correspondence on the subject. So readily, and as it appears to me, so remorselessly is he prepared to throw off men, no matter how long or how close their association may have been with him, if they once dare to judge or to question the truth of what he has written. But it is in harmony with his declared sentiments. In a letter already referred to he had said, (not to me) ‘I shall come to London and shall see how far the consciences of the saints there are troubled; that is to me how far the enemy has been at work’!”
I have presented an outline of this correspondence in some fulness, because of the light that it sheds on the Darbyism of the day. No imputation either of arrogance or of pitilessness to Darby can well go beyond what his own published references to this controversy will bear out. Hall had been his friend for thirty-five years; Dorman for twenty-eight. Both were elderly men, sacrificing the friends and associations of a lifetime, when they could have neither the time nor the heart to form fresh ones. In Dorman’s case, as he had lived (at least to a great extent) by his ministry, serious pecuniary loss was added. Yet Darby, in a long introduction prefixed to the second edition of his papers on the Sufferings, has not a kindly word for either of them. Of Dorman he says almost nothing, but of Hall a good deal, seeking to fasten on him, by a wretched sophism, an unconscious participation in Newtonianism. This stroke was doubtless adroit, because of the odium it was calculated to excite; but it is hard to think it anything but unscrupulous. Elsewhere he says of his opponents, “I am inclined to suspect that, not being in communion with Christ in the matter, Satan has deceived them by the ambiguity of the word ‘suffering’. … But if they had been seeking the truth and edification simply, they would
