Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/263

 harboured a doctrine that two of their very ablest and most respected teachers had to conclude (visibly in spite of themselves and at a great personal sacrifice) to be essentially the same thing. Darby’s personal influence availed to smother the question; and in no other conceivable way could it have been disposed of.

As to the minor question of what Darby taught, Dorman frankly acknowledged the difficulty. He speaks of “the whole difficulty of apprehending Mr. D.’s various statements; and the still greater difficulty of reconciling them when they are understood; all the contradictions that so abundantly meet you in dealing with this third point”. It will not be forgotten that the same difficulty had been alleged by many to attend the investigation of Newton’s opinions, although Newton was a far clearer writer than Darby. At the present day there are good men that imagine they can dispose of all charges against Darby’s tracts by reading them for themselves in his Collected Writings. Occasionally they do read them, and pronounce him innocent. Probably they would read Newton’s old tracts with equal satisfaction, if they read them without knowing that Newton had written them. Bellett read them with approval, and afterwards joined a party that had no rationale for its existence except its “testimony” against the tracts he had approved.

Darby’s followers had his authority for assuming that the essence of Newton’s error was that he taught that Christ suffered Divine wrath otherwise than atoningly. Hall, speaking of his correspondence with Darby in 1865, says, “My correspondence closed with the request that he would print some paper which I could shew, to the effect—that he did not hold, or mean to teach that our Lord was ever smitten by God’s hand, save atoningly, but that he thought such a statement ‘false and heretical’.