Darby had actually taught what was imputed to him is really of secondary importance. If the seceders had withdrawn on the bare ground that Darby taught doctrines that made him unfit for Christian communion, what he actually taught would have become the all-important question. But the fact was far otherwise; on that point Hall and Dorman are both perfectly explicit. “I have not felt myself particularly called upon,” says Dorman, “in this examination to prove that these doctrines are false and heretical,” though he evidently thought them so. “It is enough if I have shewn that they make any approach to those formerly held by Mr. Newton.”[1] And Hall writes: “So like are they to Mr. N.’s doctrines, that even had they not been as bad in themselves as I judge them to be, I should be quite unable to maintain the place of what is called testimony against Mr. N., while connected with those who hold what I think to be as bad”.
The position of the Exclusives was reduced to an absurdity, apart altogether from the question of what Darby had taught. It was the distinctive basis of their communion to cut off “from the Church of God on earth” all those who had the most remote, or even the most unreal and fictitious, connexion with Newton’s old doctrine—a doctrine apparently no longer actually professed by anybody in 1866; while at the same time they
- ↑ Dorman now begins to do Newton rather belated justice. “In justice I am bound to say, that amidst all the apparent confusion and contradictions of his statements about the position and experiences of the Lord Jesus in connexion with Israel, his care to guard against imputing to Christ the presence or possibility of actual sin, is a plain proof that, however wrong his doctrines, it was no part of his intention to defame Christ.” This was really (and would be still) a remarkable discovery for an Exclusive Brother.
