Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/273

 placed—viz., enduring sufferings and smiting from the hand of God, not in atonement—is the same in both. A person voluntarily taking his place with an ‘exiled family’ may be the illustration of the one; and a mother voluntarily taking her place with ‘a son in prison’ may be the illustration of the other: but he must be a bold as well as a clever person, who will assert that the difference between the two constitutes the sole difference (in the case in question) between a ‘true and a false Christ!’

“So that it comes out at last, that when this difference has been calculated (if it can be calculated), the exact amount of the guilt of Bethesda will have been found. … This is the exact ground on which a warfare, the most vindictive and unsparing in character, has been carried on against a congregation of Christians, and against all who did not condemn them. … This difference alone has been the ground of endless calumnies—calumnies the most base and groundless, during the whole of that period. It has been, too, the occasion of the bitterest animosities, far and wide, between former friends and fellow-labourers in the gospel. It has occasioned in innumerable instances the severing of family ties, the sundering of the truest affections, and the sending many a faithful Christian broken-hearted to the grave! …

“‘I reject Bethesda as wickedness, as I ever did,’ writes the author of these doctrines, when re-asserting them in his preface lately to a second edition of his tract on The Sufferings of Christ.

“Such a sentiment (if it were only individual) deserves the severest reprobation on the part of all good men. But when it is uttered in order to give the tone of feeling and the ground of practical action to a whole religious community towards other Christians, the heart revolts from it with unutterable loathing.”

It is a relief to observe how fully the writer felt that he came himself within the scope of his own vehement denunciations. “Here,” he says, “I have to bow my head—lower it may be than all besides; still, I will not conceal the truth from myself or others that intolerant dogmas and immeasurable conceit have usurped to a large extent the place which was once occupied by a divine charity, and a living expression, however