Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/158

146

The italics are Newton’s.

This was a serious matter, for even by Deck’s admission the hymn had been “long used by godly brethren without consciousness of evil”. Accordingly, on the 14th of November, Deck brought up the rear in the procession of faggot-bearers by issuing a Confession of a Verbal Error in a Hymn. He had, he said, “meant by the epithet, ‘mortal flesh,’ … ‘capable of death,’” (which, by the by, is exactly what Newton took him to mean), and he had so used the term without having consulted Walker or Johnson, Ainsworth or Riddle, Liddell or Parkhurst, or the Greek Concordance. These authorities had somehow or other convicted him of a serious philological error; and this he confesses with a solemnity that is perhaps a little amusing. I have no wish to turn the conscientiousness of so excellent a man into ridicule, but it is hard to take the matter quite so seriously as he did. Personally, I regret the change he suggested—“Thou didst our flesh and blood partake”. It is a very weakening alteration, and the term mortal would not have been so much an open door to the errors that Newton had really taught, as a barrier against those quasi-Gnostic tendencies that from that time always haunted the outworks of the theology of Darbyism.

It is time to return to 1848. The closing act of the long tragedy was the Bath Conference. The conference was open only to such as repudiated the Newtonian