Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/151

Rh confessions of error and sin. Their honesty is greatly to their credit, even if their state of mind were perhaps somewhat morbid. The very unconsciousness in which they had held doctrines involving consequences that they abhorred, tended to unnerve them in the presence of the clamour that rose around them; and they gave themselves up too eagerly perhaps to the luxury of self-accusation. It is no disparagement of these men, who all lived to enjoy high consideration in one section or another of the later Brethren, to say that they lacked the theological knowledge and acumen of their late chief, and not less his dauntless self-possession. In one sense the lack was a great advantage, for it enabled them to sever themselves from the whole system of speculation that was answerable for such sorry fruits; but it had the drawback that it made them less than just to themselves and their former associates, and exposed them to some extent to errors of a new kind.

On Monday, December 13, a meeting of the members of the church, convened by Soltau, was held. Several hundreds were present. Their “minds were painfully affected,” Tregelles tells us, “by the picture” that Soltau “drew of the Christ that (he said) he had preached for ten years”. The next morning one of his hearers said to him in Tregelles’s presence, “Oh! Mr. Soltau, if I had known that you had held such views as you expressed last night, I could not have remained in communion with you”. Soltau replied, “I never held these things in my conscience”. “But surely,” was the reply, “you gave us that idea last night!” Soltau answered, “I held what might have led to them”. (The italics are Tregelles’s.) “I cheerfully,” Dr. Tregelles proceeds, “bear my testimony to the difference between the actual teaching and preaching of Mr. Soltau, and