There was no charge of heresy; there was not one scriptural ground on which the separation could be justified; but, as if there had been no injunction to mutual forbearance and long-suffering, and as if the blood of the Lamb no longer constituted the sure foundation of all true fellowship here, as it is of all the fellowship in the glory, we find Mr. Darby either excommunicating the saints, with whom for so many years he had been in fellowship, or perhaps more correctly, excommunicating himself; in either case, in the action itself, as well as in the spirit and manner of it, rending the body of the Lord, and saying in fact as one of old, who had no mother’s heart to yearn over the child, “Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.” Oh for the bowels of Christ Jesus, the heart of the loving Master, that yearned in the Apostles, that would have sacrificed self a thousand times on the altar of the Lord, for His body’s sake. Where was the love that travailed in birth again till Christ was formed in the Galatian churches—the love that gave to the Apostles a mother’s solicitude for the people of God, that could not cut them off, though in love to them it was
“Fifthly, the Deification of the Saints, that is ‘Omniscient power of superintendence,’ ‘Omnipotent power necessary to such execution.’ And referring to Ezekiel’s vision but as a description of the power of the cherubim who symbolize the redeemed, ‘Nowhere absent, but everywhere present in the perfectness of undivided action,’ and they ‘will apply to the earth, the wisdom of the elders, and the throne.’
“And as a sixth point, the constant extenuation of the evil of Popery. And the decided absence of Christ from the teaching, while the Saints were exalted ‘almost into co-equality with God.’
“I may add, as a seventh, the exaltation and beauty of a personal Antichrist in a way quite contrary to Scripture, so as to alarm and shake the minds of the Saints.”
That too much weight be not attached to any of the above reasons, we add Mr. Wigram’s reasons for joining in the act of separation from those “accredited as Christians,” “without any question,” as given in his “Reasons for withdrawing from Ebrington Street.”
“The cause of withdrawal was not difference of judgment upon the prophetic question, neither was it a question of doctrine: my act of withdrawal took place solely and simply because a new and a human church system had been introduced, and one which appeared to screen guilt. I am thankful for this, because while it forced me to separate from the congregation, as such, it left me free to have fellowship with any as individuals in the congregation. They are all accredited as Christians, and. I can accredit them as such without any question. The hinge of all this is a new ecclesiastical polity having been introduced, and acted upon and avowed in Ebrington Street, new, and opposed to what I had known there from the Beginning.”
