Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/272

 “you cannot get on … if you are living in secret sin”.

Mackintosh sufficiently refuted his own magniloquent phrases by the following instructive passage:—

"“Alas! alas I we often see men on their feet in our assemblies whom common sense, to say nothing of spirituality, would keep in their seats. We have often sat and gazed in astonishment at some whom we have heard attempting to minister in the assembly. We have often thought that the assembly has been looked upon by a certain class of ignorant men, fond of hearing themselves talk, as a sphere in which they might easily figure without the pains of school and college work.”"

A far weaker man than Dorman might well have given a good account of so feeble an antagonist. Much more important is the powerful and eloquent denunciation of Darbyism. Referring to the excommunication of the whole meeting at East Coker “for having received to the Lord’s Table persons who were judged to have implicated themselves with ‘Bethesda,’”—and treating the excommunication as typical of the whole system of Exclusive discipline,—he justly says:“I make no further comment upon it beyond saying that no legal fiction ever went half its length in absurdity; nor was any ground of ‘constructive treason,’ I believe, ever pleaded before the most flagitious court half as unrighteous as this plea of these brethren in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. The simplest statement of such a procedure is its deepest condemnation.”

The following statement, however startling, is not satire.

“Whoever gives attention to this subject can see at once the differences of the prophetic theories that gave rise in each instance to this exceptional ‘third class of the sufferings of Christ’; but he will at the same time see that the position in which Christ is