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Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la mdthode. 1 2 3 V 1; : 2 3 4 5 6 Antinomianism Revived; OR, THE THEOLOGY OF THE SO-CALLED PL YMO UTH BRE THREN EXAMINED AND l^EKUTED By DANIEL STEELE, D. D., Professok of Didactic Theology in Boston University. Author of ''People's Commentary" ''Love Enthroned,'" "Mile-Stone Fapers,'" etc. WITH INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN READERS BY N. BURWASH, S.T.D., Presioent of Victoria College. 7 TORONTO: WILLIAM BRIGGS, 78 & 80 KING STREET EAST. Montreal : C. W. COAXES. Halifax: S. F. HUESTIS. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year rSS/ By Mcdonald, gill & co., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washingtor CONTENTS. Intkoduction to Canadian Readers . Introduction Preface CHAPTER 1. Antinomianism Defined CHAPTER II. Antinomiaxism. — Historical Sketch CHAPTER III, Thk Plymouth Bukthken . CHAPTER IV. The Plymouth BKETHRE>f {Continued) CHAPTER A' Antinomian Faith CHAPTER VI. The Plymouth View of the Atonement CHAPTER VII. Eternal Life Non-Forfkitable Paok. 5 23 81 37 52 77 IOC 121 132 ' i COJ^TENTS. niAPTKR vin. Holiness Impittkd CTIAPTKR IX. Plymouth Es( nAToi.cxiv, oic Last Things (IIAPTEPv X. The Prophetic CoxinnKxcE Reviewed CHAPTER XI. Difficulties or Litehalism CHAPTER XII. Predestinahi.vx Basis CHAPTER Xni. EXEOETICAL AnSURDITIES CHAPTER XIV. ■i DiFFICULTIiiS IN THE THOUSAND YeARS CHAPTER XV. The Church not the Kingdom . • • CHAPTER XVI. Elect Numbeb of the Gentiles 148 162 193 204 214 223 ?:].■) 246 256 Introduction to Canadian Readers. This work, by the Rev. Daniel Steele, D.D., Professor of Didactic Theology in Boston University, is a very timely book. An Antinomian view of the Atonement, an Antinomian definition of faith, and an equally Antinomian view of the agencies by which the Kingdom of Christ is to be advanced to its final glory, are the curse of a large part of our modern evangelization. Dr. Steele has well named this error " Antinomianism Revived," for in every century since the Reformation it has made its ap- pearance. It constituted the chief enemy of true religion with which Wesley and Fletcher were called to contend, thwarting more than any other the mission of Methodism to spread Scriptural Holiness over the land. In the work before us Dr. Steele has, in a very popular style, and with the clearest and most trenchant logic, set before us, (1) The INTRODUCTION TO CANADIAN READERS. nature of this error ; (2) A comprehensive and valu- able sketch of its past history ; (3) A very full exposi- tion of its modern organized form as Plymouthism ; (4) A careful examination of its three fundamental errors as to Faith, the Atonement, and the absolutely irrevocable character of the believer's title to eternal life ; (5) A most valuable chapter on the Antinomian doctrine of imputed Holiness j and finally, (6) a very complete discussion of the Eschatology, or Second Advent Doctrine, which accompanies this Gospel, falsely so called. We regard this entire system of teaching as one of the greatest enemies with which Christianity is called to contend to-day, inasmuch as it creates weakness from within, which is far more dangerous than can be any attack from without. In combating this heresy, our younger ministry will find in Dr. Steele's book an invaluable storehouse of in- forr.iation and argument, giving them the gist of the keen logic with which Wesley and Fletcher met this error in their day, but admirably adapted to the new guise in which it appears in our time. N. BURWASH, m INTRODUCTION. m The arguments of this book are directed, mainly, against the doctrines inculcated by the so-called Plymouth Brethren, We shall attempt little more, in this introduction which we are asked to write, than to answer the question, " Who are the Plymouth Brethren f " They are a sect (if it be proper to call those a sect who repudiate all sects) popularly known as "Darbyites,"" Brethren," "Plymouth Breth- ren," etc. They originated in England nearly sixty years ago, under the leadership of Mr. John Darby. Mr. Darby was born in England, of wealthy parents. He was educated for the law, and commenced its practice. But his subsequent conversion changed his whole course of life. He was impressed that it was his duty to enter INTRODUCTION. the ministry. His father, learning of his pur- pose, became violently opposed to it, and not being able to dissuade him from it, actually dis- inherited him. But a wealthy uncle adopted him, and at his decease left him an ample for- tur«5. Mr. Darby having finished his theological studies, was ordained, and admitted to the min- istry of the Established Church. But he did not long continue in fellowship with that church. Not being able to understand the doctrine of apostolic succession, he rejected it, and with- drew from the Establishment and denounced it as an illegitimate church. Having severed his connection with what he regarded an apostate church, he went in search of the true one, not doubting as yet but what such a church could be found. But Mr. Darby never found his ideal church. Such as were of his way of thinking were urged to band themselves together and wait until Christ should make His personal advent, which INTRODUCTION. they confidently anticipated would speedily occur. The first band of this faith was formed in Ireland. But it was in Plymouth, England, that the Brethren met with the greatest favor. Here their members soon numbered some fifteen hundred. So marked was their success in Ply- mouth, that they were called '* Plymouth Breth- ren." It is proper to say, that they have nt \er assumed this name, nor, in fact, an^*' other, except " Brr^thren." Nor do we know tiiat they seriously object to it. Great success attended the labors of me " Brethren," and bands were formed in London, Exeter, and several other places. Many per- sons of wealth united with ihem, and contrib- uted considerable sums of money to aid in "spreading the new faith. About this time they established their first periodical, entitled the Christian Witness^ Mr. Darby being its chief contributor. It was not long before their violent attacks on the church drew upon them the opposition fTP* a INTIiODUCTIOK. i of the English clergy. And so well directed and ably conducted was that opposition, that the spread of the new faith was not only seri- ously checked, but their numbers were greatly reduced. ' * In 1838, or near that time, Mr. Darby left England for the Continent. He first visited Paris, where he remained for a time, without seeing much fruit of his labor. But in Switz- erland, wliicli he next visited, he found a more invitinff field. o Some time before Mr. Darby's visit to Switz- erland, the Wesleyan Methodists had com- menced successful operations in Lausanne, and quite a number of the members of the State Church had withdrawn and united with them, creating no little stir among the people. Among the new proselytes to Methodism were some who still held to the doctrine of predesti- nation, and rejected the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection. It was claimed that, un- der these circumstances, those who held the INTJiODUCTIOH. 9 doctrine of predestination, and still adhered to the Methodists, had received but half the truth. These differences of religious opinion extended to the Methodists of Vevay, producing no little disturbance among the members there. With the purpose of overthrowing the new faith, an influential member of the State Church at Lausanne, invited Mr. Darby to come there and fight the Methodists. He went, and by his preaching, and the publication of a book entitled. The Doctrine of the Wesleyans Regard- ing Perfection^ and their use of the Holy Scrip- tures^ he succeeded in so far bewildering the uninstructed people, that the greater part of them abandoned their faith, and either returned to the State Church, or united with the dis- senters. Mr. Darby seemed to have still more in his plan. He delivered a series of lectures on the prophecies, entitled, Views Regarding the Actual Expectation of the Churchy and the Prophe- cies which Uslablish it. These lectures were MRmi«-iT9= ^T i i ii M W ^^M i ) 10 INTRODUCTION. ' I largely attended, and produced a profound im pression upon all classes. They were subse- quently published in French, German, and English, and may be found in Mr. Darby's published works. In the estimation of the author, at least, they lifted the veil which had long covered the prophecies. Mr. Darby's influence with the people is said to have been so great that the regular ministry was almost entirely ignored, and he became the accepted prophet. In fact, his publications had the effect to turn the people, as a whole, from the ministry. It was his custom to administer the sacra- ment every Sabbath indiscriminately to church- ineu and dissenters, which practice earned for him the reputation of being a large-hearted Christian, anxious to make the church one. . When Mr. Darby had sufficiently drawn the people to himself^ he was prepared, it would seem, to make known to them his plans more fully. These were, to draw out of the State INTRODUCTION. 11 Church its best members, and unite them with others, and so form a circle of perfectly free congregations, without any organization, and to make himself, it was claimed, the centre of the whole. , To accomplish this end, a series of "fly- sheets," or tracts, were issued at Geneva and Lausanne, which clearly revealed Mr. Darby's plan. In one of these tracts, entitled, "Aposta- cy of the Economy," he laid the axe at the root of the tree, leaving the whole Christian Church, so far as he was able, a shapeless wreck. In an- other tract, " On the Foundation of the Church," he attacked the Dissenters, denying the right to form a churcli. In still another, " Liberty to preach Jesus possessed of every Christian," he denied the existence of any priestly office in the church, except the universal priesthood of believers. The church having come to an end, the ordained ministry, or priesthood, went with it. No man, nor body of men, Mr. Darby claimed, had any right to such an office, and to w \ I I 1 12 lNTROl>UCTION. assume any such right was proof of the corrup- tion and ruin of the whole system. In another tract, entitled " The Promise of the Lord," based on Matt, xviii. 20, is given the shibboleth of the Darbyite gatherings. Finally, a tract entitled, " Schism " was issued, in which all who hesitated to take part in these gatherings were denominated, " Schismatics." It will be seen at a glance that the work of demolition progressed with great rapidity The church is first demolished. Mr. Darby does not allow even a poor Dissenter to organize a new one, no matter how good it might be. Next, the Gospel ministry is swept away, and should any one set up a claim to such an office, ho would give the clearest evidence of his corruption. In this way the world is left without a church and without a ministry ; and the only substi- tute furnished is a few Darbyite gatherings, which are without form and without responsi- bility. From Switzerland they spread into France, and gathered, after a time, several con- INTRODUCTION. 18 gregatioDs in Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and oth- er places. A French periodical was established for the propagation of their principles, and a kind of seminary was started for training Mis- sionaries. That secessions should occur where no orga- nizations exist, and where all organizations are utterly repudiated, seems strange. But it was not possible for persons, who could readily ac- cept such radical views as Mr. Darby enunci- ated, to be long held by them. This is i^'e- eminently true of the Plymouth Brethren. A division soon took place under the leader- ship of Mr. B. W. Newton. It originated in England, but extended to the Continent. Mr. Newton, it is claimed, held with Irving that Christ was not sinless. This notion was ear- nestly repelled by most of the Darby ites, and the obnoxious Newton was formally expelled by Mr. Darby. We will not stop to inquire how Mr. Dp.rby could have consistently ex- pelled a man from his society, when he ignored / r I i r 14 INTRODUCTION. and utterly repudiated all organizations. The Newton heresy extended into Vevay, where considerable trouble followed. The " Breth- ren " there split into two factions ; and this was soon followed by several other societies. Another division took place in England, in which Mr. George Miiller, of Bristol, was the most prominent actor. Other divisions have taken place. In America there are several schools of the Plymouth Brethren. Mr. Darby is utterly ig nored by some of them. While the old man was still living they went so far as to represent him as a second " Diotrephes, who loveth to have the pre-eminence " (3 John 9). They insinuated that Mr. Darbv, the father of them all, had very far fallen from original Dar- byis.n ; at least, this would be naturally in- feired from the manner in which they treated him. We have in Boston, and other places, two classes, or schools, of the Plymouth Breth- ren. INTRODUCTION. 15 The religions views of the Plymouth Breth- ren are fully set forth, by Dr. Steele, in the fol- lowing pages. They are Antinomians of the straitest sect. Everything but pure Darbyism belongs to this world. There is nobody right but themselves. The church is fallen, and can- not be reformed, and our only duty is to go out of her. Anything which looks like church pros- perity is, with the Plymouth Brethren, a delu- sion. "The year-books of Christianity," says Mr. Darby, " are the year-books of hell." One of their writers, speaking of the church, says : " It is a corrupt mysterious mixture, a spiritual malformation, the master-piece of Satan, the corrupter of the truth of God." " It is that thing which Satan has made of profess- ing Christianity. It is worse, by far, than Ju- daism; worse by far than all the darkest forms of Paganism," The New Birth, with a Plymouth Brother, is not a change of our old nature, but the forma- tion of a new man who is distinguished in all if 16 INTRODUCTION. things from the old — has his own customs, wishes, aims, feelings and necessities — and these are spiritual, heavenly and Divine. The old man, instead of being absolutely crucified and put to death, was only crucified in Christ eighteen hundred years ago, while, in fact, he actually lives and grows, often worse and worse, to the end of life. In response to a question we once put to Mr. Darby, he said, his nature, or old man, had been growing worse and worse ever since he had believed in Christ. But he paid no attention to that, as he was saved in Christ and had nothing to do with the old man — the carnal mind. One of their number puts it thus : " The believer's state can never corres- pond with his standing." The seventh and eighth of Romans exist in the same heart, and at the same time. v Mr. Mcintosh, their most venerated authority, says : " Flesh is flesh, nor can it ever be made aught else but flesh. The Holy Ghost did not come down on the day of Pentecost to improve I INTBODUCTION. 1 nature, or do away the fact of its incurable evil, but to baptize believers into one bod}', and con- nect them with their living head in Heaven." Perfect holiness, with the Brethren, is one and the same with justification. It is, or was, a finished work of God. It is in no sense per- sonal in ourselves, but in Christ, and accom- plished when He died on the cross. It can never be diminished nor increased. No sin committed by a justified person can in the least affect his justification. The soul's standing must ever remain as pure as Christ Himself. He may get drunk like Noah, coinmit murder and adultery like David, curse like Peter, or lie like Ananias and Sapphira, and his standing is no more affected by it than was Stephen's when under a shower of stones, with his face sliining like that of an angel. One of their writers gives the following de- scription of a good man: — " The good man feels that when he is pre- senting to God liis prayer and his praises and 18 INTRODUCTION. other holy things, that many vain and foolish thoughts often come unbidden, as the unclean fowls came down upon the sacrifice which Abra- ham had 3 aid in order to be offered to God (Gen. XV. 11) ; and he feels that his sacrifice is sadly spoiled ; and he asks, ' Can tlie pure God accept such impure sacrifices as I now bring and lay on His altar?' There is so much of self and sin in our lioliest things that our very tears need wasliing, and our very repentance towards (iod needs to be repented of. In each of our hearts there is a fountain of black, filthy wateis ; and when we think we are about to present a gift pure and clean to God, the stream bursts forth, -and the gifts we thought would be so clean and pure are besmeared with vile effu- sions of our own orrupt heart. And we often think that Satan empties much of the horrible filth of hell into our hearts, making each of them into a sewer for the foul waters of the abyss of despair to run through." Can anything worse than this be said of the most wicked man living? Satan can do no worse than to empty the " horrible filth of hell into his heart," and make him a " sewer for the INTRODUCTION. 19 foul waters of the abyss of despair to run through." This is the best thing the Gospel of the Plymouth Brethren can do for poor, fallen, human nature. And yet, strange to say, this same man, who is filled with the " horrible filth of hell," and is a " sewer for the foul waters of the abyss of despair to run tlirough," is, at the same time, pure as Christ is pure. Here are his words : — "He who is our Great High Priest before God is pure without a stain. God sees Him as such, and He stands for us who are His people, and we are accepted in Him. His holiness is ours by imputation. Standing in Him we are in the sight of God, holy as Christ is holy, and pure as Christ is pure. God looks at our rep- resentative, and He sees us in Him. We are complete in Him who is our spotless and glori- ous Head." Here is full-fledged Antinomianism. The Plymouth Brethren profess to have no creed but the Bible. They condemn all who avow a creed, as putting human opinions in thg ! 