I would honour it when others abandon it. May my soul be with yours!—Yours in our common Lord,
“Joseph White Niblock.”
Dorman, writing in 1849, accepts this letter as “almost prophetic of the course which things have taken”. He was all unconscious that Niblock might have thought the prophecy much more strikingly fulfilled in Darby’s conduct than in Newton’s. Nor does he see that he is by no means entitled to accept the glowing phrases as an unqualified tribute to Brethrenism. What are we to think of the ecclesiastical position in which the atmosphere is so rarefied that a true Christian cannot long walk in it, unless he be endowed with an extraordinary spirituality? Such was not at the beginning the provision of the Lord for His flock. Is it too much to say that, for the luxury of breathing such an ethereal atmosphere, the leaders of the Brethren had neglected divine safeguards that our palpable infirmities have always called for, and had denounced the service of common sense as unworthy of the House of God? Dorman’s own words seem to justify the conclusion. “In this letter,” he adds, “Dr. Niblock has truly, though perhaps unconsciously stated what ought ever to have been the ‘theory,’ as he calls it, of the brethren’s position;—a position too heavenly to be maintained by earthly minds; a position based upon heavenly principles, and making its appeal continually to faith: depending for its subsistence every hour upon the exercise of the living power of Christ.” This is magnificent, but it is not the Church of Christ; and no one has seen this more clearly than Dorman himself saw it at a later day. As an ecclesiastical experiment Brethrenism must fall unregretted; but let us spare no effort to preserve the elements of spiritual strength and beauty that it unquestionably enshrined.
