Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/176

 exceptional case of ignorance of what has passed) is opening the door now to the infection of the abominable evil from which at so much painful cost we have been delivered. It has been formally and deliberately admitted at Bethesda under the plea of not investigating it (itself a principle which refuses to watch against roots of bitterness), and really palliated. And if this be admitted by receiving persons from Bethesda, those doing so are morally identified with the evil, for the body so acting is corporately responsible for the evil they admit. If brethren think they can admit those who subvert the person and glory of Christ, and principles which have led to so much untruth and dishonesty, it is well they should say so, that those who cannot may know what to do. I only lay the matter before the consciences of brethren, urging it upon them by their fidelity to Christ. And I am clear in my conscience towards them. For my own part, I should neither go to Bethesda in its present state, nor while in that state go where persons from it were knowingly admitted. I do not wish to reason on it here, but lay it before brethren, and press it on their fidelity to Christ and their care of His beloved saints.

“Ever yours in His grace, “J. N. D.”

On Darby’s own showing he had now receded indefinitely far from the only platform where, as he once held, “the fulness of blessing” could be found,—a “meeting … framed to embrace all the children of God in the full basis of the Kingdom of the Son”. No ingenuity in proving that Müller and Craik had made themselves obnoxious to “the discipline of the house of God” could get rid of the plain fact that two Christian leaders, whom all their fellow Christians were at liberty to honour “for their work’s sake,” were to be cut off with their whole flock from the Table of the Lord on ecclesiastical grounds. Leeds gave the lie direct to Dublin as pointedly as ever Geneva gave it to Rome; and this is equally clear whether we agree with Leeds or with Dublin, or with neither.

Two points are specially noteworthy. In the first