Page:Groves - Darbyism - Its Rise and Development and a Review of the Bethesda Question.djvu/76

 has been going on among the party of late, but they reveal a state of things in the body that is sad to contemplate, and such an advance in the downward path of false doctrine which, however, need cause no surprise to those who know whereunto allowed evil will grow. But God is speaking, and may we all hear. But a few years have passed away, and the unrighteous course pursued towards Mr. Newton has not been forgotten by the Holy God, and now He who makes those, who are wise in their own craftiness, fools, permits the accuser to stand where the accused stood, and allows Mr. Darby to occupy the place of the heretic. His own discipline, righteously carried out, would at once excommunicate not only him, but all those who maintain fellowship with him.

It is no uncommon thing for those guilty in any matter to attempt to conceal their own departures from truth and uprightness by an unusual zeal against the delinquencies of others, supposed or real, and so we find Mr. Darby while lying under the imputation of having put forth unsound statements, writing of Bethesda in the letter to Mr. Spurr already quoted from in page 63 as follows:—

“The evil at Bethesda is the most unprincipled admission of blasphemers against Christ, the coldest contempt for him I ever came across. All their efforts to examine and hide it only make the matter worse; all who do not abhor the whole system and all connexion with it, are already entangled and defiled. It is, I am satisfied, a mere net of Satan, though many christians may be entangled in it. Every question of churches and unity disappear before the question of Bethesda. It is a question of Christ. Faith governed my path as to it, but I have seen its fruits in America, the West Indies, France, Switzerland, and in a measure in India. I have seen it the spring and support everywhere of unprincipledness and evil, and all who were under its influence turned from uprightness and truth.”

The man who here accuses others of admitting blasphemers, is accused by his own followers of maintaining the very same blasphemies, which he falsely says that Bethesda has admitted; is himself defiled, and has himself been turned from uprightness and truth, by the shewing of his own friends! How easy to charge others with unprincipledness! and were it our purpose we could retort the charge accompanied with facts known to some. There is a wickedness in this style of writing that its parade of the name and honor of Christ only makes the more intensely evil; those who can lift the veil and read what lies written, not on the surface but underneath, loathe and abhor the unholy proximity with which the Most Holy is brought into connexion with the unhallowed, profane actings of pride; but there are those who are led by their feelings and whose judgment is blinded, and this