Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/258



"“The link of connexion between your doctrine and Newton’s, you yourself have forged, so that you need not resort to ‘the devil’ to put the thought into my head. You have done it thus: You make your doctrine and his distinctive of a true and a false Christ. You take the worst features of his (not unjustly), and the best features of your own (not designedly), to shew it; and then you bring the whole force of this distinction to bear upon the severest course of discipline that I think was ever pursued in the church of God. … When it is made the sole basis of our differential communion, the sole ground of an unyielding and unsparing discipline, it becomes the conscience, it forces it, to look a little more deeply into the matter.”"

The letter ends with another expression of personal attachment, the transparent sincerity of which Darby can hardly have failed to recognise. “I don’t speak of what it costs me to write, but I do say that I would have spared you, at all costs but one, the trouble and pain of reading even a single line.”

This letter bore date March 14. In the hope that something would be done to set things right, Dorman waited for three months. He then found “that all was to be maintained”. “I learned,” he writes, “that nine of the leaders in London had in effect countersigned the whole doctrine, and had thus sent it on, accredited as far as their names could accredit it, for currency amongst those who acknowledged Mr. D.’s rule. This of course took away from me every possible court of appeal. … What could I longer have to do with a body whose leaders had bound upon them, as their distinguishing characteristic, the dogma of ‘a third class of Christ’s sufferings,’ for which their originator, in terms, acknowledges the New Testament affords no grounds?” These