A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 7

by William Blair Neatby

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VII
The Doctrinal Controversy at Plymouth

The early summer of 1847 afforded Darby the opportunity of dealing his already discomfited rival a crushing and decisive blow. A manuscript, purporting to be notes of a lecture by Newton on the Sixth Psalm, was lent to Mrs. J. L. Harris, whose husband, since the secession from Ebrington Street, had openly taken Darby’s side. Harris, on reading it, was shocked at the experiences it ascribed to Christ. He addressed to a staunch supporter of Darby’s, Mr. Christopher McAdam, a long letter containing very severe strictures on the manuscript, and gave his correspondent permission to print them. They were accordingly published in July, along with the incriminated manuscript. A very surprising circumstance—if anything in this controversy could surprise us—is that Harris did not apply to Newton to know whether he acknowledged the notes as containing a trustworthy report of his lecture. Harris thought that ‘after making every allowance for imperfect note-taking and misapprehension,” the doctrine was “so clearly defined” as to be “capable of being stated without misrepresenting its meaning”. George Müller was afterwards greatly blamed by the Darbyites for calling Harris’s act a “work of darkness”; but surely the term may be justified, however much we regret that so excellent a man as Harris should have shared, in an evil moment, in a policy that denied to Newton the common rights, I do not say of a Christian brother, but of a fellow-creature.

Newton, before making any reply to Harris’s tract, issued an authoritative account of his own views, under the title of Remarks on the Sufferings of the Lord Jesus. Darby immediately struck in with Observations on a Tract, etc. The tone is rude and unfeeling. He endeavours to fasten on Newton the full responsibility for the notes—a responsibility that Newton afterwards disowned. “The person from whom it came, residing in the house with him … stated that it was the substance of Mr. N.’s lecture correctly given. One can understand that he could not disown, and that he dared not own it.” Harris’s action is justified in the following remarkable passage:—

“A man manufactures poison and distributes it without avowing his name, and disseminates it assiduously in secret to destroy and ruin. … Is it not to be labelled, because the poisoner, in order to facilitate his mischief, will not do it? … Because he acts secretly and subtilly, am I to keep his secret, if, without any art or even seeking it, I have discovered it by the providence of God? No; I must publish plainly what it is, and who it is.”

The imputation was made in ignorance, for Newton had not yet disclaimed all knowledge of the manuscript, but the passage is a good example of the settled principle of its author,—to condemn Newton unheard on every possible count. After this, we do not expect Newton to receive any quarter in respect of his character as a Christian.

“The ignorance of some things proves there is no knowledge of God. … The first tract shews this in the things of God. The second still more (in the effort to save the writer’s credit)—entire indifference to the truth and glory of Christ. He declares his value for things, which not to value would discredit him; but fatal error is slurred and glossed over without a regard for the Christ it denies, and fatal ignorance of essential truth displayed. This I shall now shew, as a solemn warning to brethren, not to give heed to this seducing spirit.”

Darby was blinded by passionate prejudice. Whatever Newton’s speculative errors may have been, there is not, I am persuaded, a single paragraph in all his writings that would afford colourable ground for charging him with indifference to the glory of Christ. If Darby had deliberately sat down to devise the most malignant lie that could be told against his neighbour, he could scarcely have done worse. I have not the slightest doubt that Newton would at any moment have laid down his life rather than consciously derogate from the glory of Christ. So, I fully believe, would Darby; but this only completes the horror of the fratricidal strife. It is a signal illustration of how much harder it is to live by Christ’s teaching than to die for it.

Newton’s Observations in reply to Harris appeared on the 1st of September. A calm and dignified forbearance was their distinguishing feature.

“I never saw one line of these notes, nor indeed knew of their existence (though aware that such notes were often taken), until I heard that they were read and severely censured in a meeting convened in Exeter for the purpose. Shortly afterwards they were published, accompanied by the Strictures on which I now comment. This was done without any communication having been made to me, and therefore no opportunity was afforded me of avowing or disavowing any of the sentiments, or of rendering any explanation, or even giving any judgment as to the accuracy of the notes.”

He explains that the notes were not taken in shorthand, and could not give a full account, or even a fair impression, of what was said, and proceeds as follows:—

“Nor would I wish to cast on others blame, that I may myself perhaps equally or more deserve. That on this and many other occasions, I may have spoken unguardedly and without sufficient precision of thought and expression, and so have given just reason for the present chastisement, I willingly admit; and I desire to mark the rod and who has appointed it. At the same time I increasingly feel, after writing the present tract, that the doctrine intended to be conveyed will bear, as a whole, most rigid examination by the word of God.”

In the body of his tract Newton occasionally complains that the notes had misrepresented him, and that his critic had misrepresented the notes; but everything is said with the same total absence of bitterness.