20 INTRODUCTION. place of the Word of God. And yet they seem to have a well-defined creed, and put it forth with great persistency.* They denounce all commentaries on the Scriptures as mislead- ing ; and yet Mr. Darby has written commenta- ries quite extensively on the Bible, to say noth- ing of Mr. Mcintosh, whom they regard as nearly, if not quite, inspired. They do not labor for sinners, but for the members of the various churches, as if they were in more peril than the outside world. They may be seen around revival meetings with tracts in hand, containing antagonistic senti- ments, to be placed in the hands of new con- verts, for the purpose of mystifying them, and drawing them away from Christ and salvation. * To find out whether they were a sect, that is, a fragment cutting itself off from the general Church of Christ, tho author of this vol- ume once asked Mr. Darby whether he would be permitted to par- take of the Lord's Supper with them, if he should present himself. Mr. Da' by replied that he would be allowed to partake, proviUea he should correctly answer certain doctrinal questions. Tho other "Brethren »' present strongly dissented from such liberty, and inti- mated close communion. Hence, while denouncing all schisms and sects, they are a sect of the straightest and moat exclusive kind^ iirrRODijcMos. 21 and in this way make proselytes to their faith, not from the world, but from the churches. We bid all a hearty God-speed who are work- ing for the salvation of souls. And did we be- lieve that souls are made better by accepting the dogmas of the Plymouth Brethren, we should most heartily say : " Go on, and the Lord bless you." But so far as we can see, their teachings are evil, and only evil. It makes chaos of order, and deceives souls by assuring them that they are in Christ, while they are full of corruption. Dr. Steele has done a valuable service for all the churches; for Plymouthism successful, means the churches depleted. While they may hold some views in common with some of the evangelical churches, their main purpose is to undermine the churches, and foster a spiiit that would lay waste every church in Christendom. We firmly believe that this book will greatly aid in arresting this growing tide of error. W. McDonald, '11^ f !^ 1 1 PEEFAOE. It is no secret that the author of this book believes in a large Gospel, an evangel co-exten- sive with the present needs of the depraved offspring of Adam ; yea, more : he believes that where sin hath abounded, grace doth here and now much more abound to those believers who insist that Christ is a perfect Saviour from inbred sin, through the efficacy of His blood, in procuring the indwelling Comforter and Sancti- fier. He unhesitatingly proclaims and testifies to all the world that Jesus Christ can make clean the inside, as well as the outside of His vessels unto honor ; that heart-purity is real and inwrought, and not a stainless robe, con- cealing unspeakable moral filthiness and lep- rosy. He believes with St. John against the Gnostics, that if any man asserts that he has il 4m9 VU^fACR. by nature no defiling taint of depravity, no bent toward acts of sin, and hence, that he does not need the blood of atonement, that he is self- deceived, and the truth is not in him; but if he will confess his lost condition, God is faithful and just, not only to forgive, but also to cleanse from all sin, " actual and original " (Bengel). He is bold to assert that we are living in the days when Ezekiel's prophecy is fulfilled: "I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean; from* all your filthiness and from ALL your idols I will cleanse you ; I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes," — a case of evangelical legalism, — "and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. I will also save you from all your uncleannesses " ; and in •the days when the words of Jehovah, by the lips of Moses, are verified in the experience of a multitude of believers : " The Lord thy God will circumcise thy heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine /' PBEFACB. 25 heart, and witli all thy soul, that thou mayest live." He finds St. Paul's inspired unfoldings of the Gospel germs, dropped by Christ, to be the exact fulfilment and realization of these predictions, when the Apostle asserts that " our old man is crucified with him " — that is, in the same manner, and with as deadly an effect — " that the body of sin might be destroj'ed " — " put out of existence " (Meyer) ; so that every advanced believer may truthfully assert, "it is no longer I that live" (i2. V. Am. Com- mittee), He is confident that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus does now " make us free from the law of sin and death," although it does not, this side of the grave, deliver us from errors, ignorances, and such innocent infirmities as St. Paul gloried in without detriment to his saintly character. Believing, as the author is not ashamed to confess with tongue and type and telegraph and telephone, in a genuine Christian perfection — a Scriptural term m m PREFACE. >■ ! ; ii ■ ; ! which cannot be used " without raising the pity or indignation of one-half of the religious world, some making it the subject of their pious sneers " — he views with sorrow the resurrec- tion of that spurious perfection which wrought disastrous effects in past generations, consisting in an imaginary perfect and inaUenable stand- ing in Christ wholly independenf; of moral con- duct and character, the outcome of which must inevitably be, in many cases, the rejection of God's law as the rule of life, and a sad lower- ing of the standard of Christian morality. It is an evil omen when Christian teachers make eloquent pleas for the flesh, and fallaciously construct ingenious Scriptural arguments for indwelling sin. So long as the believer dwells in the body, such preaching, instead of inspiring unspeakable abhorrence for sin, deadens men's sensibility to its dreadful nature and leads them " to speak of the corruptions of their hearts in as unaffected and airy a manner, as if they talked of freckles upon their faces, and to run PRBFAOB. 27 down their sinful nature only to apologize for their sinful practices ; or to appear great profi- cients in self-knowledge, and court the praise due to genuine humility." We have noted the fact that a school of pop- ular evangelists have espoused the doctrines which lie at the base of Antinomianism, and that they are zealously inculcating these pecu- liar tenets in Young Men's Christian Associa- tions and summer schools. We have done what we could, by articles in our Christian periodi- cals, to warn the public of the certain evil re- sults which will ensue when these doctrines de- scend from the few Christian teachers who, by well-established Christian habits, are fortified against their pernicious tendency, to the multi- tudes of weak believers who may be ensnared to their moral ruin by the pleasing doctrine that one act of faith in Christ secures a perpet- ual exemption from condemnation, and a life- long license for walking in the flesh. Some teachers of this doctrine may live in 1i t ''I'i 'I *!l f^ M ■I; . r? 28 PREFACE. harmony with the purest ethical precepts of Christ, under what Joseph Cook calls " heredi- tary momentum,'* and a personal experience of salvation in former years, before embracing their present theological errors. But what will be the legitimate fruit in those who give full credence to a theoretical error lying so near to conduct and character, and who are without the safeguards of which we have just spoken ? From our knowledge of the human heart we forebode many shipwrecks of moral character. Men generally live below their creeds ; few rise above them. Illustration: A preacher riding on top of an omnibus, in London, addressed words of reproof to a tipsy man by his side, who was using very improper language, and warned him as a transgressor of the law of God. " Oh," said the man, " it is not by works, it is by faith, and I believe in Jesus Christ, and of course I shall be saved." Here is a man, a sample of myriads, who are living in wilful sin, dreaming of final salvation on the ground of a I- I : PREFACE. barren, fruitless, speculative belief that Jesus Christ died for their salvation, a faith which no more reforms the conduct and transforms the character, than faith in the existence of the sea- serpent. The fatal mistake is in ignoring the Scrip- tural test of saving faith, evangelical works. It is true that the penitent believer seeking the pardon of sin is justified by faith only. But it is also true that in the day of Judgment the same person will be judged by works only, works which attest the genuineness of his faith / (Jer. xvii. 10 ; xxxii. 19 ; Ezek. vii. 3, 27 ; xviii.\ [^ 20, 30 ; 1 Cor. iii. 8, 13-15 ; 2 Cor. v. 10 ; Gal. j wi. 5-8; especially Matt. XXV. 31-46). -_^ It is due to the Christian public that I should acknowledge my sense of incompetency for the proper handling of this subject. I have long waited for some eminent theologian to lift up his voice in refutation of a system of error which is industriously promoted by persons whose zeal is worthy of a better cause. At 30 PREFACE. 11 • I, , length I have yielded to the importunity of many Christian men to expose the character and tendencies of that system of doctrines against which this book is prayerfully directed. I have made a free use of that great armory of weapons — " Fletcher's Checks to Antino- mianism." Sometimes I have quoted sentences unchanged, noting them with quotation marks. But frequently these marks could not be used by reason of the alterations which I have made, either to abridge, to modernize, or to eliminate some personal allusion. In my quotations from the writings of the Plymouth Brethren and their sympathizers, I have endeavored to give the exact idea of the writer as gathered from the context. Whoever of my Christian friends may be grieved, I trust that the great day will reveal that truth has not been wounded, but rather cleared of errors and set forth in the robes of her native beauty. Antinomianism Revived. CHAPTER I. I antino:mianism defined. Rev. J. Fletcher says, " An Antinoraian is a professor of Christianity, who is antinomos^ against the law of Christ, as well as against the law of Moses. He allows Christ's law to be a rule of life, but not a rule of judgment for believers, and thus lie destroys that law at a stroke, as a law ; it being evident that a rule by the personal observance or non-observance of which Christ's subjects can never be acquit- It ted or condemned, is not a law for them. Hence he asserts that Christians shall no more be justified before God by their personal obedi- ^ % •u^l II ii 1 , i 1 1 ii 1 1 1 1 1 III 1! ■ r ii 1 1'! "IM 'V i! ) -(;' hi t- 1 ,»^ 82 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. ence to the law of Christ, than by their per- sonal obedience to the ceremonial law of Moses. Nay, he believes that the best of Christians perpetually break Christ's law ; that nobody ever kept it but Christ Himself ; and that we shall be justified or condemned before God, in the great day, not as we shall personally be found to have finally kept or broken Christ's law, but as God shall be found to have, before the foundation of the world, arbitrarily laid, or not laid, to our account, the merit of Christ's keeping His own law. Thus he hopes to stand in the great day, merely by what he calls ' Christ's imputed righteousness ' ; excluding with abhorrence, from our final justification, the evangelical worthiness of our own personal, sincere obedience of repentance and faith, — a precious obedience this which he calls ' dung, dross, and filthy rags ' just as if it were the insincere obedience of self-righteous pride, and Pharisaic hypocrisy. Nevertheless, though he thus excludes the evangelical, derived worthi- ANTINOMIANISM DEFINED. 3' t> ness of the works of faith, from our eternal justification and salvation, he himself doe?} good works, if he is in other respects a good man. Nay, in this case, he piques himself on doing them, thinking he is peculiarly obliged to make people believe that, immoral as his senti- ments are, they draw after them the greatest benevolence and the strictest morality." This reminds us of the testimony of a Univer- salist woman, " That she had come three miles to attend this prayer-meeting, so as to show that the Universalists are as pious as the Orthodox." * -/ But there are multitudes carelessly following the stream of corrupt nature who are crying out, not against the unholiness, but against the ^^ legality^ of their wicked hearts, which still suggest that they must do something^ in order to attain eternal life." They decry that evan- gelical legality which all true Christians arc in love with — a cleaving to Christ by that kind of faith which works rigliteousness — a follow- \ % m'>:>n il 84 ANTINOMIAKISM REVIVED. il ;1 ^ 1! 'i ing Him as He went about doing good, and a showing by St. James* works that we have St. Paul's faith. The consistent Antinomian — that is, one whose practice accords with his theory — is loud in his proclamation of a finished eternal salvation, the blotting out of his sins, past, present and future, on the Cross eighteen hun- dred years ago, without respect to his own con- duct, character, or works. His salvation is so finished that no sins can ever blot his name out of the Book of Life. He thinks that the Son of God magnified the law that we might vilify it; that He made it honorable, that we might make it contemptible ; that He came to fulfil it, that we might be discharged from ful- filling it, according to our capacity. He has no sympathy with David's confession : " I love Thy commandments above gold and prscious stones : I will always keep Thy law, yea, for- ever and ever : I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts." ANTINOMIANISM DEFINED. 36 In short, the creed of the Antinomian is this : I was justified when Chnst died, and my faith is simply a waking up to the fact that I have always been saved — a realization of what was done before I had any being ; that a be- liever is not bound to mourn for sin, because it was pardoned before it was committed, and pardoned sin is no sin ; that God does not see sin in believers, however great sins they com- mit ; that by God's laying our iniquities upon Christ, He became as completely sinful as I, and I as completely righteous as Christ. More- over, I believe that no sin can do a believer any ultimate harm, although it may temporarily interrupt communion with God. I must not do any duty for my own salvation. This is included in the new covenant, which is all of it a promise, having no condition on my part. It is a paid up, non-forfeitable, eternal-life in- surance policy. Since the new covenant is not properly made with us, but with Christ for us, the conditions, repentance, faith, and obedience. 1 ' ; ' n; m Us*' hu. m 36 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. , are nr/ on our side, but on Christ's side, who repented, believed, and obeyed, in such a way as to relieve us from these unpleasant acts. Hence it is folly to search for inward marks of grace, and it is a fundamental error, to make sanctification an indispensable evidence of justi- fication — an error which dampens the joys of him who takes Christ for his sanctification, and plunges him into needless alarms and distresses." '6 ! (■ ■li|! . I; li'. ' i r CHAPTER II. ANTINOMIA23ISM. — HISTORICAL SKETCH. Theological errors move in cycles, some- times of very long periods. They resemble those comets of unknown orbits which occa- sionally dash into our solar system ; but they are not as harmless. Often they leave moral ruin in their track. Since all Christian truth is practical, and aims at the moral transforma- tion of men, all negations of that truth are deleterious; they not only obscure the truth and obstruct its purifying effect, but they positively corrupt and destroy souls. This is specially true of errors which release men from obligation to the law of God. After St. Paul had demonstrated the impossibility of justifica- tion by works compensative for sin, and had established the doctrine of justification through 37 ■ r? 1 jnmm- 38 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. h' !■ ilii a faith in Christ which works by love and purifies the heart, there started up a class of teachers who drew from Paul's teaching the fallacious inference that the law of God is abolished in the case of the believer, who is henceforth delivered from its authority as the rule of life. Hencv*) they became, what Luther first styled, Antinomians (Greek anti^ against, and nomos, law). We infer from Rom. iii. 8, 31 ; vi. 1 ; Eph. V. 6 ; 2 Peter ii. 18, 19, and James ii. 17-26, in which warnings are given against a perversion of the truth as an excuse for licer- tiousness, that AntinDmianism, in its grosse:: form, found place in the primitive church. AIj along the history of the Church, a revival o^ the cardinal doctrine of justification, by fait:; only, has been followed by a resurrection of Antinomianism, which Wesley defines as " the doctrine which makes void the law through faith." Those who aver that ultra-Calvinism is the invariable antecedent of Antinomianism, would be unwilling to accept the necessary in- HISTOBICAL SKETCH. 