobation.” I believe I was at that time unable to imagine that Newton could have reprobated the theological system of the Brethren so vehemently, if personal pique had not been behind his denunciations; and I partially interpreted what I still consider his extravagant language as an expression of personal resentment. I now believe, after the much fuller investigation called for by my present undertaking, that I did him a great injustice; and as I consider Newton one of the worst-used men of the last century, so he is one of the last to whom I would willingly be unfair. Newton, even more than Darby, if possible, seems really to have regarded the interests of the Church of Christ as bound up with the peculiarities of a certain dispensational system, and this is a weakness that must not be forgotten in weighing the conduct of either.
