earth, being outside what represents it in London. I am bound by Scripture to count him so. I come to Sheffield. There he breaks bread, and is—in what? Not in the Church of God on earth, for he is out of it in London, and there are not two Churches on earth, can not be, so as to be in one and out of another.”[1] We will not stay to remark upon the assumption and inconsequence of this utterance, as the subject will recur, but we cannot forbear asking whether any loftier claims or pretensions have ever been put forth even by “the Church” of Rome. “The Brethren” at Sheffield were thus declared outside the Church of God on earth because they had harboured one who was said to have acted over again the sin of Korah.[2]
We hasten on to the last division.—Strange to say, Mr. Darby himself, as if proceeding from a lex talionis, was its occasion. Having adopted a peculiar mode of interpreting the Psalms, he endeavoured to force the life and the facts of Christ’s life into accordance with the views at which he had thus arrived. Consequently, he propounded some novel views respecting the sufferings of our Lord. He divided them into three classes, and “the third class sufferings,” as they have been termed, were said to be from the hand of God, but not atoning; they were on behalf of the Jewish remnant that is to be restored towards the end of the age.
The period of these sufferings is said to be from the time He entered the garden of Gethsemane up to the Cross, and on the Cross until the time that he cried, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Mr. Darby thus says: “Till forsaken of God, the work of atonement, the wrath that worked it out in
- ↑ Christian Obedience, etc., pp. 7 and 22.
- ↑ The Jersey case, connected with this and that at Peckham, the grossest of all, if we may judge from the pamphlets issued, we purposely omit, as taking place out of England.