Darby replied in A Plain Statement of the Doctrine on the Sufferings of our Blessed Lord. In the introduction he says, “The author, as is his known custom, after making statements which subvert the faith, seeks by modifying, by making statements which are entirely different appear to be the same, or substituting one for the other, smothering up what was said by expatiating on recognised truths, to confound the minds of the simple, and escape the discrediting detection of the doctrines he has taught.” Darby leaves “to others to express their feeling as to the hopeless dishonesty of the author”. In other respects also, “the author” was by Darby’s account in a very pitiable plight. “I have not the least doubt,” he gravely observes, “from circumstances I have heard lately, of the authenticity of which I have not the smallest question, that Mr. Newton received his prophetic system by direct inspiration from Satan, analogous to the Irvingite delusion.”

The gravamen of Darby’s charges is that Newton placed Christ under Divine wrath, apart from that which He endured vicariously in making atonement. By His position as a man and an Israelite, Christ incurred “wrath,”^[1] from which He delivered Himself by keeping the law, and thus obtaining title to enter into life by His obedience. With whatever exaggerations and misconstructions Darby urged the charge, the charge he was urging was at last a true one. Newton was always very zealous in maintaining, in an extreme Calvinistic sense, the imputation of Adam’s guilt to all his posterity; and he had actually brought Christ beneath the imputation, as coming by His human birth under “Adam’s federal headship”. He further taught that Christ, as born into Israel when the nation was under the curse, came by this association under the curse in some sense Himself, and endured its penalties. At the same time he denied that the sufferings in which the Saviour was thus involved were his atoning sufferings. These he limited to the Cross. If he appealed to standard Protestant divines, his appeal was disallowed, on the ground that the divines in question had held that Christ suffered vicariously throughout his whole life; and that therein lay the vital difference between them and him.

All this is true. On the other hand, Newton repudiated in the strongest terms certain expressions that it was sought to fasten upon him, such as that Christ was “a child of wrath even as others,” or that He was “made a curse” before His death on the cross. And undoubtedly his accusers were guilty of a very great injustice in charging him with every heretical conclusion that they felt able to draw from his principles, without regard to the all-important question whether he had himself drawn or foreseen such conclusions. The most offensive tenets commonly charged upon Newton are much more often the unfair constructions, or at best the legitimate deductions, of his adversaries than tenets that he himself ever expressed.

It is of the utmost consequence that Newton from first to last with unfaltering voice affirmed the catholic doctrine of the Person of the Saviour. Christ was to him very God of very God, yet truly man, free from all taint cleaving to fallen nature, having no sin, original or otherwise. Newton never remotely hinted even the abstract peccability of Christ, and the analogy of his system to Irvingism was only fanciful; and when his accusers suggested an affinity to Arianism or Socinianism, they might just as well have suggested an affinity to Deism. It is no less important that Newton constantly affirmed that Christ as man, in the days of His flesh, was always perfectly well-pleasing to God. Suppose that in this he were inconsistent, are we to give full weight (and often much more than full weight) to every exceptionable statement, while we explain his orthodoxies as deliberately designed only to give currency to his errors ? This exactly describes Darby’s conduct, and remains a deep blot on his reputation.

On the 26th of November, Newton issued A Statement and Acknowledgment respecting certain Doctrinal Errors. In this he withdrew, unreservedly, and with many penitential expressions, the doctrine that Christ was born under the “federal headship of Adam”. He claimed indeed the benefit of “the limitations by which this doctrine was guarded” in his own mind and teaching; but he acknowledged that many of the injurious “deductions,” though he had not drawn them, had yet been legitimately drawn. “I wish,” he says, “explicitly to state that I do not ascribe any of Christ’s living experiences to the imputation of Adam’s guilt, nor ought I to have made any statements or used any words which did so ascribe any of His sufferings to anything imputed to Him; nor yet that He had by keeping the law or by anything else to deliver Himself from such imputation or its consequences.”

The abjuration was full and evidently sincere, but it was felt by most of the Brethren to be only partial, and not to cover the special error of the recent tracts. This error had consisted in attributing non-atoning judicial suffering to our Lord as a member of the nation of Israel. Not that Newton persisted in this view, for, on the contrary, he withdrew both the incriminated tracts “for reconsideration”. Darby, however, without awaiting the results of the reconsideration, hastened to issue a Notice of the Statement, in which he set it aside as worthless. He was not without a well-grounded apprehension that he would be “considered relentless,” but he thought “of the interest of the Church of God in it, and even of Mr. Newton’s own”. The charity of the pamphlet how- ever is not such as to constitute Newton greatly his critic’s debtor.

It may be well to anticipate here the issue of the controversy as it relates to Mr. Newton personally. The withdrawn tracts were never reissued, but, on the other hand, their teaching was never (so far as I can ascertain) formally repudiated by their author. In 1848 he issued A Letter on Subjects connected with the Lord’s Humanity, which appeared both to Darby and to George Müller to reaffirm the objectionable doctrine in its essence, though with great modification of terms. Mr. Newton’s adherents claim that the ripe results of his reconsideration are contained in a pamphlet published in 1858, under the title of Christ our Suffering Surety. That Mr. Newton’s ultimate position was one of ultra-orthodoxy is of course notorious,^[2] but it is highly unfortunate that he never explicitly declared his attitude towards the doctrine of the suppressed tracts. In the end he substituted for it a different doctrine, and left the matter there. This may fairly be taken to imply retractation, but to exclude confession; and the inference is that Newton did not consider further confession called for,—or, to put it otherwise, that he deemed that his error had involved infirmity, rather than sin.