89 ference that the apostle to the Gentiles was an ultra-Calvinist ; yet it is true that the doctrines of Calvinism can be logically pushed to that conclusion. It is also true that othsr forms of doctrine which emphasize faith in Jesus Christ, as the sole ground of acceptance with God, are more or less liable to have the tares of Antino- LTjaTiism spring up in their field. Tbf root of this error lies in a false view of the mediatorial work of Christ, that H"^ per- forms for men the obedience which they ought to perform, and that God can justly demand nothing further *from the delinquents. It is claimed that Christ^s perfect virtues are reck- oned to the believer in such a way as to excuse him for theii absence ; His chastity compensat- ing for the a,b?^./>uce of that moral quality in the believer. JI^Loe, adultery and murder in King David, bbir«g ^^npensated by the purity and benevolence of Jesus imputed to him in the mind of God, did not mar David's standing a« righteous before God. V in 'li !! 1' li : -) \ A ' 40 ANTINQMIANISM REVIVED. Theologians who state the doctrine of the atonement with proper safeguards, are careful to limit its vicarious efficacy to the passive obe- dience of the Son of God, His sufferings and death. His active obedience constitutes no part of His substitutional work. The germ of Antinomianism is found in the inclusion of the latter in the atonement. is true that the God-man was actively obedicat to the Father's will, buc this obedience was personal, and not mediatorial. Hence, every one justified through faith in the shed blood of Christ, is under obli- gation to render personal obedience to God's law. In this respect Jesus cannot be his proxy or representative. Says Bishop Hopkins: "Though Christ's bearing the punishment of the law by death docs exempt us from suffering, yet His obeying of the law does not excuse obedience to the law. He obeyed the law as a covenant of works — we only as a rule of righteousness." It should bo said that the Gnostic sects were It: !! !- :\"i HISTORICAL SKETCH. 41 Antinomian on other grounds. They held that their spiritual natures could not contract moral pollution, whatever their moral conduct might be, sin inhering only in matter. As a piece of gold retains its purity while encompassed by the filth of the swine-sty, so the soul keeps pure amid the grossest sins. This species of Anti- nomianism was not limited to those who pro- fessed faith in Christ. It was adopted by all who held that all evil inheres in uncreated matter. Modern Universalism is only another form of Antinomianism. It is the expectation of salva- tion through Christ, without obedience to either the law or the Gospel. Christianity was very early disfigured by an- tinomianism, a doctrinal and practical error which opposes itself to God's law even in the evangelical form in which it was defined by His adorable Son, ** Thou shalt love God with all thy heart, and tliy neighbor as thyself." This had l>een the burden of Christ's preaching, with i '3 a--? ■ m 1 rf. , il' 1 i ■ 1 42 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the hint that His own life was to be given, as a ransom for many, and to secure grace to enable them to fulfil God*s law.' The apostles, by precept and example, powerfully enforced their Lord's doctrine and practice. Their lives are true copies of their exhortations. It is hard to say which excite men most to believe and obey, their seraphic sermons or their saintly lives. Success crowned their labors. Both Ju- daism and paganism heard the thunder of their words of faith and fell prostrate beneath the lightning of their works of love. But before all is lost, Satan hastens to " transform himself into an angel of light." In this disguise he in- stills speculative faith, instead of a saving faith which works by love, purifies the heart, and overcomes the world ; he pleads for loose living, puts the badge of contempt upon the daily cross, and gets multitudes of Laodiceans and Gnostics into his snare. Sad and sure is the result. Genuine works of faith are neglected ; idle works of men's invention are substituted HISTORICAL SKETCH. 43 for those of God's commandments ; and fallen churches, gliding downward through the smooth ^ way of antinomianism, return to the covert way of Phariseeism, or to the broad way of infidel- ity. Such was the distressing outlook upon the church when Luther arose. True faith was de- throned by superstitious fancy, and works were will nigh choked by the thorns of this baneful error. Luther swung the sharp scythe of re- form over northern Europe, and he might have mowed a broad swath through Italy and Rome itself, if he had not at the same time scattered the dragons teeth of antinomianism, which sprang up around his German home an army of armed men. The balance of evangelical precepts had not been preserved in preaching the forgiveness of sins by faith only, without adding that this faith is genuine only when it buds, blossoms, and bears the fruitage of holy character. Our Lord's sermon upon the Mount, was ex- I i 44 AI^TINOMIANISM EEVTVED. :: I '•:♦ < 1 plained away, and St. James' Epistle was wished out of the Bible as an " epistle of str«,w," and not of the precious stones of Gospel truth. The practicable law of Christy styled the law of lib- erty, because of the ease with which it could be kept by a regenerate soul entirely sanctified through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, was perpetually confounded with that impracticable Christless law of Edenic innocence ; and the avoidable penalties of the former were injudic- iously represented as one with the dreadful curse of the latter, or with the abrogated cere- monies of Mosaism. Then the law of Christ demanding purity and love was publicly wedded to the devil, and poor bewildered Protestants were taught to defy and scoff at both. From such a seed-sowing the dreadful harvest waved over Germany. Lawless believers, under the name of Ana-Baptists, arose fancying them- selves the dear elect people of God, reasoning thus : " First, the earth belongs to the saints, and, secondly, we are the saints." All things HISTORICAL SKETCH. 45 were theirs. They were complete in Clirist, and absolutely sure of salvation by reason of their standing in Him. They went about in religious mobs to deliver people from legal bondage^ and bring them into Gospel liberty^ — a liberty to despise all laws, Divine and human, and to do every one what was right in his own eyes. Luther was alarmed and shocked. He hastened from his concealment in the castle of the Wartburg, to check a movement which was disgracing the Reformation. But the mischief was done : the thistle-seed had been broadcast over Germany. The only proper remedy he did not perseveringly ap]>ly : salvation, not by the merit of works, but by the works of faith, as a condition, and as a proof of its genuine- ness in the great day. Men are now justified from the guilt of sin by a work producing faith. They will be justified in the day of judgment only on the testimony of faith-produced works. Nevertheless, Luther learned wisdom enough to abandon the root i^i the mischief when he I i! « % m '•■' Pi •J»t«> » • • • IS ( 46 ATINOMIANISM REVIVED. iif U. y drew up, or, rather, indorsed, the Augsburg Confession, in which are these remarkable words : " We teach touching repentance, that those who have sinned after baptism may ob- tain the forgiveness of sins as often as they are converted,'* etc. Again : " We condemn the Anabaptists, who say that those who have been once justified can no more lose the Holy Spirit." This antidote of Gospel truth, clearly and frequently enforced, might have stopped the spread of Antinomianism. But Luther did not insist upon it, vascillated, and sometimes seemed even to contradict it. When Calvin arose, though he seldom went the length of some of his followers in the next century in speculative Antinomianism, yet he laid excel- lent foundations for it in his un-Scriptural and unguarded doctrine of absolute decrees, and of the necessary, final perseverance of backsliding believers. We have hinted that Antinomianism has had HISTORICAL SKETCH. 47 1 its cycles in the history of the Church. Its full development, since the Reformation, is due to John Agricola (1492-1566), one of the early coadjutors of Luther, some of whose expres- sions, as to justification and the law, in the heat of his great controversy with Rome, were hasty, extravagant, and quite Antinomian. These utterances Agricola developed into a system so extreme, and so subversive of Christian morals, that he published in 1537 these words : " Art thou steeped in sin — an adulterer or a thief? If thou believest, thou art in salvation. All who follow Moses must go to the devil; to the gallows with Moses." This was the kind of tares sown in Luther's iield by a professed friend. Luther attacked him violently, calling him a fanatic, and other hard names. After Agricola's death, Amsdorf and Otto advocated his doctrines, and main- tained that good works are an obstacle to salva- tion. Similar sentiments were preached in England in the days of Oliver Cromwell. But 1 1 ^ m m ANTINOMIAXISM REVIVED. •4 > it remained for Dr. Crisi), (1600-1G42), a rector of the Church of England, to give this error its full development in Anglican theology, from the seed-corn of high Galvanism. The follow- ing sentiments abound in his sermons : " The law is cruel and tyrannical, requiring what is naturally impossible." " The sins of the elect were so imputed to Christ, as that, though He did not commit them, yet they became actually His transgressions, and ceased to be theirs. The feelings of conscience which tell them that sin is theirs, arise from a want of knowing the truth. It is but the voice of a lying spirit in the hearts of believers that saith they have yet sin wasting their conscience, and lying as a burden too heavy for them to bear. Christ's righteousness is so imputed to the elect, that they, ceasing to be sinners, are as righteous as He was, and all that He was. An elect person is not in a condemned state while an unbe- liever ; and should he happen to die before God calls liim to believe, he would not be lost. illj ■I 1 HISTORICAL SKETCH. 49 Repentance and confession of sin are not neces- sary to forgiveness. A believer may certainly cr'"'»lude before confession, yea, as soon as he habU committed sin, the interest he hath in Christ, and the love of Christ embracing him." This doctrine completely destroys th«^ dis- tinction between right and wrong, and removes all motives to abstain from sin. It boasts in the perseverance of the saints, while it believes in no saint but one, that is, Jesus, and neglects to persevere. Several vigorous theologians op' ed this baneful doctrine, the chief of vi Wuo^ were Baxter and Williams, who, after heroic efforts and no small suffering, finally triumphed. The next revival of Antinomianism in the Church of England and among the dissenters, was in the eighteenth century and was met most courageously by John Wesley, the apostle of experimental godliness and of Christian per- fection, and by the seraphic John Fletcher, whose writings, says Dr. Dollinger, "are the ',J W '<; 50 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. r ii'' ■ |!i:J most important theological productions which issued from Protestanism in the latter part of the eighteenth centurj-." His reasoning is co- gent, his imagination vivid, his style clear and in- cisive, and the momentum of his arguments is so irresistible that he swept the field, driving Anti- nomianism out of England during, at least, two generations. His "Checks" stand to-day un- answered and unanswerable. No man can read them with candor and continue to deny the obligation of believers to strict obedience to the law of God ; that inwrought holiness is the requirement of the Gospel, and that there is no sharp contrast between it and the law. A thorough study of these " Checks," by the ministry in our times, would wonderfully stim- ulate their spiritual life, tone up their theology, and furnish them with the weapons for the con- flict with the cycle of Antinomian error which is now upon the Church. • ' The agency through which this heresy, en- tombed by Fletcher, has had its resurrection, HISTORICAL SKETCH. 51 is the so-called Plymouth Brethren, whose peculiar tenets will be described in the next chapter. 'j\i m ):l' /'f CHAPTER in. THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. / 1 :^ ' What are the Plymouth Brethren ? This is a question which many people are asking. An old lady at Hamilton camp-meeting last year, hearing the writer comment on one of their doctrines, indignantly left the audience, ex- claiming, "I have heard enough of the Ply- mo, "i Brethren and Beecher, too ! " She was thinking of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The Plymouth Brethren originated in Dub- lin, Ireland, about the year 1830, and almost simultaneously in Plymouth, England. In the latter place they increased so rapidly that they once numbered 1,500. Hence they are called by outsiders Plymouth Brethren. Although they do not repudiate the word " Plymouth," 62 \ / I ' * - i THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. they style themselves " The Brethren." Their leading mind, if not their origindl founder, v/ho died a few years ago at an advanced age, is John Darby. Hence they are sometimes called Darbyites. The movement was at first a pro- test against ecclesiasticism, like that of George Fox, the first Quaker. Darby, a clergyman in the Church of England, renounced the Church, and assumed that all existing Church organiza- tions are a detriment to Christianity, and obstructive of regeneration and the spiritual life. His little band of adherents claim to be a reproduction of the primitive disciples — the only genuine specimens on earth. They refuse to take any distinctive name, and disavow that they are a sect. They call themselves the Brethren, as if they were the only persons in the bonds of Christian brotherhood. They are all priests and all laymen. They insist that in Christianity there is no specially called and ordained ministerial order. In this they resem- ble the Friends; but, unlike them, they lay V / ; 'I I M ' 64 ANTINOMIAiaSM REVIVED. J- / great stress upon ordinances, especially the Lord's Supper. This they celebrate alone by themselves every Lord's day, and it constitutes the chief part of their worship. To find out whether they are a sect, i. e., a fragment cut- ting itself from the general Church of Christ, I once asked Mr. Darby whether I would be permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper with them if I should present myself. He replied that I would be allowed to partake, if I should correctly answer certain doctrinal questions. The other " Brethren " present strongly dissent- ed from such liberality, and intimated close communion. Hence, while denouncing all schisms and sects, they are a sect of the straight- est and most exclusive kind. They baptize by immersion only. Meetings for worship in- cluding only believers, are entirely different from meetings for preaching where the unre- generate are permitted to be present. They talk much about separation unto God, by which they mean abandonment of ecclesiastical organ- 'THE PLYMOUTH BBETHEEN. 55 iztitions , and politics even, refraining from voting, insisting on deadness to the world and entire devotion to God, by going forth and preaching Christ wherever they can get a liearer. They make constant use of the Bible in i)rivate and in public, or, rather, of a certain line of texts, interpreted to sustain their pecu- liar tenets. Professing to rely only on the Word of God, you will find them all equipped with the commentaries of Mcintosh, Darby, and others. To propagate their doctrines they scatter many tracts and smail expository books. Several years ago, D. L. Moody learned his method of Bible-study and Bible-readings from the English Plymouth Brethren. In his eager- ness to attain a knowledge of the Bible, he made his first voyage to Europe, attracted by the fame of these students of the Holy Scrip- tures. Hence they claim him as a product of their system. In his earnest exhortation to converts to join some church, he certainly repudiates Plymouth come-out-ism, and he em« 11 M ', if 53 ANTIXOMIAXISM REVIVED. l:;r I •' \ plmtically disclaims some of the theological tenets of the Brethren. Just how far he accords with them we do not know. He adopts their millennarianism, and preaches the personal reign of Christ on the earth as a sub- . stitute for the present agency of the Spirit and of preaching, which are regarded as inade- quate for the successful evangelization of the whole world, and the reconstruction of society on a Christian basis. His declaration that the world is like a ship so hopelessly wrecked that it cannot be gotten off the rocks, but must be left to perish, while Christians rescue as many of the passengers as possible, is a pessimistic Plymouth idea.