Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/181

 not take our flesh, but flesh and blood essentially different from ours.” He also said, “I have ever maintained that He was in all things made like unto His brethren, sin only excepted; that the flesh which He assumed was the flesh and blood of the children; that the physical or chemical properties of His body were the same as ours”.

The controversy had now entered on its final stage, and it is important to give it careful definition. The followers of Darby allowed it to be believed that men like Newton and Craik had taught that the ordinary means of destruction would have availed against the life of the Saviour, without respect to His own will in the matter. The truth is that Newton and Craik repeatedly, and in every variety of phrase, affirmed that the issues of life and death for Himself lay, under every possible physical condition, in His own will. They taught that on the impossible supposition of His body sustaining an injury that would in the case of another man be mortal, death would have ensued unless for miraculous intervention; but that this miraculous intervention lay within His own power as much as within the power of God the Father. For this the Darbyites have treated them for more than fifty years as heretics. I have been told by a very responsible informant that they affixed a further stigma on Craik for saying that Christ was taken into Egypt to escape the sword of Herod. They refused to see that the first Gospel was the original fount of this heresy. To Wigram there was “no reverence in talking of the physical or chemical properties of the Lord’s body”; though if there were irreverence in the discussion Wigram should have remembered that it was he that had raised it. He did not see that Craik was merely stating, in opposition to an