The explanation of this is surely very simple. The essence of the error of the two tracts had been the attribution to Christ of certain penal sufferings that were yet not vicarious and atoning. Newton’s ultimate position was that Christ actually endured such sufferings, but endured them vicariously and atoningly. This was of course a view that he was able to buttress abundantly by quotations from orthodox Protestant divines; nor did his adversaries, greatly as they disliked it, deny that it was compatible with essential orthodoxy. Now, it doubtless appeared to Newton that the position he had taken up in the two tracts merely marked a stage in the process by which his mind passed to the acknowledgment of a vicarious and atoning character in Christ’s sufferings in life. Indeed, there can be little doubt that his mind was taking this direction from 1835 at the latest. Under these circumstances it is likely that he thought it sufficient to formally abandon the position that Christ’s vicarious sufferings were confined to the Cross. As early as July, 1848, he was teaching that all Christ’s “living sufferings” were vicarious in the sense of being endured “exclusively on behalf of others”.^[3] Afterwards he went further, and affirmed vicariousness in the full sense of substitution. It may be said therefore that he did not return to orthodoxy by a retreat, but rather advanced to it, emerging, as it were, on the opposite bank of the stream of error.

Newton’s colleagues in the oversight of the church in Ebrington Street were not moving in any such direction; and consequently the recognition of their error was followed by a wholly different line of conduct.

On the 8th of December Newton left Plymouth for good, and took up his residence in London. He went all unaware of the imminent secession of three of the four men that had until that time so steadily supported him; their defection therefore cannot have influenced his movements. Possibly he judged it best for the peace of the church at Ebrington Street that he should withdraw; but a far stronger reason must doubtless be sought in his growing antipathy to every form of Brethrenism. In London he established a church in total isolation from every ecclesiastical body. So far from there being any recognition of liberty of ministry, Newton was the sole speaker; and if he were compelled to be absent, he would allow of no substitute, unless Dr. Tregelles were available. In the absence of both, a sermon of Newton’s was read.^[4] From this time therefore we must reckon him as wholly dissociated from Brethrenism, although he continued to attend his former meeting, and to take part in the ministry, when he happened to be visiting in Plymouth.

Scarcely had Newton departed when Soltau, Batten and William Dyer surrendered at discretion. By the close of the year they had all withdrawn from the Ebrington Street Church, and had published lengthy confessions of error and sin. Their honesty is greatly to their credit, even if their state of mind were perhaps somewhat morbid. The very unconsciousness in which they had held doctrines involving consequences that they abhorred, tended to unnerve them in the presence of the clamour that rose around them; and they gave themselves up too eagerly perhaps to the luxury of self-accusation. It is no disparagement of these men, who all lived to enjoy high consideration in one section or another of the later Brethren, to say that they lacked the theological knowledge and acumen of their late chief, and not less his dauntless self-possession. In one sense the lack was a great advantage, for it enabled them to sever themselves from the whole system of speculation that was answerable for such sorry fruits; but it had the drawback that it made them less than just to themselves and their former associates, and exposed them to some extent to errors of a new kind.

On Monday, December 13, a meeting of the members of the church, convened by Soltau, was held. Several hundreds were present. Their “minds were painfully affected,” Tregelles tells us, “by the picture” that Soltau “drew of the Christ that (he said) he had preached for ten years”. The next morning one of his hearers said to him in Tregelles’s presence, “Oh! Mr. Soltau, if I had known that you had held such views as you expressed last night, I could not have remained in communion with you”. Soltau replied, “I never held these things in my conscience”. “But surely,” was the reply, “you gave us that idea last night!” Soltau answered, “I held what might have led to them” . (The italics are Tregelles’s.) “I cheerfully,” Dr. Tregelles proceeds, “bear my testimony to the difference between the actual teaching and preaching of Mr. Soltau, and what, under great excitement, he represented it at the meeting in question as having been; all those whom he left can unite with me fully in this testimony.”

This general agitation must be borne in mind in examining the various “confessions”. The penitent teachers all affirm that they had not contemplated the consequences of their principles, while they justly blame themselves for want of the care due in so sacred an enquiry; yet their language is strong enough to have met the occasion if they had been responsible for all that their adversaries sought to fasten on them. But there is no confession whatever of moral obliquity in any one of the three. Darby had just written, “I can only say, not speaking now of Mr. Newton, but of Messrs. Dyer, Soltau, Clulow, and Batten, that I have never met with such wretched trickery, or such bold untruth, as in the printed documents they have circulated.”^[5] But even in the depths of their humiliation, Dyer, Soltau and Batten have nothing to say that gives countenance to this accusation.

