with His atoning work, in the New Testament, and much less in relation to any of His other sufferings.
We cannot enter at length into these speculations of Mr. Darby and his followers, from which may the God of grace keep us, enabling us as humble worshippers, to speak of the sufferings of Immanuel, such things only as God has unmistakably revealed to us, in his records of those things which are to be most assuredly believed among us. Well may Captain Hall write, in contemplating these departures from sacred fundamental truth, “The Cross, the awful yet glorious symbol of divine love in its heights and depths, and of an eternal redemption from the curse and wrath justly due to us, is taken from us altogether; it ceases to be the symbol of the first class of our Lord’s sufferings, atoning sufferings for our sin, received and accepted by all christians, and is used as the symbol (and confirmation) of a third class of sufferings under an unatoning curse and wrath. Alas! They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him.”[1]
We would again warn all of the fearful delusion into which many fall, who are contented to seek a protection and a safeguard from heresy in the spirituality of much else that is taught at the same time. God has shewn that teaching is to be judged of by fruits, and not by words, and one painful feature in the present apology made by many involved in these errors, is, that they seek a shelter from evil and false doctrine in the uncertain, fallacious argument of beautiful teaching, which may only be the more delusive because the more beautiful; and when added to this a natural infallibility is assumed and acted on, what will the end be but as one wrote in regard to it, “It will be Princeism or something worse.” We could make godly hearts shudder in the recital of much, that in the utterance bespeaks the most heavenly realizations of that which is the most intensely spiritual, uttered by those in bondage to some of the darkest delusions that have darkened the checkered history of the professing church. God teaches us, by permitting such things to arise, that we must cultivate not an ideal and pictorial christianity, but one that makes all the lovely pictures living figures. The church has to learn that the belief in any doctrine is a dead thing going to corruption, unless it be brought into the living activities of obedience. It becomes us all to bring the principle of justification by works as spoken of in James, more practi-
- ↑ “Grief upon Grief,” p. 51.
