Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/329

 answer was, ‘I decline controversy with Mr. Grant’” —a refusal he might very likely have sustained by the plea that he and Mr. Grant were not in ecclesiastical intercommunion. Moreover, Mr. Raven distinctly said, in criticising an opponent, “Mr. G[ladwell] appears to me to be in great ignorance of the true moral character of Christ’s humanity. He did not get that character by being made of a woman, though that was the way by which He took man’s form, but Manhood in Him takes its character from what He ever was divinely. ‘The Word became flesh.’ He does not seem to me to have any idea of real heavenly humanity.”

Some of Mr. Raven’s followers, if not Mr. Raven himself, explicitly taught that Christ was man independently of the Incarnation; and the above extract from Mr. Raven’s own pen is unintelligible unless he means that Christ was not man of the substance of His mother, but that He derived from her only the outward form of a man. It is hard to distinguish this from the doctrine that He was man in semblance merely. The Brethren of an earlier generation would have been safer if, instead of yielding themselves to a passionate revulsion from Newton’s errors, they had listened to the warnings of such men as Craik and Tregelles, and had soberly set themselves to judge righteous judgment.

Associated with this error, there was a tendency among Mr. Raven’s disciples to deny that anything that linked Christ with the bodily infirmities of mankind, or even with its natural human sympathies, could be an “expression” of the Eternal Life. It was commonly said that “the Lord, as a babe in the manger, was not