To some extent they justified Darby’s charges of “clericalism” and “sectarianism”; and they all plead guilty to party spirit, and to having, in excessive measure, subordinated other duties to the maintenance of the peculiar system that they identified with “the truth”. Dyer treats the subject the most fully.

“This led many to charge ‘clericalism,’ and practically there was something which warranted this charge. Not, I think, from any effort to elevate those who ministered in the word, as such, (which, I suppose, would properly be ‘clericalism’) but from the way in which the ministry of individuals was acted on by the aiming at a special object. … Exclusiveness has thus been pro- duced both as to persons and doctrine. …

“But I must yet further say, that when I speak of a position which has been assumed, I do not mean that which was held by the gathering, as a congregation of saints—but a position which has been practically slidden into by those most active and influential in that gathering. …

“The name of the Lord Jesus was the alone gathering point and foundation; the sovereign will of Christ, the Church’s glorified and blessed Head, and the energy and guidance of the present Spirit, the acknowledged source and power of all ministry. But still, within all this, and often practically more powerful than it all, an influence was felt, and a course pursued, which I now see was sectarian and intolerant.”

On the 10th of January, 1848, a reply to parts of these Confessions appeared under the title of A Statement from Christians Assembling in the Name of the Lord, in Ebrington Street, Plymouth. It was probably drawn up under Tregelles’s guidance, and is certainly a sufficient guarantee of the substantial orthodoxy of the remnant of the Ebrington Street Church. To the calmness and patience of Newton is added a certain tenderness of charity singularly attractive in men that had endured the stormy vicissitudes of the previous three years. It will scarcely excite surprise that they allege that the great majority amongst them were wholly ignorant of the very existence of the specified errors; but it is a very important circumstance in view of the subsequent developments of disciplinary operations against them.

The doctrinal statements are simple and explicit. “We desire to disclaim any and every statement of doctrine which would impute the guilt of Adam, or the curse of the broken law, to the Lord Jesus,—either by federal Headship in Adam, or by birth.” “With regard to the curse of the broken law attaching to the Lord Jesus by birth, we believe that this was not held by any amongst us; whatever indefinite thoughts any individuals may have entertained or do entertain on the subject of His connexion with Israel.” But the most significant statements are those that relate to the question of the mortality of Christ’s body. This question was rapidly becoming paramount over the whole field of the controversy, and we shall often encounter it again. The present statement of belief on the subject should be carefully observed by all who wish to form a complete opinion on the great disruption of Brethrenism. “He thus took a human body which was mortal, by which we mean a body capable of dying. … He possessed life essentially in Himself. He was the Holy One of God. He had also a claim to live as the one who in all things obeyed the will of God … and besides, he could not die, except according to God’s purpose as the sacrifice.”^[6]

In taking up this ground, the Ebrington Street congregation was not merely standing on the defensive. Some of their adversaries, taking fright at doctrines that they judged to glance in an Arian direction, were finding refuge in a kind of Gnostic denial of the true manhood of Christ. The following statement by Tregelles may be taken as minutely accurate, not only because of his well-known remarkable memory, but also because there is plenty of corroborative evidence. He expressly states that several of the doctrines he quotes were put forth by men reputed to be teachers.

“The real and full relation of Christ to man and to Israel was questioned by some and denied by others. I will give you a few instances—expressions which I know to have been used: it was said that ‘the Lord was man but not the Son of Adam, and that the name “Son of Man” was simply a title’: that ‘His humanity was something divine,’ that ‘it was a spiritual humanity’; that ‘He did not become man by birth, but in some other way’; that ‘made of a woman (Gal. 4), does not mean born of a woman’; that ‘He was not man of the substance of His mother, but that He was of the substance of God, His Father’; that ‘the expression in Hebrews vii., without father, without mother, without descent, related to our Lord as man, and that the genealogies both in Matthew and Luke were those of Joseph His reputed father, and not of Mary; so that the Scripture has designedly cut Him off from the family of man, and from that of Israel!!’ It has been repeatedly denied that our Lord was mortal, and when this word was explained as meaning capable of dying (not compelled to die), it has been said that He had no more capacity for dying than he had for sin.”

It would be unjust to suppose that these speculations became an established part of the creed of Darbyism, but some of them undoubtedly exercised a prejudicial effect on a portion of its doctrinal system. This was especially true of the denial of the mortality of Christ’s flesh. Even to the present day it is sometimes suggested that Newton’s life-long heretical character is proved, if an assertion that the body of our Lord was mortal can be found in his later works. I had long supposed that the two parties misunderstood each other (very culpably, no doubt) as to the sense in which they severally employed the term “mortal”; but further investigation has shown me that such was not the case, at any rate at the first. Both Newton and his friends explained repeatedly that by “mortal” they intended only “capable of dying”; yet their opponents charged them with teaching “mortality” in a sense that they expressly disclaimed. Darby was not deceived. “Mortal,” he says, “is a word used in two senses—being capable of dying, and being actually subject to death as a necessity. Now of course Christ was capable of dying, or he could not die. But the doctrine taught here is that he was mortal as we are.” This was written before the explicit declarations to the contrary (so far at I have observed) were made; but, when made, they availed nothing to mitigate the fury of the persecution. If Darby himself remained unentangled in the ambiguity he had so plainly exposed, it is a great pity that he allowed himself to profit by the ignorant zeal of his followers.