^ In England the Brethren are quite numerous and influential. Some, as Tregelles, are very scholarly. Such men as Varley, Lord Rad- stock, Blackstone, and MuUer, are either pror fessed Brethren, or are in strong sympathy with them. They have missionaries in India who^$ disorganizing influence has given our Methodist iHi 11 m THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 67 missionaries some trouble, and has caused one secession, and the loss of several promising missionary stations. The Wesleyan Methodist societies in Lausanne and Vevay, in Switzer- land, at one time suffered great loss through the bewilderment caused by the preaching of Mr. Darby against their doctrine of Christian perfection, and their use of the Holy Scriptures. The leaven of their doctrines has already spread widely in America, and their theological tenets are preached by leading ministers in Boston, New York, St. Louis, and other cities, while their theories of Church organization are rejected. The Brethren, having no written creed and no Church discipline, are exposed to constant schisms, so that there are several sorts in England, and two sets in Boston at the present time who repudiate each other quite cordially. The anti-Darby party aver that the Holy Spirit has drawn the portrait of John Darby in 3 John 9, 10. But in the worst of their theological > 58 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. ;; ! > tenets they are quite generally agreed — their Antinomianism. We have heard Mr. Darby say that if any man had anything to do with the law of God, even to obey it, he was a sin- ner by that very act. Their primal error seems to be in their con- ception of the Atonement. They teach that sin, as a kind of personality, was condemned on the cross of Christ and put away forever. Whose sins? Those of the believer. All his sins past, present, and future, are " judged 'V and swept away forever in the Atonement, and the believer is to have no more concern for his past or future sins, since they were blotted out eighteen hundred years ago. Here is their most mischievous tenet respecting faith and its relation to the Atonement and to eternal life : The first momentary act of faith renders the Atonement eternally available, and without an)' further conditions infallibly secures everlasting life. Hence the younger Dr. Tyng, in a recent sermon odorous of Plymouth, declared that in THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 59 that act of faith the believer's " responsibility ends.** This must mean that his probation ceases, his eternal salvation having been abso- lutely secured. The object grasped by faith is not so much Jesus Christ, a present Saviour, as His finished work of condemning and putting away sin on the cross. " Faith grasps only past and finished acts." Intellectual assent to these historical facts, the atonement of Christ judging my sin, and His resurrection as the proof thereof, con- stitutes saving faith. Their view of the Atonement is the old and exploded commercial theory — so much suffer- ing by Christ equals so much suffering by the sinners saved by Christ. With this theory of the Atonement, they cannot proclaim its uni- versality without teaching Universalism. So they make a distinction between the death of Christ for all, and the blood of Christ shed only for those who are, through faith, sprinkled and cleansed thereby. By this means God Jl 60 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. f saves Ijelievers, and presents "an aspect of mercy " toward all mankind. Tljcir idea of justification is not that it is a present act, taking place in the mind of God in favor of the penitent believer, but it is a past, completed, wholesale transaction on Calvary ages ago. Faith puts a man into the realization of tlie fact that all his foreseen sins were then cast behind God's back forever, and that he has a through ticket to heaven. In regeneration, the new man is created in the believer, and the old man remains with aD his powers unchanged. Mr. Darby asserted to the writer that after mure than lifty years of .J Christian experience he found the old man in himself worse than he was at his regeneration. Says Mcintosh : " It is no part of the work of the Holy Spirit to improve human nature," — that seems to be past praying for, — but to make a brand-new man to dwell in the same body with the old man till physical death lucki- ly comes and kills the old Adam who had sue- ■1 '111! THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 61 cessfully defied all power in heaven and earth effectually to crucify him. Henceforth the new man has the entire possession of the disem- bodied soul. How different this from a holi- ness bearing its heavenly fruit this side of the grave (Luke i. 74, 75; Rom. vi. 6, 19, 22; 2 Cor. vii. 7, 2; 1 Thess. iii. 13; iv. 7; ii. 10; Heb. xii. 10, 14 ; Col. ii. 11 (Rev. Ver.) ; 1 John iv. 17). The only Scripture cited for this doctrine of death sanctification is Rom. vi. 7 : " He that is dead is free from sin." This evidently means (see verse 6), he who has died unto sin is freed or justified (Rev. Ver.) from sin. This text, found by the "Brethren," escaped the keen eyes of the whole West- minster Assembly, who could find nothing in proof of this point better than Heb. xii, 23: " the spirits of just men made perfect," assum- ing the point in proof that they were made perfect in death. The Greek scholar will note that the text reads, not " perfected spirits," but the '* spirits of perfected just (men)," implying 62 ANTINOMIAKISM REVIVKD. perfection in this life. Yet the old man is to be quite vigorously choked down and kept under till death comes to the rescue and brings that good riddance which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, could not bestow. He is to be reckoned as dead by a kind of pious fiction, though he is as lusty and vigorous as ever. That Scripture which says "that the body of sin might be destroyed " is explained to signify, " be re- pressed " and " rendered inactive " ; and those Scriptures in which the old man, or the flesh, is to be crucified, mortified, or killed, are all understood to imply a life-long torture on the cross — a killing that continues through scores of years. Says J. Denham Smith, a conspicu- ous Plymouth theologian, in a standard theo- logical tract : " The two natures remain in him unchanged. His old nature is not modified or ameliorated by the impartation of the new; nor, on the other hand, does the new nature become soiled or corrupted by reason of its co-existence in the same being with the old. THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 63 They remain the same. There is no blending or amalgamation. They are essentially and eternally distinct. The old nature is unalter- ably and incurably corrupt, while the new nature is divinely pure in its essence." This doctrine of the two natures is not com- pletely stated till the fact is brought out that neither is regarded as responsible for the acts of the other. For they are conceived of as per- sons. If the flesh of the believer behaves badly, that is none of the believer's business. He does not live in that department of his being, and hence has no responsibility for its evil deeds. The " flesh was condemned on the cross and is under sentence," why should 1 worry about it ? This reminds us of the story of the English bishop and his servant, who reproved him for profanity. The bishop, who was a member of the house of lords, replied, th..v he swore as a lord, not as a bishop. "Bu*^" queried the servant, "when the devil gets the lord, what will become of the bishop ? " W tii i' 'lili ^ I 1 64 ANTINOMIANISM RBVIV vmy. The favorite method of exegesis of 1 John iii. 9, is to substitute " whatsoever " for " who- soever," and to say, " that part of our nature that is born of God does not commit sin," the unregenerate part will continue to sin. This is the style of exegesis: "We have a right to read the text thus : * WTiatsoever is born of God doth not sin.' We are double creatures all the way through. That part of us that is born of God does not sin. Sin is decreasing ; righteousness is growing. So we need not feel discouraged if we find ourselves going astray, if the purpose of our heart is toward God. We are confident of constant progression — sure of being better in the other life than here. It is always first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. The Apostle tells us that religion brings us great assurance. We know we shall be like Him — how little like Him now I We are a long way from the per- fect pattern of Christ, of being like Him in character, with not a stain upon the sours '^*f^ THE PLYMOUTH BRETirKEN. C5 whiteness. Feed your soul on tlio thought of better things to come. Look for the hour when He shall appear and we shall bo like Him." At this point the following questions are per- tinent : — 1. Have we any right to lower the standard of character required in the Scriptures to suit the state of " those who are called Christians " ? Is not such an expounder guilty of a perversion of the Holy Scriptures ? 2. How high a rank is that theology entitled to which discrowns man in order to save him ; which changes him from a " who " to a " what,'* from a person to a thing, in order to keep him from sinning? Does such a theology empha- size the sacredness and dignity of man ? Does it honor the Holy Spirit to teach that Ho be- gets impersonal " whatsoevers," instead oi per- sonal " whomsoevers " ? 8. In the light of this expositiou, what be- comes of St. John's sharply defined line sepa- / \ mv III 60 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. rating " the children of God " and " the chil- dren of the devil"? For in the very next verse to the text he says : " In this " — the fact of not sinning — " the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil " — in the fact of their sinning. This exposition not only " tears down the fence between the Lord's garden and the devil's common," but it actually binds up the child of God and the child of the devil in a single personality, im- possible to be classified either with the right- eous or the wicked. 4. Is the human being of such a double nature that a part of him may be holy, and a part commit sin ? 5. Is not the action of the free will an ele- ment of every moral act, and can the will at one and the same time sin and abstain from sin? 6. If such a moral philosophy is good in the pulpit, would it not be good at the bar? Could nut the lawyer plead that the part of the THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 67 accused which is born of God is innocent of the crime, and that it is only the unregenerate part that has done the mischief, and therefore the regenerate part should be acquitted ? Would not any judge, endowed with average common sense, sentence the unregenerate part to the gallows, and tell the regenerate part to look out for itself? The soul that sinneth — the undivided soul — it shall die. 7. Is there any analogy in the natural world for a partial birth — a part being born at one time and a part forty or fifty years afterward ? A hearer of this exposition very properly asks me the question : " What if a person should die before he gets wholly born ? " 8. Is the expounder right in his interpretation of assurance, that it does not relate to present knowledge of forgiveness and of entire sanctifi- cation, but to the final perseverance of the saints ? Does it not always relate to a knowl- edge of our present acceptance with God, except this one expression, " the assurance of hope"? 68 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. \'i I <: I hi 9. Is freedom from sin ever presented as an object of hope in the future ? Is entire sancti- fication ever classified with the good things to come, such as the second coming of Christ, the resurrection and glorification of the body, and the rewards of Heaven ? 10. Does not St. John, in this very epistle, declare, that as Jesus is, so are Christians in thb world ? Does the likeness of Christ which be- lievers shall have when they shall see Him, consist in the fact of their being then sancti fied, or rather in the fact of both soul and bo then glorified? 11. Our last question is this : Is Antinomian- ism getting up out of its grave in New Eng- land ? For the innermost essence of this error is, that it destroys human responsibility for sin, by saddling it all upon the flesh, " the old man," who turns out at last a mere mythical person who cannot be found in the Day of Judgment. We are impressed, in reading the Plymouth writings, with the perpetual confusion of the \ .-.^-■nr^T:- IS > ^!« THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. term, " sinful flesh," with the body, as though \ sin could be predicated of the material part of man. Some even speak of the hand and the foot as committing sin. Thus the old error of Oriental philosophy and of Gnosticism, that inherent and unconquerable evil lurks in matter, lies at the bottom of the Plymouth theology. Of course they strenuously antagonize in- wrought and personal holiness as an utter im- possibility, since the old man has a lease of the soul which does not expire till death. Yet they insist that they are perfectly holy in Christ "up there," while perfectly carnal and corrupt " down here " in their moral state. They dwell ad nauseam upon the distinction between the standing in Christ and the state. The standing in Christ attained by a single act of faith is the great and decisive thing ; the moral state is a small affair, having not the least power to damage the standing. David in Uriah's bed, and with hands red with his blood, was in a sad moral predicament indeed, so far as his l< 70 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. ^ / moral state was concerned, but his judicial standing in Christ was not in the least im* paired. All that he lost was his communion with God ; all that he sought for was restored joy — " Restore Thou unto me the joy of Thy salvation." God did not see his adultery and murder. These were covered with the blood of atonement shed in the Divine purpose before the foundation of the world, and put away forever before David was born. A favor- ite proof text for this abominable dogma, which lays the axe ftt the root of the whole system of Christian morals, is Num, xxiii. 21 : " He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel," correctly rendered by Rosenmiiller : "God cannot endure to be- hold iniquity cast upon Jacob, nor can He bear to see affliction, vexation, trouble, wrought against Israel." Some such must be the mean- . ing of this text. The Plymouth exegesis makes . it positively deny the omniscence of God, and flatly contradict His declaration : " Because all THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN, 71 these men which have seen My glory, and My miracles which I did in Egypt and in the wil- derness, have tempted Me now these ten times, and have not hearkened to My voice ; surely they shall not see the land which I swear unto their fathers, neither shall any of them that provoked me see it" (Num. xiv. 22, 23). God not only saw the sins of Israel, but He kept accurate account of their number, and so in- dignant was He that He purposed to smite and disinherit the whole nation, and raise up a bet- ter one from Moses (Num. xiv. 12). The doctrine that the believer is seen only in Christ, and is regarded as pure as Christ Him- self, is founded on his incorporation into the glorified human and Divine Person in heaven. The first act of faith is the occasion on which the Holy Spirit eternally incorporates the be- liever into the risen and glorified body of Jesus Christ. " Since," as Mr. Darby said to the writer, " Jesus does not walk about in heaven dropping off fingers and toes,"it follows that fif! 73 ANTIXOMIANISM REVIVED. 1- eveiy believer once incorporated into Christ is absolutely sure of ultimate salvation. The cer- tainty is forever beyond contingencies. No act of sin, even murder, can remove us from our •■tanding in Christ. Sin may obstruct com- munion, and leave the soul in sadness and dark- ness for a season ; but since, as Shakspeare says, " All is well that ends well," sin in a believer is well since it ends in eternal life. For a proof of this doctrine, Eph. v. 30 is quoted : " For we are members of His body." The clause, "of His flesh and of His bones," which is rejected by the Revised Version as spurious, is strongly emphasized as a proof of a literal in- corporation into the person of Christ. A little attention to the context will show that literal embodiment in Christ cannot be meant without implying the actual incorporation of the hus- band and wife in " one flesh." If it be said, this is just what marriage produces, we reply, that the "one flesh" of wedlock becomes two through infidelity to the marriage vow (Matt. THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 73 V. 32). Sin destroys the soul's marriage with Christ, and brings about a divorce which may become eternal (James iv. 4-6, Rev. Ver). Another favorite proof-text is Eph. ii. 6, which is understood as teaching that all believers are, in their judicial standing, literally " sitting to- gether in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Another proof-text is found in the oft-recurring words, " in Christ." It may Le safely said that the Plymouth doc- trines find their basis in a literalizing of figures, ingenious allegorizing of facts, and a straining of types. The best specimens of typology run wild, are found in the Plymouth commentaries. For instance : In order to prove that it was not the mission of the Comforter to sanctify the Pentecostal Church, and to destroy sin in the hearts of full believers, this is the line of argument which is thought to be unanswerable : Leaven always stands for sin. In Lev. xxiii. 16, 17, is the command to put leaven into the bread for Pentecost. Therefore there was sin 74 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. iH'^ / in the Pentecostal Church after it was filled with the Holy Spirit, whose office is not to cleanse believers from all sin, but to incorporate them into Christ up in the sky. This is the argument of their greatest annotator, M'ln- tosh, whose exegetical skill and spiritual insight are by some of " the Brethren " attributed to an inspiration almost plenary. Says another writ- er, J. R. C. : " We know that Moses in the law spake of Christ. These ancient enactments were shado\^^s, in many, if not in all, cases, of good things to come." Then from the Mosaic requirement that " the man who hath taken a wife shall not go out to war, but shall be free at home one year to cheer his wife," he gravely argues that this signifies that Christ will not go forth to battle until He has remained with the saints a certain period at home in a kind of honeymoon. Here is a specimen of Major Whittle's typology, whose doctrines are all drawn from the Plymouth Brethren: First, he assumes, without a particle of proof, that THE PLYMOUTH lUiETHKEN. 