mony to the strength of the personal tie that bound so many hearts to Darby in a life-long devotion.
“I cannot of course gauge the depth of other people’s affection for you, but I know the strength of my own, and how I esteem you for your Master’s sake, and for your unflinching, unflagging zeal and faithfulness in His service: but this is nothing though true. … If … you think it good to impute influences’ which I could in a moment shew you that my heart was inaccessible to, and tendencies the very reverse of which I am conscious, and then quietly tell me I am instigated by the devil in what I am doing, so far as I can see there is no help for it. …
“Your appeal to my feelings as to the effect of my letters on your spirit and work amidst your overtaxed spiritual energies, my heart must have lost all its sensibilities if it had not felt, and felt with an anguish you perhaps would be little disposed to give me credit for. But at the same time there is, on my part, Christ and conscience to be thought about as well as on yours. … I have kept my sorrows in my own bosom. … I have sought to make no faction against you, even if I were able to do so. … I was led into this examination, as I have told you, solely by the desire to deliver Hall from what I thought to be a wrong judgment about it.”
The following passage shows that Darby had attempted a very common means of intimidation. It seldom was encountered, unhappily, with such unbending sternness.
“Any talk to me about approaching Newton’s doctrine, because I cannot agree with yours, and drawing towards ‘Bethesda’—and danger of losing my moral integrity in doing so—I honestly tell you is lost upon me. I think such things are unworthy of one Christian to impute to another; and it is the direct way to reduce all the power of conscience to a name.”
It was the direct way, and a sure way, as the history of Darbyism to this very day abundantly witnesses.
Dorman proceeds to give his reasons for identifying Darby’s doctrine, as to its essence, with Newton’s.