Of this zeal a curious example occurred two or three years later. Newton had written in August, 1850, A Letter to a Friend concerning a Tract recently published in Cork. In this letter he was supposed to have reiterated his heresies with regard to the mortality of Christ. I propose to give the reader the means of judging of the positions that the two parties severally occupied. Newton writes as follows:—

“I am thankful to be able to say, that I hold (and so does Bishop Pearson) that Christ, though he did assume a mortal body, was under no necessity of death as we—that he was ever in moral nearness to God, not less so on earth than when He was in Heaven—that He was ever the object of the Father’s complacency, delight, and love,—that whether in the cradle, or in life, or on the Cross, He was alike morally perfect, as perfect as He now is in Heaven—perfect in all His inward experiences—perfect in all His outward ways, and therefore in both, unlike other men—that he never was as those for whom and with whom He suffered—that all His sufferings were as the Redeemer—all on behalf of others, and for their salvation. The doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed—the Nicene Creed—and the Athanasian Creed, I gladly accept, as well as the first seventeen articles of the Church of England, as containing the truths for which I would desire to live and die.”

This was not written till 1850; but Newton quotes from his Letter on the Lord’s Humanity, published two years earlier. Its language is of the utmost importance, for Newton’s alleged heresy in this particular served in after years as the principal buttress of the vast disciplinary system of Darbyism.

“The Lord Jesus was fore-ordained as the sacrifice before all worlds, and therefore it was impossible for Him to die except as the sacrifice; but with the very object of dying as the sacrifice, He was pleased voluntarily to assume a body which, as regarded its natural or physical condition, was as much exposed to death, if smitten by the sword, or deprived of necessary nutriment, as ours would be.

“Yet it was as impossible for Christ to die in consequence of anything to which he might be thus exposed, as for God to be plucked from the Throne of His government. If all nutriment had been withdrawn from Him from His birth, yet God, His Father, would have sustained Him by perpetual miracle, or He would have so sustained Himself, rather than that death should have fallen, in any way, except substitutionary—on the One who deserved only blessing and life.”

In the letter of 1850, not content with citing such writers as Pearson and Bengel, Newton actually called to his aid one of the leading supporters of the attack on the doctrine of his two tracts. This was James G. Deck, widely and honourably known as a hymn-writer far beyond the limits of his own sect. This truly excellent man, who was born in 1802, had held a commission in the army, and had had some pleasant intercourse with Norris Groves abroad. At this time he had long since resigned his commission, and was exercising his ministry at Weymouth. About 1837 he had published his well-known hymn beginning, “Lord Jesus, are we one with Thee?” This hymn had found its way into several collections in use amongst the Brethren. Newton appealed to the second verse:—

“Such was Thy grace that for our sake
Thou didst from heaven come down;
Our mortal flesh and blood partake;
In all our misery one.”

The italics are Newton’s.

This was a serious matter, for even by Deck’s admission the hymn had been “long used by godly brethren without consciousness of evil”.^[7] Accordingly, on the 14th of November, Deck brought up the rear in the procession of faggot-bearers by issuing a Confession of a Verbal Error in a Hymn. He had, he said, “meant by the epithet, ‘mortal flesh,’ … ‘capable of death,’” (which, by the by, is exactly what Newton took him to mean), and he had so used the term without having consulted Walker or Johnson, Ainsworth or Riddle, Liddell or Parkhurst, or the Greek Concordance. These authorities had somehow or other convicted him of a serious philological error; and this he confesses with a solemnity that is perhaps a little amusing. I have no wish to turn the conscientiousness of so excellent a man into ridicule, but it is hard to take the matter quite so seriously as he did. Personally, I regret the change he suggested—“Thou didst our flesh and blood partake”. It is a very weakening alteration, and the term mortal would not have been so much an open door to the errors that Newton had really taught, as a barrier against those quasi-Gnostic tendencies that from that time always haunted the outworks of the theology of Darbyism.

It is time to return to 1848. The closing act of the long tragedy was the Bath Conference. The conference was open only to such as repudiated the Newtonian errors. I am indebted to the courtesy of a venerable Brother, who was present at the proceedings, for the following graphic description. I have great confidence in giving currency to his narrative. The writer was closely associated with many of the leaders in this long strife, and was no partisan of either Darby or Newton.

