case every call for caution and care in connexion with Plymouth, and this was not wanting; for the course pursued in Bethesda was to examine all who came from thence, on whom any suspicion rested of being in any way implicated in the new doctrines promulgated, and more than that, it was not deemed advisable to do in the present state of the case. It is easy to execute a wholesale excommunication,—it needs only a high hand and a hard heart; but it requires much patient forbearance and grace, to exercise a holy, righteous, discriminating discipline in the fear of God, treating the saints of God as they are treated by Him, and as He commands us to treat them, not promiscuously as a whole, but patiently one by one: “of some having compassion making a difference,” and “some saving with fear, pulling them out of the fire.”
“7th. The requirement that we should investigate and judge Mr. Newton’s tracts, appeared to some of us like the introduction of a fresh test of communion. It was demanded of us that, in addition to a sound confession and a corresponding walk, we should as a body come to a formal decision about what many of us might be quite unable to understand.”
We will only further observe here how distinctly those who have been stigmatized as careless in preserving the sanctity of Church fellowship, and of the Lord’s table, maintain to the fullest extent, the necessity of a sound confession of faith, as well as of a corresponding holiness in walk; for it has been asserted , that, while laxity in morals is carefully watched against in Bethesda, laxity in doctrine is thought little of. Nothing can be more false, and more contrary to simple matters of fact which continually occur, to prove the extreme sensitiveness of the leading brethren in every matter affecting vital truth. It was feared that this requirement to judge would become a test of communion, and so it has proved in the case of all who have bowed their necks to the yoke of Mr. Darby’s anti-christian discipline. This result, which was inevitable from the course pursued, Bethesda instinctively shrunk from; and in order to preserve their simplicity as it is in Christ, determined to keep themselves clear of all and every objection, general or particular, that the Word of God bound not upon their own individual conscience. This at once led them to reject the command to judge a matter as they were told, “because the Church had judged it,” the argument ever made use of by Popery, to enforce its decrees—the Church ever being in every case the same, “Those who think as we do.”
“8th. We remembered the word of the Lord, that ‘the beginning of strife is as the letting out of water.’ We were well aware that the great body of believers
