Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/243

 virtue of an “inherent” or “infused” righteousness in the believer. But even Dr. Reid rejects this preposterous suggestion. Justification by faith only has had no more strenuous upholders than the Brethren; indeed, their tendency was rather towards antinomianism than in the opposite direction.

It is true that the Brethren did not allow that a sinner is justified as being deemed to have kept the law that Christ kept for him, but maintained, on the contrary, that he is justified wholly as being associated by faith with Christ in the expiation of the breach of the law. They insisted that in Romans iv. 6-8 St. Paul identifies the imputation of righteousness with the non-imputation of sin; and they adhered to the literal rendering of Romans vi. 7,—“He that is dead is justified from sin”. To the objection that such a righteousness is merely “negative,” and that a “positive” righteousness must be sought in the imputation of Christ’s law-keeping to the believer, the most moderate of them would have replied that such a view of justification is not contemplated in Scripture, and that the believer in Christ is accepted before God “in all Christ’s acceptance”. Perhaps it would be right to say that they sought, not a merely legal, but rather a transcendental justification.

The common sense of evangelical people in general, while perhaps not interesting itself particularly in the dispute, has accepted the position of the Brethren as being solidly evangelical; and certainly any argument leading to a different conclusion would seem to involve a reductio ad absurdum. On the other hand, a good many theologians, of whom B. W. Newton was the most eminent, have laboured to fix on the Brethren the stigma of heresy in respect of these views. The Brethren