Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/118

106 Christ in the Sermon on the Mount was to a great extent transferred from the Church to the rather shadowy “remnant”. This tendency in turn linked itself with a growing repugnance to associating the idea of law in any shape with Christian standing—a repugnance that has widely given rise to a plausible (though not altogether just) charge of antinomianism against the Brethren.

Darby’s doctrine, exempting the Christian Church from the judgments that both parties agreed in anticipating, was connected with a general disposition to magnify unduly, as Newton thought, the special privileges of the Church as compared with the faithful of the older dispensation. Newton strenuously upheld that Abraham and the rest of the faithful of old would form in heaven an integral part of the Church, the Bride of Christ. Darby resisted this as a view derogatory from the Church’s special glory, and roused apparently against Newton a great enthusiasm on behalf of her invaded prerogatives. Newton answered with tremendous severity. “I believe this,” he said, “to be only another form in which one of the chief poisons of corrupted Christianity will, if the statement be persevered in, be disseminated. I believe it to be setting the Church in a position which pertains to Christ alone. I believe it, therefore, derogatory to the glory of Christ—and I feel assured, too, that the evil results of this have already appeared, and that many minds are beginning to make the Church, and not Christ, the centre around which their thoughts about Scripture, and their arrangements of Scripture revolve.” The closing suggestion was certainly not wanting in shrewdness, as any one subsequently familiar with Brethrenism could testify.

Turning now to ecclesiastical matters, the principal charges against Newton were clericalism and