Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/155

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"“The real and full relation of Christ to man and to Israel was questioned by some and denied by others. I will give you a few instances—expressions which I know to have been used: it was said that ‘the Lord was man but not the Son of Adam, and that the name “Son of Man” was simply a title’: that ‘His humanity was something divine,’ that ‘it was a spiritual humanity’; that ‘He did not become man by birth, but in some other way’; that ‘made of a woman (Gal. 4), does not mean born of a woman’; that ‘He was not man of the substance of His mother, but that He was of the substance of God, His Father’; that ‘the expression in Hebrews vii., without father, without mother, without descent, related to our Lord as man, and that the genealogies both in Matthew and Luke were those of Joseph His reputed father, and not of Mary; so that the Scripture has designedly cut Him off from the family of man, and from that of Israel!!’ It has been repeatedly denied that our Lord was mortal, and when this word was explained as meaning capable of dying (not compelled to die), it has been said that He had no more capacity for dying than he had for sin.”"

It would be unjust to suppose that these speculations became an established part of the creed of Darbyism, but some of them undoubtedly exercised a prejudicial effect on a portion of its doctrinal system. This was especially true of the denial of the mortality of Christ’s flesh. Even to the present day it is sometimes suggested that Newton’s life-long heretical character is proved, if an assertion that the body of our Lord was mortal can be found in his later works. I had long supposed that the two parties misunderstood each other (very culpably, no doubt) as to the sense in which they severally employed the term “mortal”; but further investigation has shown me that such was not the case, at any rate at the first. Both Newton and his friends explained repeatedly that by “mortal” they intended only “capable of dying”; yet their opponents charged them with teaching “mortality” in a sense that they expressly disclaimed. Darby was not deceived. “Mortal,” he