Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/269

 Darby to which he had contributed; and I learned, from private conversation with him, that he had broken entirely away from the principle of applying the whole of even the Messianic psalms to Christ. Nor was he alone in this, even amongst Darby’s devoted followers.

It was with a singularly bad grace that Darby continued to take the loftiest ground. With an evident reference to Dorman’s suggestion of an irenicum, he writes in the introduction to the edition of his Sufferings that appeared in 1867, “I reject Bethesda as wickedness, as I ever did. … When the blasphemous doctrine of Mr. Newton … came out, Bethesda deliberately sheltered and accredited it. … It is all one to me if it be a Baptist Church or anything else, it has been untrue to Christ, and no persuasion, with the help of God, will ever lead me a step nearer to it.” Now the words printed (by me) in italics are not merely untrue, but they simply are destitute of the remotest connexion with truth. If Darby did not know that he was writing a lie, it could only have been that the Bethesda frenzy had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. It was only in the previous year that he had written affectionately to the dying Craik, describing himself as “ecclesiastically separated from” him.

Darby had let loose a flood of odious speculation on the sufferings of the Saviour, which, whether it were heresy or not, was certainly sacrilege. This I prefer to pass over, but an article in the Bible Treasury for August, 1866, cannot be so lightly dismissed; for we read in it that Christ “entered into all the darkness and the wrath of God, but before He went out of the world He had passed through it all, and went out in perfect quiet. The