Brethren Archive

American Darby Letterbook - Page: 139


Transcript:


the kind of attack of my brother and Dorman and Hall I feel no disposition to take notice. The doctrinal points I have from their letters. God’s meaning in what takes place I should and do weigh with Him. It is, of course, an additional pressure on me in my more direct work in this very difficult country, but I do not feel it much now. I am still very glad I offered to stand outside. If it was not to be so, God has His own purpose and blessing in it. If it were to be so, yet I have not as far as yet advised a thought of giving up a hair’s breadth of what my real meaning was. The world with me or against me, I hold firm and unmoved. My judgment is that while I might relieve them by leaving them, and the doctrine is no proper business of theirs, their yielding to Dorman and Hale would be the first step in their ruin. What I always desired was that they should go on quietly on their own ground. That is their business, but to not be terrified by the adversaries. Was death, as death, a suffering and sorrow to Christ, for instance in Gethsemane, when Hall admits Christ was not accomplishing the work of atonement, or not? I do not mean man’s pure action in it, but death as death – when the sorrows of death compassed Him. Was His cutting off as Messiah, Deuteronomy 9, nothing to Him? Atonement was in the cup, suffering for righteousness all His public course at any rate through. Was there no heart-suffering, but man’s outward persecutions, because He was righteous and His feeling them? Nothing that passed on Christ’s heart but atonement and persecution? They do not seem to know what suffering means, and apply it only to outward actual things coming on a man, nor the true mind of good in the midst of evil. Heart-suffering for others I suppose they have never known. I do not envy them. It was neither sympathy for others nor atonement when Christ looked for compassion and found none.

J.N.D.

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