75 the ark is a type of Christ. Secondly, all who went into the ark in the old world came out in the new; none died, none were lost. Hence all who are once in Christ will be infallibly saved ! Admit the premises, and the demon- stration is irresistible. m These are only a few specimens of the logic of types when handled by an ingenious man, eager to find biblical proofs for for un-Scriptu- ral doctrines. The great master of this falla- cious treatment of God's Word, the wizzard who can give a Scriptural flavor to tenets most repugnant to the sacred oracles, is Andrew Jukes. Whether one of the "Brethren," I know not ; but he is unexcelled in their typo- logical sleight of hand, even going beyond his teachers and demonstrating the ultimate res- toration of all the wicked in hell to holiness and heaven. Evangelical minds should be on their guard against this subtle method of in- stilling dangerous theological errojs. There \ y \ / 76 ANTINOMIANISM BBVIVED. is a large class of minds which are easily capti- vated by types which are purely fanciful, the cunning inventions of men. 1 1 =3MHM*K CHAPTER IV. THE PLYMOUTH BRETHBBN — (^Continued^, A CARDINAL Plymouth tenet is the necessary continuance of the flesh, or the old man, and his abiding, unchanged, with the new man, till death. Regeneration has no effect on the old man by way of improvement or extinction. He is incapable of becoming better, and has a life- lease in the believer's soul. The personality, or what says J, may put itself under the leader- ship of either the new nature or the old for an indefinite period without detriment to the standing, only the communion is obstructed when the old Adam is at the helm. The best illustration of the Christian soul is, that it is a ^ tenement with two rooms. The spiritual apart- ^ ment faces the sun, and the fleshly room is in the rear, turned from the sun. The believer, oiice sure of his stauduig in Christ, may live iu 11 fel5* 78 ANTINOMIANISM BEVIVED. SI" i •i' I N the front room and bask in the sunshine, or he may retire into the back room and live in the shade. He is exhorted to live in the front ^ room, and to keep the back room locked, if he would have unbroken happiness through cloud- less communion with God. But if he should disregard the exhortation, and, owl-like, should - dwell amid the darkness all his daj'-s, he is just as sure at last of the inheritance of the saints in light, though he was not partial to the light while dwelling in his double tenement on the earth. These teachers have a special hostility to the Weslyan doctrine of Christian perfection, against which they oppose perfection in Christ. They are very shy of the term " perfect love," since this, as used by St. John, evidently refers to our love to God : " Herein is our love made perfect." This is not God's love to us, as some say, "for," says Alford, "this is forbidden by the whole context." Inwrought personal holi- ness is denied, as ministering to pride, wliile a imfrgHPSf I THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. n constant declaration of inward vileness, and of a fictitious purity, by the imputation of Christ's purity, is supposed to conduce to our humility and Christ's exaltation. The Plymouth idea of entire sanctification is exceedingly complex and contradictory, ^'^irst, in our standing we are as holy as Christ ; sec- ondly, in our flesh we are perfectly vile, the old man being incapable of improvement ; thirdly, the new man is perfectly pure, being a new creature by the Spirit, and hence not needing sanctification. This statement is highly sug- gestive of the celebrated kettle plea : — 1. Our client never borrowed the kettle ; 2. It was cracked when he borrowed it ; 3. It was whole when he returned it. But, nevertheless, there 1^ an exhortation to practical holiness in most of the writings of the Brethren, on this wise : " Be holy down here because ye are holy up there " (in Christ). "Strive to make your state correspond with your standing.'' Yet this motive to Christian n ! II iii I) i 80 ANTtNOMIANISM REVIVED. purity is neutralized by the assurance that the believer's standing in Christ is eternal anyhow, just as the exhortation to sinners to repentance by a Universalist is a motive of no force, since ultimate salvation is certain. Says M'Intosh : " God will never reverse His decision as to what His people are as to standing." " Israel's bless- edness and security are made to depend, not on themselves, but on the faithfulness of Jehovah." " We must never measure the standing by the state, but always the state by the standing. To lower the standing because of the state, is to give the death-blow to all progress in practi- cal Christianity." That is to say, the fruit must always be judged by the tree ; to judge the tree by the fruit, is to give the death-blow to practical pomology. The opening verse of 2 Cor. xii., speaks of visions and revelations of the Lord ; the closing verse condemns uncleanness and fornication and lasciviousness not repented of. "In the for- mer," says MTntosh, '' we have the positive Iii THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. CA then only through Plymouth eye-glasses ! From Augustine to Darby this has been a standing proof-text against entire sanctification, which is as plainlv taught iu the passage as the sun in M d THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 83 the heavens. Let any candid mind read tlie context, and he will see that the clause, " If we say we have no sin," means, if any unregener V ate man denies that he has any sin which needs the atonement, or that he has ever sinned, as it is in verse ten, he deceives himself. No writer would so stultify himself as to say that he who is cleansed from all sin in the seventh verse, is a dupe and a liar in the eighth verse, if he tes- tifies to the all-cleansing blood. John must bo written down as utterly self-contradictory to say that he that is born of God sinneth not, and then brand with deception and falsehood the man who should profess that by grace he was kept from siu. Yet this passage, wrenched from its context, is the proof constantly reiter- ated, that there is no salvation from sin in this life. The r.bsurdity of this text as a proof of indwelling sin, us the highest attainable state of the Christian, and of self-deception on the part of the person who professes entire inward cleansing, is akin to that of advertising a corn- id'^ i O^^y^"^ -ml M f|T 4 II 1 11 84 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. plete cure of cancers, and then branding as ' false every testimony to such a cure. r Another text constantly urged by them, in utter disregard of the context, is Gal. v. 17, which, by that fallacy in logic called " begging the question," they assume to be descriptive of the most perfect specimen of the Spirit's work in a human soul, whereas St. Paul is writing to a backsliding church. " I marvel," says he, as translated by Dean Alford, " that ye are so soon removing from Him that called you in the grace of Christ, unto a different Gospel." Again : " Are ye so foolish ? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now being made perfect in the flesh?" In believers, in this mixed moral state, a struggle is going on between the flesh and the spirit. The fallacy lies in the assumption, that the best Christians are in this state, against the positive testimony of St. Paul : " I have been crucified with Christ ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ that livp.fh in me." * i'ii THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 85 The doctrine of assurance is strongly empha- sized by these Christians as the privilege of all who are in Christ. They are very earnest in their condemnation of the ** hope-so " experience, and they insist on a clear and undoubted knowledge of the forgiveness of sins and adop- tion into the family of God. But this truth, when joined with the pernicious doctrine of eternal incorporation into the glorified body of Christ, removes the safeguard against sin, which old-fashioned Calvinism set up, in the uncer- tainty which every Christian was taught that he must feel respecting his acceptance with God. Both Calvinism and Arminianism have checks which deter believers from sin. The Arminian is told that the holiest saint on earth may fall from grace and drop into hell. The Calvinist is restrained from abusing the doctrine of uncoDditional election by the consid -ration, that no man may, beyond a doubt, ki .w thas hib own name is oa the secr«'; register of Gods ciiosen ones. This igtiorazice iuspires a - li ■V»A?^(f*""^''te '.fc^ w '!i I 86 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. ful solicitude promotive of watchfulness and persevering fidelity in the Calvinist, just as the possibility of total and final apostasy tends to conserve the purity of the Arminian. The Plymouth Brethren drop both of these safe- guards by uniting, with eternal incorporation into Christ, a present and absolute assurance of that fact. There may be a few souls who would not be put in imminent peril by the revelation, that their eternal salvation is secured beyond a peradventure ; but the mass of believ- ers would become dizzy, if suddenly lifted to such a height, and many would fall into sin. Human nature at its best estate can never be safely released from the salutary restraint of fear. Hence we predict that great moral dis- asters will follow the general prevalence of the teachings of Mr. Darby and his school. In this matter of assurance, how much more guarded are the utterances of John Wesley, who teaches the certain knowledge of justifica- tion by faith, with appropriate safeguards. .' 1 ; THE PLYMOUTH BRETHREN. 87 " Let none ever presume to rest in any supposed testimony of the Spirit which is separate from the fruit of it." This, translated into the Ply- mouth idiom, \vrould read thus : " Let none ever presume to rest in any supposed Btanding in Christ while his actual state of character is not radiant with all the excellences of Christ." "Let no one who is in a state of wilful sin, imagine that he has a standing in Christ pure and clear before the throne of God, for hig standing in heaven is the same as his state on earth." In perfect accord with this absolute assurance of final salvation, is the denial of the general judg- ment as taught in all orthodox creeds. If the saints have a through ticket for heaven, why should they stand before the judgment seat of Christ? The favorite proof-text, ever on the lips of the Brethren, is John v. 24, with the comment that " condemnation " should be trans- lated " judgment." To show how far this fails to prove the doctrine for which it is quoted, I « i I 88 ANTDCOMIANISM EEVIVED. \': ii / will aclduco AlforcVs note Anglicizing Ihe Greek: **TIic believing and the having eternal life are commensurate ; where the faith is, the possession of eternal life is ; and when the one remits, the other is forfeited. But here the faith is set before us as an enduring faith, and its effects are described in their completion (See Eph. i. 19, 20)." "Ho who believeth" (perse veringly) " comes not into, has no concern /^ with, the separation (Jcrisis)^ the damnatory part J I of the judgment." All the texts which teach UX^ / the simultaneous judgment of all the human family are ingeniously explained away by par- tial judgments strung along through the future, after the doctrine of Swedenborg, in order to make way for this new doctrine, that the saints will not be before Christ's judgment tribunal in the last day. We shall show the fallacy of these explanations when we come to the discu»- Bion of the Plymouth scheme of eschatologyv or last things. ill THE PLYMOUTH BKETHBEN. 89 The Sins of Believers are not Real Sins. This is a necessary inference from the assured exemption of believers from condemnation, however deep their fall into gross sins. For this exemption implies the absence of guilt. Those acts which entail no guilt cannot bo real sins. If they appear to bo sins, their appear- ance is deceptive. Hence, a distinguished English doctor of divinity could say in the pulpit, " A believer may be assured of pardon as soon as he commits any sin, even adultery and murder. Sins are but scarecrows and bug- bears, to frighten ignorant children, but men of understanding see they are counterfeit things." The author has heard Dr. Brooks, of St. Louis, assert that the sins of believers mate- rially differ from the sins of unbelievers, liint- ing that they are not real sins in God's eyes, be- cause He sees the believer and all his acts only in Jesus Christ. This is the logical conclusion from the premises that character is transferable* IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I m _ S ilM ■'' MM M lll||^ Z2 1 2.0 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 < 6" - ► V] <^ /2 ^ el 'cS o /y /A 'w 7 Photograpliic Sciences Corporation 23 WEST MAIN STREET WF-BSTER, N.Y. MS80 (716) 872-4503 \ iV ^ % n,^ <1> ^'^ A <\ u 90 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. I I ^^■jl 1;l rHi 1 ' n^H 1 '1 iW in w that Jesus Christ on the cross became a sinner, and was punished, while we, by a single act of faith, assume His righteousness by an inalien- able incorporation into His glorified person in heaven, and are ever afterward viewed by God as possessing all His moral excellencies, among which is sinlessness. What an opiate to the accusing conscience ! what a weakening of the divine safeguards against sin, set up in man's moral constitution, are manifest on the very face of such a theo- logical tenet ! The chief barrier against sin i? removed, and sinning is made easy. With ordinary human beings, even after regeneration, facility for sinning with impunity becomes a tremendous temptation, and to most men an irresistible incentive to sin. If God has sol- emnly pronounced " woe to them that call (moral) evil good, and (moral) good evil," what must be His sentence against those who entirely rub out the broad boundary line be- tween them by teaching that the willful viola^ THE PLYl^IOUTH BRETHREN. 91 tion of the known law of God is only a seem- ing, but not a real sin? Yet this is the inevi- table outcome of the doctrine that there never can be condemnation to them who are in Christ. The case is aggravated by the denial of the possibility of entire sanctification in this life, and by the assertion that the flesh, the sinward bent of the soul, must remain until it is eradi- cated by physical death. Broadcast these twin doctrines throughout Christendom, that believ- ers are incapable of real sin, and that the sin principle is a necessity in every human heart during this life, defying the blood of Christ to purge it away, and the Christian Church will need myriads of patient toilers to grub up these seeds of immoralities, more baneful than the Canada thistle is to the farmers of this western world. This whole question of the believer's relation to God's law has been discussed by the theo- logical giants of past generations. I quote from Baxter's Aphorisms on Justification, an I Ir .f: 92 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. epitome made by J. Wesley: "As there are two covenants, with their distinct conditions, so there is a twofold righteousness, and both of them absolutely necessary for salvation. Our righteousness of the first covenant (under the remediless, Christless, Adamic law) is not per- sonal, or consisteth not in any actions preferred by us; for we never personally satisfied the law (of innocence), but it is wholly without us, in Christ. In this sense every Christian dis- claimeth his own righteousness, or his own works. Those only shall be in Christ legally righteous who believe and obey the Gospel, and so are in themselves evangelically right- eous. Though Christ performed the conditions of the law (of Paradisaical innocence), and made satisfaction for our non-performance, yet WE OUESELVES MUST PERFORM THE CONDI- TIONS OF THE GOSPEL. These (last) two pro- positions seem to me so clear, that I wonder that any able divines should deny them. Me- thinks they should be articles of our creed, and i fj THE PLYMOUTH BRETHBEN. a part of children's catechisms. To affirm that our evangelical or new-covenant righteousness is in Christ, and not in ourselves, or performed by Christ, and not by ourselves, is such a mon- strous piece of Antinomian doctrine as no man, who knows the nature and difference of the covenants, can possibly entertain." (Bax. Aphor. Prop. 14-17.) Thus speaks this pious, practical, well-balanced dissenter against the fatal errors arising from confounding the Adamic law with the law of Christ, the first demanding of a perfect man a faultless life, the other requiring an imperfect man, inheriting damaged intellectual and moral powers, to ren- der perfect, that is, pure love, bo God his Heavenly Father, through Christ his adorable Saviour, with the assistance of regenerating and sanctifying grace. It was the clearly discerned distinction be- tween the two covenants which prompted good Bishop Hopkins to make this paradoxical reso- lution? "So to BELIEVE, so to rest on the i ■ : m In lectual assent to the fact that Jesus put away sin once and forever on His cross. There is no preliminary to this mental act, such as a heart- felt conviction of sin, and eternal abandonment of it in purpose and in reality. Nor is there any test of this faith in the genuineness of its fruits. The evangelical defii^icion of saving faith is utterly ignored, — that it has its root in genuine repentance, its bud and blossom in joy- ful obedience, and its fruitage in holiness of heart and life ; that in addition to the assent of 100 ANTlJJOxMlAN FAITH. 