Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/182

 incipient Docetism, the real humanity of the body of Christ, “sent in the likeness of sinful flesh”. Indeed Wigram exposed his total want of the requisite theological knowledge by observing, “A resurrection body will be truly human, yet not subject to such things”; as if a resurrection body were flesh and blood (1 Cor. xv. 50), or else as if Christ did not take part of flesh and blood (Heb. ii. 14).

The Darbyites (and indeed the Open Brethren are not clear in the matter) should have considered what their position involved. If Christ’s body had not the physiological properties of our own, the statement that he died “the death of the Cross” becomes unmeaning. A year or two ago I heard an address from a Brother of the Open section, who actually taught that Christ did not die from crucifixion, but by a mere miraculous act. The good man was certainly not a responsible teacher, nor did I ever know a man of weight to set Holy Scripture on one side with quite so much definiteness and completeness; but I have heard much that glanced in the same direction. Newton had a sense of this peril, and in spite of his serious errors, he was quite entitled to feel in other particulars that he was standing in defence of the Catholic faith. And if in condemning Newton’s errors Craik were (as Wigram implies) slower and quieter than Müller or good Mr. Chapman of Barnstaple, the reason probably was that, being a far better theologian than either, he was able to take account of more tendencies than fell within their narrower range of observation; and judged that too absorbing a preoccupation with errors on the one hand was blinding the Brethren to the approach of errors just as serious on the other.

This feeling is perhaps reflected in the following extract from a letter that Craik wrote about this time:—