“The meeting at Bath, May 10, 1848, was held for the purpose of again recognising as faithful fellow-servants the brethren who had renounced Mr. Newton’s doctrines, and also to give these brethren an opportunity of complaining of some statements affecting them personally. …

“I think I remember Mr. Harris at the Bath meeting, and as being accorded the place of president, in so far as any such function was recognised.^[8] He ever was, as no other, universally respected amongst the Brethren. … The meeting was mostly taken up with grievances of the Plymouth brethren, in which Mr. William Dyer took an animated part. … Mr. Darby had some basis of fact to give for everything he had said, and his free reference to an evil power may be understood by Mr. Dyer’s saying that he objected to ‘the devil being made the pack-horse’. Mr. Darby frequently added to his explanations that he might have done better. It was afterwards very aptly remarked that he never once said that he ought to have done better. Mr. Chapman had a turn with him too, thinking he was precipitate in making the separation. ‘I waited six weeks.’ ‘Dear brother, if it had been at Barnstaple, we should have waited six years!’ was the reply. I think it was the only time that I well remember seeing Mr. Dorman. He was, in his virile, incisive way, the most strenuous supporter of Mr. Darby’s action. I remember little of what was said by Mr. [Captain] Hall, or Mr. Wigram, but Lord Congleton, who had a case of his own, I shall never forget. Mr. Bellett sat between him and Sir Edward Denny, and with his arm round the latter. Lord Congleton, addressing Mr. Darby with characteristic frankness, was saying, ‘that is to say—that—that—if you were to tell me anything—I wouldn’t believe you’. … Lord Congleton was the most utterly truthful man, I think I ever met, and he could not tolerate untruth in others. … Sir A. Campbell gave his judgment in a few grave and weighty words, quoting as his verdict, ‘Dead flies make the ointment of the apothecary to stink; so doth a little folly one who is in high reputation for wisdom and honour’. During an interval between the meetings he remained in the room, with his legs resting on one of the benches, looking desolate and dejected.”

This account of the conference seriously qualifies the version that has long been current among the Darbyites. William Trotter of York, an ex-Methodist minister, is more highly spoken of by every one that knew him than almost any other Plymouth Brother; and his untimely death, while he was yet under fifty, was felt to be a heavy loss of the kind that Christians can least afford. Such a man is entitled to a charitable judgment if, under the impression that the ark of God was imperilled, he was betrayed into an unworthy action in its defence. His Whole Case of Plymouth and Bethesda vies with the Narrative of Facts itself in advertising its own untrustworthiness. With regard to the Bath meeting, Trotter states that “the brethren who had been rescued from the doctrinal errors of Mr. N. … made further confession, full and ample, as to their implication in the charges made against the untruthful, immoral system of Ebrington Street. They acknowledged that these charges were just. One, at least, of those who signed their names to ‘the Plymouth Documents’ … confessed that these documents were justly chargeable with trickery and falsehood.” Trotter, who was not present, claims Robert Howard of Tottenham as his informant. He may have misunderstood Howard, but in any case his statement is self-stultifying, and no authentication can help it greatly. He speaks of “further” confession, but I can find no trace of any made previously; and in saying “one at least,” what did he intend his readers to infer as to the others?

It is not wonderful that the adherents of Darby should have caught at any chance of accrediting his extraordinary Narrative. Trotter makes another effort. Not only Howard, but also Andrew Jukes (at that time associated with the Brethren), assured him that “every endeavour to shake” the testimony of Darby’s pamphlets recoiled “on the heads of those who made them”—to wit, of such men as Lord Congleton, and the late Robert Nelson, then of Edinburgh.

I have not assumed that the pamphlets in question are deliberately untruthful; but as for their reliability, let any one read them^[9] and judge for himself. With regard to the effect said to have been produced at the Bath meeting on the minds of Howard and Jukes, it is impossible to attach any weight to it. To pit Lord Congleton against Mr. Darby in a public discussion, without a very strong chairman, was no more likely a way to elicit the truth than any other form of the time-honoured method of single combat.

From this time Newton ceased to take any active part in the history of the Brethren. He survived his separation from them by more than fifty years, standing, until his recent death, at the head of a very small but very devoted band of disciples. His doctrinal errors in the period preceding the separation are not to be denied; but certain circumstances must be mentioned that more or less extenuate his responsibility, and that also shed light on the early doctrinal conceptions of the Brethren in general.