101 the intellect, — the fruitless faith of devils (James ii. 19), — there must be the consent of the will, the Christward movement of the moral sensibilities, and an unwavering reliance on Him, and on Him alone, as a present Saviour. Nor do the Antinomians teach that faith is continuous — a life-long outgoing of the heart in glad obedience — but rather t >t its efficacy is concentrated into a single act of assent to a past fact, an act which forever and forever justifies. We can easily prerlicc the chtviacter of the edifice built upon a foundation so defective. On such a corner-stone we do not expect to find a love which purifies the heart and overcomes the world, a hunger and thirst after righteousness, an eager pursuit of holiness, and " pressing on unto perfection " (Heb. vi. 1, Rev. Ver.), and that " perfect love which casteth out all fear that has torment." We find rather a dry, intellectual religion, tena- cious of its speculative theory, indifferent to inward and outward holiness, and reveling in imaginary graces, or, rather, in the perfections Pi ,.i: 102 ANTVNOMIANISM BEVIVED. 'I of Christ falsely imputed to themselves, and preferring to keep the old man alive rather than his summary crucifixion, in order "that the body of sin may be destroyed." We find a sys- tem which is a great comfort to the backslider in heart and life, and a pleasant refuge to those who have lost their inheritance among the sanctified, into which they once entered when under better religious instruction. We have thus far spoken of an indefinite An- tinomian faith ; we now proceed to speak of FAITH VERSUS FEELING. "The power of God," says Fletcher, "is fre- quently talked of, but rarely felt, and too often cried down under the despicable name of frames and feelingsJ* " If I had a mind," said the eloquent George Whitefield, " to hinder the progress of the Gos- pel, and to establish the kingdom of darkness, I would go about telling people they might have the Spirit of God, and yet not feel it," or which is much the same, that the pardon which /:i ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 108 Christ procured for them is already obtained hy them, whether they enjoy the sense of it or not. This is the kind of faith which multitudes of souls in utter spiritual barrenness are resting in for eternal life. They are exhorted to beware of looking for any changed feeling, that feeling is inconsistent with true faith. Says John Wesley, " It is easy to satisfy ourselves without being possessed of the holiness and happiness of the Gospel. It is easy to call these (holi- ness and happiness) frames and feelings, and then to oppose faith to one and Christ to the other. Frames (allowing the expression) are no other than heavenly tempers, the mind that was in Christ ; feelings are the Divine consola- tions of the Holy Ghost shed abroad in the heart of him that truly believes. And wher- ever faith is, and wherever Christ is, there are these blessed frames and feelings. If they are not in us, it is a sure sign that though the wil- derness become a pool, the pool is become a wilderness again." {Note on Peter iii. 18). This is tiie process of inculcating this kind V 104 ANTmOMIANISM EEVIVED. of faith. The religious teacher sits doTvn in the inquiry room, by the side of the seeker, opens his Biule at Romans x. 9, and reads : "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus (Jesus as Lord, Rev. Ver.), and shalt believe in thy lieart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." Do you • confess that Jesus is your Lord ? Yes. Do you believe that He arose from the dead ? Yes. Well, praise the Lord, you are born again I you have found eternal life. But I do not experi- ence any inward change. Never mind that; you are to believe without any feeling. If you look for feeling as the ground of your faith that you are now a child of God, you dishonor the Word. The Word says that you are saved, and you ought to believe the Bible. It is weak and childish to be looking for any change in your feelings. I strongly advise you to be bap- tized and join the Church. You have fulfilled the conditions of salvation. You are licnce- forth to count yourself a Christian, and by a resolved will to crush out all doubts respecting ANTINOMIAN FATTH. 105 your conversion, whenever they arise. For they will arise. All true Christians have doubts of this kind. It is an evidence that they have a good hope in Christ. But, dear pastor, is this all there is in the new birth? I expected I should have unspeakable joy, arising from a sense of burning love. I thought I should be sure that T was saved by some inward impres- sion by the Holy Ghost. Oh, says the pastor, you are not to expect a miraculous conversion. That kind is limited to the Apostolic age. Sin " m," and Sin " on," the Soul. Through all their books and innumerable tracts runs a distinction between the preposi- tions "in" and "on." It is the aim of the Gospel to deliver from sin " on " the soul, but not from sin " in " the heart, till we pass through the gate of death. In other words, justification is affirmed, but entire sanctification in the present life is denied. The blood of Jesus Christ is efficacious for the removal of i ; K i Ii il 106 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. actual sins, but it fails to eradicate the sin prin- ciple, or inbred sin, till physical death comes to the aid of atonement, and completes its saving power. Thus the penalty of sin becomes its destroyer. "Death, that foul monster, the off- spring of sin, shall have the important honor of killing his father," says Fletcher. " He alone is to give the great, the last, the decisive blow." In vain do we call for Scripture proofs for death sanctification, and for the important distinction between "in" and "on." When those Scrip- tures are cited which teach immediate perfect cleansing from all sin, as in 1 John i. 7, 9, we are assured that the verb " cleanse " here means judicial clearance, or justification, and not in- herent purification. But this involves St. John in the Romish doctrine of good works as a con- dition of justification — " If we walk in the light." This is certainly a course of good works prescribed as a condition of cleansing. If this is pardon, we have a condition unknown to St. Paul. But we have as great a difdculty in pas- ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 107 sages which urge us to cleanse ourselves, as 2 Cor. vii. 1. Here we have a cluster of absurd- ities. (1.) Self-justification: "Let us cleanse ourselves." (2.) Justification is divided and distributed into two parts, " flesh and spirit " — a piece-meal pardon! (3.) "Filthiness" is a state. How can a state be justified, or have judicial clearance or acquittal ? It is easy to see that sin " in " the believer, who has been adopted into the family of God (2 Cor. vi. 18), or inbred, original depravity, is here intended, and the Corinthians are ex- horted to seek its entire purgation as a condi- tion to " perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord." Not Under the Law. ''Free from the law, oh, happy condition! ** This is a verse which should never be sung except with those safeguards which the author of the hymn has not been careful to set up. (1.) It is true that all mankind are, by the 108 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. s' M i I I atonement, forever freed from the necessity of pleading that we have perfectly kept the law, in order to acceptance with God. We are freed from the necessity of legal justification. Such a necessity would shut up a sinful race in eternal despair. We are freed from the law as the ground of Justification, Our ground of justification is the blood of Christ shed for us. (2.) Nor are true believers, who have received the Spirit of adoption, under the law as the impulse to service. They are not spurred on to activity by the threatened penalties of God's law. Love to the Law-giver has taken the place of fear of the law as a motive. This is specially true of those advanced believers, out of whom perfect love has cast all servile, tor- menting fear. Before emerging into this expe- rience, there is a blending of fear and love as motives to service. In this state the believer is not wholly delivered from legalism. But the law is put into the heart of the full believer, and its fulfillment is spontaneous and free. ^^ I ANTINOAnAN FAITH. 109 will run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my heart." The Septuagint Version, used by our Lord Jesus, reads : " I have run. . . . Since," etc. "Without the law," says St. Paul, as •an outward yoke laid upon the neck, "but under law to Christ." Love to Christ absorbs into itself all the princi- ples of the moral law, and prompts to their glad performance. Hence, " Love is the fulfill- ment of the law." This is the meaning of Rom. vii. 6, as translated in the Revision which corrects the blunder of King James' version from a faulty MS., making the law of God die, instead of the believer's dying to it; that is, ceasing to be actuated by its terrors, and be- coming obedient from the new principle of love. " But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden ; so that WE serve in newness of the SPIRIT, and not in the oldness of the letter." (3.) We are free from the law as the instru- ment of our sanctification, Christ has become no ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. !i ha :| our sanctification by purchasiug with His blood the gift of the Holy Spirit. He is called ** holy," not as a peculiar attribute, distinguish- ing Him from the Father and the Son, but be- cause it is His great office to make men holy. We are "elect through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth." (4.) Christ has freed us from the ceremonial law, (5.) Believers in Christ are not delivered from the moral law, as the rule of life. The form of this law may change, but the essence is as immutable as its Author, out of whose bosom it goes forth. If believers were free from the law, as a rule of life, we should be obliged to change the verse — it Free from the law, oh, wretched condition " ! A moral intelligence, whether man or angel, thus freed from his proper norm, would dash into ruins like a locomotive of an express train freed from the rails. As the rails give direc- ANTINOMIAN FAITH. Ill tion to the mighty momentum of the train, so is the law designed to direct our moral progress to a destiny of unspeakable blessedness. Diso- bedience derails and destroys. Hence the law is a blessing of unspeakable value. The soul that despises it is in imminent peril. The the- ology which teaches that men mount to a "happy condition," by ridding themselves of the beneficent guidance of the moral law, merits the condemnation of all Christians. Jesus is a Law-giver to control, as well as a Redeemer to save. The Sinneb has Nothing to Do. " Nothing, either great or small, > Nothing, sinner, no; Jesus died and paid it all, Long, long ago.'' All that Jesus has done for the sinner will do him no good till he personally appropriates, « by a faith which requires the highest effort to exercise, and which prompts to a continued course of good works. " This is the work of i 112 ANTINOIHIANISM KEVTVXD. / God — which He requires — that ye believe in. His Son." In all cases there must be repent- ance and its fruits, forsaking wicked ways, and turning to God. In the case of tlie unbeliev- ing Jews there were two severe preliminary works before they could believe. They must conquer their love for human honor, and through the use of prevenient grace, rise to the position where they are swayed by the honor that comes from God only, or the only God. Hie labor ^ hoc opus eat — this is work, tliis is toil. Jesus sets another task before the Jews before they can believe in Him. They must believe in Moses. Men cannot indolently neg- lect inferior light, and, at a single bound, spring up to the highest exercise of faith in Jesus, the Light of the world. They must be of the truth before they can come to Him who is the Truth. They must so love the truth already within their reach as to be willing to search for it dili- gently, and to follow wherever the truth leads. This implies self-denial and cross-beaiing, even ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 113 before Jesus is apprehended as their Saviour. Then having found Him, they must consecrate all their powers of service to do His will ; they must work while the day lasts. These worlcs are rewardable, though not meritorious, in the sense of putting God under obligation to com- pensate the doers. In the light of these truths the following verses have an Antinomian sound: — " Cast your deadly * doing ' down — Down at Jesus' feet; Stand in Him, in Him alone, Gloriously complete. *' Cease your doing; all was done Long, long ago. '" Doing' is a deadly thing •— * Doing' ends in death.** There is a call in this latter quarter of the nineteenth century for St. James to go through the world preaching from his favorite text: "Faith without works is dead." Sinners are not saved by works, but they must work to bo iiw; i: 114 ANTINOMIANISM EBVIVED. saved. "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. Ye are workers together with God." The Flesh Remains Flesh. Two natures co-existing in the believer in his best possible earthly state, is proved by John iii. 6, which is amended to read thus: " That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and remains fleshy and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." This is quoted to prove that the single nature is untouched in the new birth, while an entirely new nature, or, rather, new creature, is created, and associated therewith. This view assumes, without proof, the follow- ing:— 1. That John uses the term "flesh" in the Pauline sense, which as Meyer says, " is strange to him " ; while Cremer, in his Biblico Theo- logical Lexicon, quotes this passage as an in- stance of John's use of sarx, flesh, to signify merely that which " mediates and brings about man's connection with nature." He flnds six shades of meaning to this important word, the ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 115 last only embracing the idea of sin. He ex- cludes from this meaning all passages in the four Gospels in which the word occurs. 2. It is assumed that suc'i writers as Weiss, and Julius Miiller, are in error when they say that the meaning of Jesus is, ^Uhe corporeal birth only produces the corporeal sensual part." 8. Th;-re is a confounding of birth with crea- tion out of nothing. " For as generation," says Dr. Whedon, " is a modifying of substance or being, imparting to it a new principle of life, conforming it, as living being, to the likeness of the generator, so regeneration is a modifica- tion of the human spirit by the Holy Spirit, conforming the temper of the human to the Holy." So that that which is born of the Spirit, is the same person as is bom of the flesh. He is henceforth endowed with tha new qualit} of spiritual life, instead of spiritual death. The identical man, soul, body, and spirit — "for in the term flesh," says Alford, "is in- I Bl.i "P 116 ANTINOMTANISM REVIVED. eluded every part of that which is bom after the ordinary method of generation" — ia bom again by the endowment of spiritual life. What is born again in the view of the impu- tationist ? Not the fallen nature, — that must remain fallen; nothing is born again; but a new man is created de novo and put into the believer, who is henceforth to live a dual life, his personality sometimes dwelling under the tiway of the old man, and sometimes under the rule of the new. This is not a birth at all. For in a true birth there is a communication of life to non-living matter. So in the spiritual birth there is the impartation of life to a spirit- ually non-living soul. 4. Our best philosophers say that the only safeguard against materialism is the theory that the soul is created by a direct act of the Creator. This theory would seem to lie at the base of the reasonings of the imputationists on this text, and to afford them an analogy for the absolutely new creation of a spiritual man at the new birth. ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 117 Now it is well known in theological circles that there are three theories for the origin of the human spirit, (1) pre-existence from the date of the creation, and waiting to be incarnated, (2) traduction, or derivation from parents, the same as the body, and (3) direct creation at the time of birth, or of generation. It is not incumbent on me to show which is the true theory. But he who builds on any of these hypotheses must first demonstrate its truth. We assert that the declaration of the imputationists, that a new man is created, not by a transformation and renewal of the old man, but by an immediate creation, rests ana- logically upon a misunderstood theory respect- ing the first birth. For this theory is not that of creation absolutely independent of all ante- cedents, but each soul is created as part of a system which has been dislocated by sin. The Adamio matrix, though marred by sin, being still used in the creation, and not the matrix of a new race. 118 ANTLNOMIANISM EBV*VE1>. Well does Augustine say, " Where the Scrip- ture renders no certain testimony, human in- quiry must beware of deciding one way or the other." Let us emerge, then, from this region of speculation into that of common sense. Nico- demus was surely right when he understood that the new birth was a second birth of the same subject. The same man born of the flesh must be born again. Jesus Himself fully explains the meaning which St. Paul puts into the words, "in Christ," in that wonderful discourse of Christ, in the sixth chapter of John, about the spiritual appropriation of the benefit of His atonement, by sacramentarians, erroneously interpreted as the reception of the Lord's Supper, Christ explains what is signified by being in Him: " He that eateth (continuously) my flesh, and (persistently) drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him." Eternal blessedness is in Him, and is imparted to all who by faith con- ANTINOMIAN FAITH. 