Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/117

Rh “the times of the end”; and they therefore both maintained that a great and unprecedented persecution awaits the faithful immediately before the revelation of the Son of God in glory. But whereas Newton held that the faithful in question were simply those members of the Christian Church that would be on the earth at that time, Darby insisted that the whole Christian Church would be removed to heaven by a rapture unobserved by the world, shortly before the outbreak of the Tribulation. He accordingly found the victims of the Tribulation in “another semi-Christian or semi-Jewish body,” as Newton put it, who “will be called out as witnesses to God before the end of the age”. Now this dispute seemed of immense practical consequence to men who anticipated the immediate end of the age. Were they to warn their disciples of an impending trial, far more terrible than the worst that the blood-stained annals of the Church record, or were they to comfort them with the assurance of their total immunity from it? Nor was this all. It is clear that the doctrine of the secret rapture is inconsistent with the descriptions given of the Second Advent in the prophetic passages of the Gospels. Darby therefore taught that these descriptions were given to the apostles, not as the founders of the Christian Church, but as the representatives of a faithful remnant in the midst of apostate Judaism,—to which character the witnessing body at the time of the end (composed as it will be of semi-converted Jews) is to answer. This involved a different view of the Gospels from that which had previously obtained among Christians, and materially altered the relations of the Church to the principles declared by Christ during his earthly ministry. A tendency accordingly grew up to treat large portions of the Gospels as “Jewish”. In particular, the law of