In the first place, Newton’s greatest error, of which he made such ample confession, had been taught by him in a tract that he printed in 1835, and it had circulated extensively in that form amongst the Brethren for nearly twelve years without challenge.^[10] Moreover, as for the “two tracts,” Bellett, who was not merely one of the best, but also one of the ablest men in the whole community, “acknowledged that he saw nothing wrong in them till it was pointed out to him”; and “subsequently, when the Letter on Subjects Connected with the Lord’s Humanity appeared… he expressed his approbation of it, and wrote a letter signifying his satisfaction with it”. Nor was Bellett alone in “his slowness in this respect”.^[11] Indeed Darby must have had a share in this slowness, for Newton had evidently taught the worst of his doctrines with no thought of disguise; and yet freely (and, it must be added, malevolently) as all Newton’s doings and sayings had long been canvassed, heterodoxy in fundamental points was never attributed to him until an unauthorised, and apparently highly exaggerated report of one of his lectures came into Harris’s hands. Nor had Darby’s own expressions been felicitous, to say the least. One of Newton’s adherents, who, under the pseudonym of Vindex, wrote a vigorous and caustic pamphlet against Darby and his party, mentions a curious misunderstanding that arose out of a footnote in the earlier of the “two tracts”. Newton had quoted Darby, without naming him, to the effect that Christ (apparently in the Wilderness of the Temptation) “could not take the place of Adam in the midst of all that which would have sustained His soul; it is the place rather of Cain; the place of estrangement from God, in the absence of all sustaining power from without”. Vindex tells us that some people deemed this “the worst thing in the (so-called) Heretical Remarks,” until it transpired that it was a quotation from Darby, when they discovered that “it meant something ‘quite different’”. Darby himself allowed that “the expression about Cain was unfortunate,” but none the less affirmed in his Observations that the quotation of his words by Newton showed “the way in which statements of truth are made to sanction the teaching of error”. Most significant of all is it that, some ten years later, Darby proved totally unable to keep clear of errors that, in the judgment of several of the foremost of his own adherents, were essentially the errors charged against Newton. Most of the early Brethren seem to have chafed at the self-restraint of the four Gospels, and to have been led to seek in the Psalms for personal experiences of Christ that are unrecorded and unsuggested elsewhere. Under these circumstances the wonder is that things were no worse.

Newton’s later attitude towards his former associates was one of intense and somewhat extravagant antagonism. He thought their theology quite as heretical as they thought his. But he is entitled throughout to the credit he claimed for himself in the hapless “letter to Clulow”; his “hostility is against a system, not against individuals”.^[12] The execrations of his adversaries pursued him to his distant grave, but not once in half a century did they avail to provoke retaliation. His name to this day is regarded with absolute loathing by thousands who have never troubled to read a single tract of all that he has written; and there are certainly hundreds, scarcely a whit better informed, who have made it one of their chief objects to perpetuate the frantic prejudice. But none of the leaders of the campaign of calumny, and none of their dupes, have ever, so far as I can learn from an extensive enquiry, been assailed by Newton with one angry word of a personal character, or with one uncharitable imputation. With Newton’s ecclesiastical course I have no sympathy. He contracted the limits of orthodoxy till there can scarcely have been five hundred sound Christians in the world, and he taught principles of church-fellowship that were actually narrower than those of Darby himself. On these points I have myself spoken strongly in the past; if I refer to them now, it is to lend weight to the testimony that I gladly bear to him. As I know not where to turn for a parallel to usage so cruel and unrighteous as that from which Newton suffered, so I hardly know better where to turn to match such extraordinary forbearance as he displayed. If theological animosity could still restrain me from recognising the grace of God in his conduct, I should feel that words were poor to express my admiration either of the dignity with which his path was chosen, or of the steadfastness of self-control with which it was pursued through all its bitter length. It seems to me that Newton ignored, all unwittingly, some of the most sacred principles of Holy Scripture; but the light of one text at least shone steadily on his path. When he was reviled, he reviled not again; when he was persecuted, he threatened not: but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously.

The provocation he received cannot be summarily illustrated. An example or two, taken from the writings of the very best of his opponents, may afford some indication of its nature. The following quotation is from Trotter’s Whole Case. Let the reader judge if a more outrageous violation of every principle of justice (one is ashamed to mention charity) has been perpetrated within his experience.

“First of all, notes of a lecture appear, in which the doctrine flows out freely from the author’s lips without reserve and without disguise. Finding the indignation excited by it so very great, he publishes one tract expository of his views, more carefully worded than the lecture, but still plain enough; and another, vindicating those views against the charges of his opponents. Finding his own friends ready to desert him, he confesses his error on one point, and withdraws the tracts for re-consideration. The fruit of this re-consideration is a re-publication of the doctrine; but after months of study bestowed on the subject, who can wonder that the form in which it appears is made as unobjectionable as possible? An acute mind, spending months of study on the stating of the obnoxious doctrine in as harmless and apparently unobjectionable terms as possible, while it is still maintained and asserted as firmly as ever, might be expected to produce just such a tract as this of Mr. N.’s. But who would trust it? Does he hold the doctrines he did when he wrote his former tracts? Yes, unquestionably. Then let us look to them to know what those doctrines are; or rather to the notes of his lecture prior to any of them, in which, without a thought of reservation or disguise, he speaks out what was in his soul.”