119 is d in in tinually appropriate it. With such souls there is a mystical union with Christ, an inter-pene- tration of Spirit. So long as Jesus abides in the believer, he abides in Him : " Christ in you the hope of glory." This union excludes wilful sin. When this is committed, the union is dissolved. If Christ should continue to dwell in the heart which persists in a course of vol* untary transgression of the known law of God, He would become what St. Paul styles, " the- minister of sin," and not a destroyer of the works of the devil. In Mr. Wesley's day, when an un-Scriptural view of the doctrine of imputed righteousness was much preached, he not unfrequently met men who, while claiming to be "perfect in Christ, not in themselves," affirmed that their faith canceled their obligations to obey the Divine law. They might, as they wickedly claimed, violate any or all the ten command- ments without being guilty of sin, so long as they maintained faith in Christ. No wonder I 120 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. Mr. Wesley wrote of such men : " Surely, these are the first-born children of Satan." The true doctrine of the result of union with Christ, is very truly expressed by Rev. Mr. Sears, of the Unitarian faith : " The atonement brings the believer into such a vital union with Christ as to produce from within, outwardly^ not a putative, but a genuine, righteousness." \ \, ■■■■■■■i CHAPTER VI. THE PLYMOUTH VIEW Or THE ATONEMENT. The basis of the doctrine of imputed holiness is that theory of the atonement which represents that Christ Jesus, the sinless Son of God, in whom He was well pleased, was literally identi- fied with sin so as to be " wholly chargeable -* therewith, that we might be identified and , wholly charged with righteousness." This quo- tation is from Dr. George S. Bishop, who pro- ceeds to say, " The atonement whicli we preach is ono of absolute excliange, that Christ took our place literally — that God regarded and \ treated Christ as a sinner, and that He regards and treats the believing sinner as Christ. From - the moment we believe, God loolis upon us as if wo were Christ. . . . We then arc saved, straight through eternity, by what the Son of God has done in our place. . . . Other consid- !* -. 122 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. ^ erations have nothing to do with it. It matters nothing what we have been, what we are, or what we shall he. From the moment we believe on Christ, we are forever, in God's sight, AS Christ. Of course it is involved in this that men are saved, not hy preparing firsts that is, by- repenting, and praying, and reading the Bible, and then trusting Christ ; nor the converse of this, that is, by trusting Christ first, and then preparing something — repentance, reformation, good works — which God will accept ; but that sinner.^ are saved irrespective of what they are — how they feel — what they have done — what they hope to do — by trusting on Christ only, that the instant Christ is seen and rested on, the soul's eternity, by God's free promise, and regardless of all character and works, is fixed." We would call attention to the following points in the above quotation ; — , 1. Repentance is not necessary to saving faith. PLYMOUTH VTEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 123 2. Good works, as the fruit of saving faith, and proof of its genuineness, have no place in this scheme of salvation, and are distinctly repu- diated ; and well they may be, since by the first act of faith, as a bare, intellectual, impenitent apprehension that God punished His Son for our past, present, and future sins, " the soul's eternal salvation, regardless of conduct and char- acter, is fixed." " What we shall be matters nothing" since we have a through ticket for Heaven. St. James is an impertinence in this scheme of salvation, and his epistle may well ) be called "strawy." 3. That " God regarded and treated Christ as a sinner " ; in other words, that He actually punished His Son because he was guilty of our sins. There was a time in the life of Martin Luther when he sowed the seeds of this error, which produced a sad harvest of antinomianism. He used words which seem not blasphemous, merely because the intention was wanting. «« The prophets did foresee in Spirit that Christ 124 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. would become the greatest transgressor, mur- derer, thief, rebel and blasphemer that ever was or can be." " Whatsoever sins I, thou, and we shall have done, or shall do hereafter, they are Christ's own sins, as verily as if He had done them Himself." We once heard a layman, an ex-president of the Boston Y. M. C. A., assert in a public evan- gelistic service that " Jesus Christ on the cross was the greatest sinner in the universe ! " Such statements are usually attended by the portrayal with terrific distinctness, of the Almighty Father in the act of hurling His thunderbolts, in blasting shocks, down upon the defenceless head of His shrinking and suffering Son. / We indignantly repudiate the monstrous idea that Jesus on the cross was a sinner over- whelmed with the bolts of the Father's personal wrath. What we do afi&rm is that his sufferings and dcatli were in no sense a punishment, but a substitute for punishment^ answering the same end, the conservation of God's moral govem- / PLYMOUTH VIEW OP THE ATONEMENT. 125 ment and the vindication of His holy character while He pardons penitent believers. The chief proof-text of the doctrine that Christ on the cross was a gigantic sinner, is 2 Cor. V. 21. *' For He hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." This is styled " the sublime equation." Jesus becomes guilty of our sins and suffers their punishment, and His righteousness is henceforth forever reckoned as ours. The exchange of our sin for Christ's righteousness is " absolute." • The common sense exegesis of this text is, that Jesus became of His own free will a sin- offering for us, and that this is the meaning of sin in the first clause. This is the interpreta- tion of Augustine, Ambrosiaster, Erasmus, (Ecumenius, Vatablus, Cornelius a Lapidis, Pis- cator, Ritsche, Wolf, Hammond, Michaclis, Rosenmiiller, Ewald, Raymond, and others. It is a remarkable fact that the Hebrew word, chattath^ is used in the Old Testament by actual !. : i' 126 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. count one hundred and sixty times for sin, and one hundred and twelve times for sin-offering. It is very natural that such a mind as Paul's, saturated with the Hebrew Scriptures, should sometimes use the Greek term for sin, hamartia, in the sense of sin-offering. So obvious is this usage in Paul's Epistles, that the Revision has twice, at least, translated this term by "sin offering " — Rom. viii. 3 ; Heb. xiii. 11. We ^ contend that it should bo . thus rendered in 2 j Cor. V. 21. 4. We have insuperable philosophical and ethical difficulties in the way of receiving the statement that the guilt of the race was trans- , ferred to Christ. Character is personal, and / canjiot be transferred. Sin is not an entity, a substance which can be separated from the sin- ner and be transferred to another and be niade an attribute of his character by such a transfer. ! Sin is the act or state of a sinner, as thought is the act or state of the thinker. Neither can have an essential existence separate from their PLYMOUTH VIEW OP IHE ATONEilENT. 127 personal subject, any more than any attribute can exist separate from its substance. 5. If sin cannot exist in the abstract, it can- not be punished in the abstract. If it cannot be transferred to another, it cannot be punished in another, though one man may voluntarily suffer to save another from punishment. Hence we repudiate in the interest of sound ethical philosophy and clearness of thought, the following proposition of Dr. Bishop : — " If the sin of the believing sinner is taken from his shoulders and laid upon the Son of God, then justice, still following after sin, must strike through sin and the person of the Son of God beneath it." It is a moral axiom that only the guilty can be rightfully punished. If Christ was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners, to punish Him would be, not only contrary to all human law, but it would outrage all those God-given moral sentiments on which human law rests. It is in vain that Dr. Bishop seeks for \ ] IT — " ^i^mfm^^^m 128 ANTINOTVnANISM REVIVED. analogies to sustain tlio monstrous injustice of punishing innocence. He says, " When a father commits a crime, his whole family sink in the social scale, though innocent." Hero he con- founds the natural consequences of sin with the punishment of sin. Dr. Bishop should show that society universally hangs the innocent family on the same gibbet with the guilty hus- band and father. Then the case would be aual- agous. ' Many persons use the expression " Christ in the stead of the sinner suffered the punishment of his sin," without subjecting this proposition to that rigid analysis which theological accuracy ^requires. While it is true that Jesus is our * substitute, He is our substitute truly andstrict- * ly only in suffering, not in punishment. Sin ♦cannot be punished and pardoned also. This vwould be a moral contradiclioD. Sin is con- ditionally pardoned because Josus has suffered and died. There is no punishment of sin ex- cept in the person of the sinner who neglects / / J PT.Y^fOUTH VIE^y OP TFTK ATONEMENT. 129 80 great a Saviour. Sin was not punished on the Cross. Calvary was the scene of won- \ (Irons mercy and love, not of wrath and penalty. Says Dr. Whedon, " Punishment in the strict sense implies the guilt of the sufferer as its correlative. Whenever the sinner and the suf- ferer are not the same, it is only by an allow- able inaccuracy that the suffering can bo called punishment. It follows that it is not strictly accurate to say that Christ was punished, or that he truly suffered the punishment of sin." But this inaccuracy is no longer " allowable " when it is made the basis of the doctrine of imputed holiness, which tramples the holy law of God under foot, and flings its obligations to the winds on the plea of an inalienable stand- ing in Christ, in whom, despite my wallowing in fleshly lusts, I am seen to be as holy as He is holy. 6. But the ethical difficulties thicken as we continue om examination of this view of the atonement. . ,; i til ' 130 ANTINOMIANISM EEVIVED. A Limited Atonement Is the inevitable outcome of the doctrine that sin was punished on the cross. Whose sin? If it be answered, that of the whole human race, then universalism emerges, for God cannot in justice punish sin twice. It must be, then, that the sins ol the elect only were punished. Hence at the bottom, this system of doctrine rests upon the tenet of a particular, in distinction from a universal atonement. The fact that this basis is not avowed, and that the terminology of hyper-predestinarianism, such as " the elect,'* " the reprobates," *' special call," " irresistible grace," "perseverance of the saints," and salva- tion by "Divine Sovereignty," is studiously avoided, makes this system of doctrine still more dangerous, because these offensive feat- ures are concealed with Jesuitical cunning. We cannot resist the suspicion that this is designed, so as to make it palatable to those educated in the Arminian faith, in order to PLYMOUTH VIEW OF THE ATONEMENT. 131 \ catch them with guile. Some unreflective Arminians are thus unawares entrapped into the reception of that unmitigated scheme of doctrine which Christendom is almost univer- sally shaking off. In our first interview with Mr. Darby, we asked what was his view of election founded on the foreseen, free, acceptance of the condi- ' tions of salvation, repentance toward God, and faith in Jesus Clirist. His reply was that " an ' election, grounded upon reasons, would destroy the sovereignty of God, and that no act of the creature, no foreseen faith in Christ, conditioned election." I* ?! Is I r le ■?i I CHAPTER VII. ETEUNAI. LIFE NON-FOIIFEITABLE. In two instances Jesus speaks of everlasting life as a present possession : " He that heareth (continually) my words liatli everlasting life " (John V. 24) ; " He that believeth (persever- ingly) on me hath everlasting life " (John vi. 47). The reader of the Greek Testament sees at a glance the condition expressed in the present tense of the verb " heareth " and " believeth." If these conditions are fulfilled, the new life inspired by the first act of evangelical faith becomes everlasting. This is the common sense view. If this faith, at any point of probation, lapses, the life expires. That everlasting life once begun can be lost, is no more a contradic- tion in terns than the Jew's forfeiture of the land which God gave to them for " an everlast- * 132 1 ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLE. 133 ing possession " (Gen. xvii. 8), nor the seed of Phineas losing "the everlasting priesthood," nor the Israelites breaking "the everlasting covenant" (Is. xxiv. 5), and finding out Jeho- vah's " breach of promise " (Num. xiv. 34). Hymeneus and Philetus forfeited the everlast- ing heritage of believers by " making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience." We infer, therefore, that the words "hath everlasting life," were nerer designed as a non- forfeitable insurance policy, giving an uncondi- tional and inalienable right to the rewards of Heaven. They are a compendious expression for the spiritual life already inspired, which is destined to become everlasting if its conditions 7 are fulfilled through the whole of our probation. m A Soul Born op God can never be Un- born. An abuse of figurative language is a strong- hold of religious error. Antinomianism seizes upon " the new birth," " the being born again," 134 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. "a child or son of God," and presses these phrases into a proof of an unchangeable accept- ance with God, however grossly sinful the once regenerate person may afterwards become. J. Fletcher thus points out the fallacy in this rea- soning : *' According to the oriental style, a fol- lower of wisdo roj is called ' a son of wisdom * ; and one that d* '. j from her path, ' a son of folly ' ; a wicked luan is called * a son of Belial, a child of the wicked one, and a child of the devil.' But when he turns from wicked works, by faith, he becomes a child of God. Hence the passing from the ways of Satan to the ways of God was naturally called conversion and a netv birth. Hence some divines, who, like Nicodemus, car- nalize the expressions new birth, child of Grod, and son of God, assert, that if men who once walked in God's ways turn back, even into adultery, mur- der, and incest, they are still God's dear people and pleasant children, in the Gospel sense of the words. They ask, " Can a man be a child of God to-dav, and a child of the devil to-morrow ? / ! / ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLE. 135 Can he be born this week, and unborn the next ? " And with these questions they as much think they have overthrown the doctrine of holiness, and one-half of the Bible, as honest Nicodemus supposed he had demolished the doctrine of re- generation, and stopped our Lord's mouth, when he said, " Can a man enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born ? " The question would be easily answered, if, setting aside the oriental mode of speech, they simply asked, " May one who has ' ceased to do evil ' and learned to do well tO'day^ cease to do well and learn to do evil to--morrow ? To this we could directly reply. If the dying thief, the Philippian jailor, and multitudes of Jews, in one day went over from the sons of folly to the sons of wisdom^ where is the absurdity of saying they could measure the same way back again in one day, and draw back in the horrid womb of sin as easily as Satan drew back into rebellion, Adam into disobedience, David into adultery, Solomon into idolatry, Judas into treason, and 11 ■1 ^L T^ 136 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVEr). Ananias and Sapphira into covetousness ? When Peter had shown himself a blessed son of heavenly wisdom, by confessing Jesus Christ, did he even stay till the next day to become a son of folly by following the "wisdom which is earthly, sensual, and devilish"? Was not our Lord directly obliged to rebuke him with utmost severity, by saying, " Get thee behind me, Satan " ? A Sheep can neveb become a Goat. Here is another Antinomian abuse of figures. In the day of judgment tlie human race stand separate — the sheep and the goats. It is said that since a sheep can never become a goat, be- cause of the law of the invariability of species, so one once called by Christ a sheep can never be- come a goat. But this logic proves too much. Can a goat ever, by any power divine, become a sheep? Can a sinner ever become a saint if it is impossible for a saint ever to become an incor- rigible sinner? Yet multitudes, who live in ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLE. 