tacked with great vehemence by Stoney and Mackintosh,[1] who seem to have shared Stanley’s doctrine of “justification in a risen Christ”. Stuart’s teaching, on the other hand, was apparently a partial reaction against this tendency, in the direction of the older Evangelicalism. He writes with scholarship and acumen, which is much more than can be said for his assailants. Indeed, if one of his principal champions, Mr. Walter Scott of Hamilton, is right in saying that many “judged Mr. Stuart to be a heretic on the unproved statements” of two such divines as Stoney and Mackintosh, the circumstances give occasion to the most dismal reflexions on the theological indigence of the party.
From his neutral position, Mr. Kelly passed an unfavourable judgment on Mr. Stuart’s doctrines, but held it entirely unwarrantable (as any man in his senses, whatever his dogmatic standpoint, must needs have done) to treat them as offences calling for excommunication. Mr. Kelly’s judgment of the teaching carries far more weight than that of all the Park Street divines taken together, but it must not be allowed too much authority as against Mr. Stuart; for Mr. Stuart scarcely claimed to be other than an innovator, and Mr. Kelly had always been the supreme exponent of the older Darbyite theology.
The Park Street leaders had no scruple about pushing their ignorant quarrel to a world-wide division. Mr. Stuart’s following was fairly considerable in England,
- ↑ These were by no means the only critics of the new heresiarch. One zealous Brother published a review of Mr. Stuart’s tract, Christian Standing and Condition, and professed to have examined “in a Bercean spirit” the original Scriptures. He exposed himself to the keen retort of his learned adversary that “an essential condition for acting in that spirit is, surely, a little acquaintance with the language upon which one is writing”.
