“This doctrine, whatever its character may be proved to be, is no barren metaphysical dogma: Mr. D. knows it well. The living, inexorable law of discipline which guards the grounds of fellowship of all who are especially associated with him, took its rise eighteen years ago in the rigid exclusion of the one doctrine; and it will be hard to show how it can be righteously maintained, in conjunction with the acceptance and maintenance of the other. At any rate it is impossible for me to regard any longer this law of exclusion as having anything whatever to do with purity of doctrine: on which ground it was at first ostensibly inaugurated. ‘The brethren’ κατ᾽ έξοχήν have now, strange to say it, completed a circle. Eighteen or nineteen years ago their polity and position were entirely remodelled on the ground of separation from ‘Bethesda’ on account of alleged laxity in dealing with false doctrine. They are now themselves in a position to be separated from on the score of the reception and sanction of false doctrine amongst themselves;—and that not on some other point of Christian truth, but on the very point from which what they condemned arose.”
Some following the London leaders, and the signers of the letter of the Nine, endorse these doctrines; while others are determined to follow the injunction given by some, “Do not touch it,” and seek to have nothing to do with the matter. The former, whatever we may have to say to their evil, are not chargeable with inconsistency. They have worshipped their idol, and they are determined to follow him wherever he may lead, and to carry out their exclusive discipline which at last embraces within its own bosom, the very evil it was originated to keep out. How has God blown on it all. The wall that they have been building, and the untempered mortar that they have been daubing it with, has been brought under the judgment of the righteous God, and the great hail-stones shall fall on it when the question will have to be answered, “Where is the wall, and they who have daubed it?”
But what shall we say of the sincerity of those who determine that they will not look into the matter, who, when Mr. Dorman proposed to have a church examination of the doctrine, replied, “It will be disastrous.” Mr. Dorman withdrew because he would not “introduce the element of strife amongst them.” All wished to keep the discussion of these matters, if possible, from those with whom they were in fellowship. We fully and heartily enter into the instinctive shrinking which any might have, against bringing such matters before a body of saints, the great majority of whom will never be able to enter into them. But do not those who refuse investigation now, remember that the opposition to Bethesda arose out of the refusal of the leaders to do the very thing then, which it is now thought would be disastrous to do in Orchard Street, and if so, what becomes of that “unrighteous decree,” that established the Bethesda test, and which originated
