Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/146

134 the law, and thus obtaining title to enter into life by His obedience. With whatever exaggerations and misconstructions Darby urged the charge, the charge he was urging was at last a true one. Newton was always very zealous in maintaining, in an extreme Calvinistic sense, the imputation of Adam’s guilt to all his posterity; and he had actually brought Christ beneath the imputation, as coming by His human birth under “Adam’s federal headship”. He further taught that Christ, as born into Israel when the nation was under the curse, came by this association under the curse in some sense Himself, and endured its penalties. At the same time he denied that the sufferings in which the Saviour was thus involved were his atoning sufferings. These he limited to the Cross. If he appealed to standard Protestant divines, his appeal was disallowed, on the ground that the divines in question had held that Christ suffered vicariously throughout his whole life; and that therein lay the vital difference between them and him.

All this is true. On the other hand, Newton repudiated in the strongest terms certain expressions that it was sought to fasten upon him, such as that Christ was “a child of wrath even as others,” or that He was “made a curse” before His death on the cross. And undoubtedly his accusers were guilty of a very great injustice in charging him with every heretical conclusion that they felt able to draw from his principles, without regard to the all-important question whether he had himself drawn or foreseen such conclusions. The most offensive tenets commonly charged upon Newton are much more often the unfair constructions, or at best the legitimate deductions, of his adversaries than tenets that he himself ever expressed.