duty. “I cannot hold myself guiltless before God or His saints, unless I raise my voice concerning statements made by Henry Craik, co-labourer with George Müller in Bristol. … I do not accuse himself of being a blasphemer or a heretic; I hope better things. But I do challenge his statements as blasphemous and heretical.”[1]
The following is the incriminated passage. It was taken from Craik’s Pastoral Letters.
“The ark was formed of shittim wood: the hard, sweet-smelling acacia of the wilderness. The tree from which the sacred chest was made, had grown up and been nourished by the rain and sunshine that sometimes cheered the wastes of the desert; so Jesus, as to his humanity, grew up in the wilderness. He was a root out of a dry ground. He breathed the same air, and was nourished by the same food, by which mere creatures are sustained. The winds of this desert world blew around Him, and as the tender sapling gradually grows to maturity of height and vigour,—so Jesus advanced through the several stages of infancy, childhood, and youth, to a state of maturity in age and stature. The acacia wood is said to have great power of resisting the inroads of corruption and decay; so the humanity of the Lord Jesus was free from the slightest taint of moral evil, and his body was preserved from all taint, even of external corruption.”
To enable the reader to test his skill in the detection of heresy, I have given the passage as it appears to have been originally published, without the use of the italics by which Wigram indicated the most terrible passages. These were, “He was a root out of a dry ground,”—“and was nourished by the same food, by which mere creatures are sustained,”—and the whole of the last sentence, beginning, “The acacia wood is said”.
Wigram laid stress on the fact that by the Letter of the Ten the whole church at Bethesda stood committed
