likewise; but when we have to meet false doctrine, we have to meet it without these reservations; and when it is taught, it will be learnt without them, and therein lies the danger, of these destructive teachings to those who, not having their senses exercised, are unable to discern between the good and the evil, and who will remember what they hear often rather in its error than in its truth. “Exorbitances of doctrine;” writes one, “when advanced by men of powerful or richly furnished minds, conceal their deformity and evil tendency beneath the attraction of intelligence. But the very same extravagancies and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty but of decency, and show themselves in the loathsome nakedness of error.“[1] The unwary, the uninstructed, the fascinated, seeing the beauty of the garb in which error is thus dressed up, call it “precious truth”—precious only because they have not dug down to its foundation. This led many godly and devoted saints in 1848, to follow the false teachings of one teacher, and the same has led many since with far less excuse to follow the false teachings of another, and the result has been the same; and the ultimate tendency of the doctrines will have to be learnt in the teachings of those who have not the power to cover over the nakedness of the error. We will illustrate what we mean by two quotations from late periodicals belonging to the party.
In The Present Testimony, for August, 1866, we read as follows:—
“To Him, too, as an Israelite, the Messiah and King of Israel, the perfect Israelite, the cross (a Gentile death, and a cruel one) must have been far more sorrowful than to the two thieves. They, of course, felt the pain of the kind of death, and the death itself, in a bodily way; but besides feeling much more acutely than they did, His mind, His heart, His zeal for God, His love for Israel, His pity for the sinners and for Gentiles, all gave their tribute to His weight of sufferings. His mother, His disciples, all enlarged its dimensions too. There was too, to Him, in addition to the pain of the death, the legal curse appended, by God’s righteous judgment as King of Israel, to the form of death; as it is written, ‘Cursed is every one that hangeth upon a tree.’ But this curse of the law was not the same thing as the wrath, when he cried out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!’ The thieves bore it as He did; that thief, too, who went with Him to Paradise the same day, and who could go there to be with his Lord, because He, the Prince of Life, had borne the wrath due to sin in His own body on the tree. But the cross had been endured by many an unrepentant rebel against man and God; and the cross in itself would not take away sin. Yea more, while the time in which he endured the cross was the period in part of which the wrath came on
- ↑ Quoted by Mr. Dorman in his pamphlet, p. 31.
