those that he entered into in sympathy with the Remnant. The New Testament tells us nothing of such sufferings, as Darby seems to have admitted; but we find them in the Psalms. Newton’s enquiry followed similar lines, but it was a serious thing for him that he believed in an “unconverted remnant,” while Darby believed in a semi-converted, but unenlightened one, which might have some very slight tendency to improve matters.
Still it is dangerous work to assign to Christ the inward experiences of a sinful “remnant” of any kind. Darby had written in his Remarks on a Letter on Subjects connected with the Lord’s Humanity, “Mr. N. … declares that Jesus had ‘the exercises of soul which His elect in their unconverted state ought to have, and which they would have, if it were possible for them to know and feel everything rightly according to God’. Now whatever nonsense this may be (for it is a contradiction in terms, because, if they had such, they would not be unconverted) yet, taking it as it is, what feelings does it give to Jesus?” Though Newton guarded himself by reiterated declarations of the perfect sinlessness of all Christ’s experiences, this severe criticism of his words was not undeserved; but Darby fared no whit better when he ventured on the same perilous quest. He says that “man may be looked at morally in three conditions,” i.e., conditions of suffering. The third of these is the condition of one “awakened, quickened, and upright in desire, under the exercises of a soul learning, when a sinner, the difference of good and evil under divine government in the presence of God, not fully known in grace and redemption, whose judgment of sin is before his eyes, exposed to all the advantage that Satan can take of him in such a state—such suffering, for example, as is seen in the case of Job. Christ,” Darby proceeds, “has passed through all these