In other words, the tract in which Newton had embodied the results of his reconsideration gave his persecutors too little handle. It was therefore necessary for them to satisfy themselves at all costs that they were justified in still using against him the tracts that he had suppressed, and the unauthorised lecture-notes that he had disowned; as, otherwise, the prosecution seemed likely to collapse. For the rest, Newton’s conduct was invariably to be explained on the assumption that he always acted in the meanest and falsest spirit. Yet this paragraph is not the work of a man who had earned a cheap reputation by a sanctimonious deportment; but of one that had cheerfully sacrificed everything to his principles, and who united to a lofty disinterestedness a gracious benignity that won all hearts. I can well believe that I have rarely read a paragraph written by a better man; but I am certain that I have rarely read a worse paragraph. How is it to be explained ? I have no admiration for Darby’s resort to the diabolus e machina; but it is difficult to resist the feeling that some malignant spell was cast over the mind of such a man, and over the minds of others like him, to make them so far forget, in dealing with Newton, all those principles of humanity and uprightness which they illustriously exemplified in the other relations of life. If Christian men would only lay aside their most superfluous anxieties for the ark of God, the Church would surely be saved nine-tenths of its miseries and scandals.

Some thirty years later, a man as good as Trotter published the following sentence: “Mr. Newton and his friends, in attempting to meet the charges which were brought against them, acted in so unscriptural and untruthful a manner, as to decide many of their former friends to separate from them.” The statement, though moderate from the pen of an adherent of Darby’s, was of course libellous; but it was uttered in a perfect, if in a somewhat inglorious security. It was impossible to put too great a strain on Newton’s magnanimous forbearance.

We cannot choose but admire the rigid adherence to the principle that forbade all appeal to a secular tribunal. This constancy was not peculiar to Newton. Probably all his leading opponents would have done just the same in his place. It did not occur to them that St. Paul’s prohibition assumed that there was an appeal within the Church to a court whose decision would be final. The Brethren made no effort to constitute such a court; and that being the case it becomes a question whether an appeal to secular law would not have been the lesser of two undoubted evils. It is at all events pretty certain that if Newton had sent Darby a lawyer’s letter on the first publication of the charges of lying, there would have been an end of the whole matter, and the Church of Christ would have been saved a very great scandal.

1. Not “damnatory” wrath, but apparently disciplinary. Cf. Newton’s Observations, especially section ii., and page 48.
2. Some attempts on the part of Exclusive Brethren to prove the contrary are simply not worth noticing.
3. This was a change, not in Newton’s opinions, but in his use of the term vicarious.
4. This I heard from a constant attendant, but I am not prepared to affirm that it holds good either absolutely, or yet for the entire period of his London ministry. It suffices in any case to show that the practice of the church was at the utmost possible remove from anything resembling Brethrenism.
5. Notice of Statement and Acknowledgment, p. 9.
6. This Statement from Ebrington Street was very ill received by some of the Darbyites. The indefatigable Wigram rushed into the fray. It is often hard to distinguish between Wigram’s state of mind and pure hallucination. “What,” he asks, “is the obligation as to the Table at Ebrington Street? ‘Touch not the unclean thing’ is, I am bold to say, the word of the Spirit of the Lord to every humble inquirer. Rather would I go to the table of the Socinians or of the Unitarians than to it.” Quoted by J. E. Howard in A caution against the Darbyites, p. 36. The italics are not mine; I do not know whether they are Wigram’s or Howard’s.
7. This is not true of all the Brethren. Some, especially in Ireland, had objected. Darby could not, at any rate at that time, have been of the number, unless he objected merely on the score of ambiguity.
8. This would not be very far.
9. Collected Writings, Eccl., vol. iv.
10. An effort was made to dispute this fact, which however was fully established in the end. Darby had apparently not met with the tract.
11. The quotations are from The Basis of Peace, issued in 1871 by a Brother (Mr. Bewley) styling himself Philadelphos. The tract is an Irenicum addressed by an “Open” Brother, who had once been “Exclusive,” to his former associates. He had passed through the great crisis of 1848, and had written against “Bethesda” on the occasion of the disruption recorded in my next chapter. After changing his party he made diligent efforts to extenuate the differences between the two. He was thus a particularly well-informed writer.
12. I desire to withdraw, as susceptible of a very unjust construction, a statement I made in the British Weekly for December 28, 1900. I then wrote: “When he [Newton] became the object of a very fierce, and it is to be feared (at least in Darby’s case) rather unscrupulous persecution, he seems to have conducted himself with a great deal of the meekness of wisdom. Subsequently he abandoned the distinctive principles of Brethrenism, and was accustomed to refer to his former associates with a somewhat unnecessary vehemence of disapprobation.” I believe I was at that time unable to imagine that Newton could have reprobated the theological system of the Brethren so vehemently, if personal pique had not been behind his denunciations; and I partially interpreted what I still consider his extravagant language as an expression of personal resentment. I now believe, after the much fuller investigation called for by my present undertaking, that I did him a great injustice; and as I consider Newton one of the worst-used men of the last century, so he is one of the last to whom I would willingly be unfair. Newton, even more than Darby, if possible, seems really to have regarded the interests of the Church of Christ as bound up with the peculiarities of a certain dispensational system, and this is a weakness that must not be forgotten in weighing the conduct of either.