137 open sin, build their hopes of heaven upon this palpable mistake. " Once I heard the Shep- herd's voice," say these apostate souls ; ^^ I fol- lowed Ifim, and received His ear-mark, water bap- tism, and therefore I was one of His sheep ; and now, though I follow the voice of a stranger who leads me into all manner of sins, into adultery and murder, I am undoubtedly a sheep ; for it was never heard that a sheep became a goat." " A washed sow is no sheep," said Mr. Darby to the writer, with an air of logical conclusive- ness. Says Fletcher, " Such persons do not ob- serve that our Lord calls ' sheep ' those who hear His voice, and ' goats ' those who follow that of the tempter. Nor do they consider that Saul, a grievous wolf, 'breathing slaughter against Christ's sheep,' and * making havoc ' of His little flock, could in a short time be changed into a sheep and a shepherd ; David, a harmless sheep (and shepherd of Israel), could in a short time commence a goat with Bathsheba, and prove a wolf in sheep's clothing to her hus- f i 'i i 138 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. band." Fletcher shows the superlative fallacy ' of this style of logic by quoting the metaphors of John the Baptist and Jesus, who style the Jews a " brood of vipers and serpents." Christ afterwards compares this vipers' brood to a brood of a hen ! Had the vipers become chick- ens? To convince the reader that this is Antinomianism Unadulterated, we quote the following from Tobias Crisp, D. D., eminent preacher and writer of the An- glican Church in the seventeenth century, that our readers may understand the logical outcome and immoral tendency of this pernicious doc- trine : — " Though a believer does sin, yet he is not to be reckoned as a sinner ; his sins are reckoned to be taken F«way from him. God reckons not his sin to be his ; he reckons it Christ's, thereiore he cannot reckon it to be his. Christ does jus- ^ tify a person before he believes ; we do not be- lieve that we may be justified, but because we ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLE. 139 are justified. The elect are justified from eter- nity, at Christ's death ; and the latest time is before we are born. It is a received conceit among persons that our obedience is the way to heaven ; but I must tell you, all this sanctifica- tion of life is not a jot the way of that justified person to heaven. To what purpose do we pro- pose to ourselves the gaining of that by our labor and industry which is already become ours before we do one jot? The Lord does nothing in his people upon conditions. He intends not that by our obedience we shall gain something, which in case of our failing we shall miscarry of. While you labor to get by duties, you pro- voke God as much as in you lies. We must work from life and not for life. Love to the brethren, universal obedience, and all other inherent qualifications, are no signs by which we are to judge of our state (" standing " is the modern term). Every elect vessel, from the first in- stant of his being, is as pure in the eyes of God from the charge of sin as he shall be in glory. ; 140 ATINOMIANISM REVIVED. Though such persons do act rebellion, yet the loathsomeness and hatefulness of this rebellion is laid on the back of Christ ; He bears the sin, as well as the blame and shame ; and God can dwell with such persons that act the thing, be- cause all the filthiness of it is translated from them upon the back of Christ. It is the voice of a lying spirit in your hearts that says * you that are believers (as David) have yet sin wast- ing your conscience.' David indeed says, ' My sins are gone over ray head,* but he speaks from himself, and all that he speaks from himself was not truth. There is as much ground to be confident of the pardon of sin to a believer, as soon as he has committed it, as to believe it after he has performed all the humiliation in the world. A believer may be assured of pardon as soon as he has committed any sin, even adultery and murder. God does no longer stands dis- pleased, though a believer do sin often. There is no sin that even believers commit that can possibly do them any hurt. Therefore, as their \ r _ \ \ ETERNAL LIFE NON-FOEFEITABLE. 141 \ / \ sins cannot hurt them, so there is no cause of fear in their sins committed. Sins are but scarecrows and bugbears to frighten ignorant children, but men of understanding see tliey are counterfeit things. If we tell believers, except they walk thus and thus holily, and do these and these good works, God wil I be angry with them, we abuse the Scriptures, undo wliat Christ has done, injure believers, and tell God lies to His face. All our righteousness is filthy, full of menstruosity, the highest kind of filthi- ness; — even what is the Spirit's must be in- volved within that which is man's own, under the general notion of cloinfj." " It is a soft and easy doctrine to bid men sit still and believe, as if God would translate them to heaven upon their couches ! Christ expects that those who have grace should put forth the utmost power thereof in laboring after the salvation He has purchased for them." " So work with that earnestness, constancy, ujid un- weariness in well doing, as if thy works alone : - -im J ■«*■ 142 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. 1 were able to justify and save thee ; and so ab- solutely depend and rely upon the merits of Christ for justification and salvation, as if thou never hadst performed one act of obedience in all thy life. This is the right Gospel frame of obedi- ence, so to work as if we were only to be saved by our own merits ; and withal so to rest on the merits of Christ, as if we had never wrought anything. It is a difficult thing to give to each of these its due in practice. When we work, we are apt to neglect Christ ; and when we rely on Christ we are apt to neglect working. But that Christian has got the right art of obedience who can mingle these two together ; who can with one hand ' work the works of God,' and yet, at the same time, lay fast hold on the merit of Jesus Christ. Let this Antinomian principle be forever rooted out of the minds of men, that our working is derogatory to Christ's work. He gave himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify to Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.' »»> , ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLE. 14S Modern Antinomianisai. J We quote from modern writers essentially the same doctrines as those taught by Dr. Crisp, only there is apparently a shrinking from the frank statement of their logical outcome. There is rather an atter \pt to draw a vail over those inferences which old Antinomianism plainly avowed. In this particular, the old is less dangerous than the new. We turn to Mcintosh's ^.otes on various books of the Bible, a series of diffuse annota- tions highly esteemed by D. L. Moody and many other evangelists : *'• The very moment in which a soul is born again, — born from above, and sealed by the Holy Ghost, — he is incorporated into the body of Christ. He can no longer view himself as a solitary individual — an independent person — an isolated atom ; he is a member of a body, just as the hand or foot is a member of the human body." " There are two grand links in Christianity, which, L? i 144 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. U though very intimately connected, are perfectly distinct; namely, the link of eternal life, and the link of personal communion. The former never can be snapped by anything^ the latter can be snapped in a moment, by the weight of a feather." It seems that a sin as light as a featlier can suspend communion, while the vio- lation of every one of the ten commandments, over and over again, can never snap the link of eternal life ! Comforting indeed to the back- slider I His fear that he may at last be filled with his own ways, are gi'oundless. " Behold- ers many faults may find ; but, as regards our standing, our God sees us only in the comeli- ness of Christ ; we are perfect in Him. When God looks at His people. He beholds in them His own workmanship ; and it is to the glory of His holy name, and to the praise of His sal- vation, that not a blemish should be seen on those who are His — those v/hom He, in sov- ereign grace, has made His own. His charac- ter, His name, His glory, and the perfection of ETERNAL LIFE NON-FORFEITABLi:. 145 His work, are all involved in the standing of those witli whom He has linked Himself." Thus it would seem that David's workmanship, in making himself an adulterer and a mardercr, is utterly ignored as a blemish. While in Uriah's bed his standing as perfectly holy is absolute. " We must never measure the stand- ing by the state, but always judge the state by the standing. To lower the standing because of the state, is to give the death-blow to all progress in practical Christianity." That is, we must never judge the tree by the fruit, but always the fruit by the tree. If a crab scion, grafted on a golden pippin, still produces crab- apples, we must aver that they are golden pip- pins, because the crab lias a golden pippin standing. " The people of God are seen only in 'the vision of the Alniighty * — seen as He sees them, without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing — all their deformities hidden from view —all His comeliness seen upon them." " He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath i 146 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. he seen perverseness in Israel." The enemy may say, " There is iniquit}'^ and perverseness there all the while." " Yes ; but who can make Jehovah behold it, when He Himself has been pleased to blot it all out as a thick cloud for His name's sake ? " " God will never rever His decision as to what His people are as to stand- ing. »» This is the comment on the shameless licen- tiousness of Israel on the plains of Moab, with the women of Midian. Their standing is still the same as it was when the prophet stood on Pisgah. "It reminds us of the opening and close of 2 Cor. xii. In the former we have the positive standing of the Christian ; in the latter, the possible state into which he may fall, if not watchful. That shows us a " man iu Christ " capable of being caught up into Pava- dise at any moment. This shows us saints of God capable of plunging into all manner of sin and folly." Of course the plunge into the ETEENAL LIFE NON-i-OBFEITAiJU:. 147 cesspool has not the least damaging effect on their clean standing in Christ. These quota- tions are from Mcintosh on Numbere. ■■ v' -< CHAPTER VIII. HOLINESS IMPUTED. There is much confused and erroneous think- ing and teaching on the subject of imputed righteousness and imputed holiness. Some are confounding the two, and teaching that the only holiness possible to us in this world is the robe of Christ's righteousness thrown around hearts inherently impure. In the interest of clear thought and Christian purity, we invite the reader to a discussion of the radical distinc- tion between imputed righteousness and im- puted holiness. The term "impute," literally signifies " to think to," to reckon one thing be- longs to another when it really does not. In the Revision it is superseded by the word "reckon." We define righteousness in man to be con- 148 In- HOLINESS I^IPUTED. 141 formity to the Divine law, and holiness con formity to tlie Divine nature. Jesus Christ is both righteous and holy. These quaHties are personal, inherent, and un- transferable. But in addition to His personal righteousness He has a mediatorial righteous- ness, the merit of His passive obedience, labors, sacrifices, sufferings, death, and high-priestly intercessions. Now, although the phrase, ** the imputation of Christ's righteoubuess," or " Christ's imputed righteousness," is not found in the Bible, the doctrine itself is found *n the epistles of Paul unfolded extendedly, and it is hinted at in the Gospels when Jesus speaks of giving His life for the world, or as a ransom for many. But it is always His mediatorial, and not His personal righteousness. The absolute necessity of this imputation in the scheme of redemption, arises from the fact that one past sin produces an eternal disconformity to the Divine law, so that the Lawgiver cannot treat us as if we had never sinned without violating I "i 150 ANTINOMIANISM liEVIVED. the truth of history, and cheating the law of its demands. Hence pardon and salvation would be impossible under the reign of strict and unbending law. But here comes in the mediatorial righteousness of Christ to all who plead it as the ground of justification, so that God can be just and the justifier of him who believeth. In other words, there is a construct- ive, not to say fictitious, conformity, to the law, now possible through faith in the merits of Christ. Otherwise, law would be forever against us. The necessity of this scheme of imputation lies in the fact that God Himself cannot change the past. It is a record abso- lutely inerasible. But when God wishes to make men holy, or bring them into conformity to His own nature, there is no such inerasible record in the way. Justification is a work done for us, and has reference to the past ; sanctifi cation is a work wrought in us, and always has respect to the present. Hence, imputation of holiness is not HOLINESS UVIPUTED. 151 necessary. In fact, in the very nature of things, it is impossible. There can be no such thing as vicarious character, for character is the sum total of what we ourselves are. There may be a vicarious assumption of another's debt ; there cannot be a vicarious assumption of another's character. Hence, holiness must be personal, inherent, inwrought and imparted by the power of the Holy Spirit, procured by the same atonement by which it is possible for us, through faith, to be conformed to the Divine law, or savingly adjusted to an inerasible, sinful record. In Chuist. The phrase "in Christ" is perpetually quoted as a proof-text to sustain the doctrine of im- puted holiness, a quality not imparted to us, being inwrought by the Holy Spirit and ever afterwards existing inherently in the believer ; but an attribute of Jesus Christ regarded by God as belonging to Christians, even when they are unholy in character and wicked in conduct. 152 AKTINOMIANISM REVIVED. The theory is that Jesus Christ is standing to- day in the presence of the Father as a specimen and representative of glorified humanity, and that faith in Him so intimately unites us with Him, that all His personal excellencies become ours in such a sense as to excuse us if we lack them. It is said that the first act of faith eter- nally incorporates us into the glorified person of Christ, so that whatever sin we may commit afterwards we incur no condemnation. Says Fletcher : " People, it seems, may now be * in Christ,' without being 'new creatures,' and * new creatures ' without casting ' old things' away. They may be God's children without God's image ; and ' born of the Spirit ' without ' the fruit of the Spirit.' " The favorite proof-text of this piece of rank Antinomianism is Rom. viii. 1 : " There is there- fore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus," with special attention called to the omission by the critical MSS. and the Re- vised Version, of the limiting clause : ** who \ HOLINESS EMPUTED. 153 \ walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." Over this omission tlie imputationists rejoice, as if it unanswerably demonstriited, the truth of their doctrine, that God, seeing the believer only in Christ, beholds no sin in him, even when he has wilfully and flagrantly transgressed the known law. They fail to note that th(^ same limiting clause stands in the fourth verse unquestioned by the critics. Hence their assertion that the flesh is a sin- ful state which does not in the least damage our perfect standing in Christ, in whom the carnally- minded believer is as holy as the Son of God Himself. It is said that " the standing is never to be judged by the state, but the state by the standing." The New Testament Scriptures re- lied on as proofs of this doctrine are those in which our faith is imputed for righteousness. V The error is in failing to notice that this refers " .to the forgiveness of sins, and not to the char- 1 ^acter after justification. * Another mistake is in not distinguishing be- 154 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. \ .tween tlie sum total of Christ's merits, called,^ .His mediatorial rigliteousness, and His own per-^ «onal righteousness, which is not transferable.^ 'Character is personal and unimputable. k % Another constantly recurring Scripture is tlie ' expression, ** in Christ " — used to prove an act- ^ ^ ual incorporation into His Person. We take up our pen to examine these words. They are not found in the four Gospels nor in the Acts , of the Apostles. The}'- are Pauline, being used only by Paul, except in 1 Pet. iii. 16 ; v. 14. The words, " in the Lord," are peculiar to Paul also. Elsewhere they are found only in Rev. xiv. 13. What does Paul mean by these phrases ? 1. He does not mean incorporation into the glorified Person of Christ, for he always (except in 1 Cor. xv. 18 — " asleep in Jesus ") avoids His purely personal name, Jesus, never saying "in Jesus," but he always adds one of His titular names, Christ, or Lord.* " In Christ," \ •1 V * On <' truth as it is in Jesus," see Meyer. Eph. It. 21. Quote Meyer and Bengei. i \ HOLINESS IMPUTED. 165 or "in the Lord," must mean, then, some in- timiite relation to His official work. 2. What this rehation is will be seen when we observe that while Luke and Peter use the term " Christian," Paul never used it, but uses the more vivid phrase, " in Christ." Let us now ex- amine a favorite text of the imputationists — 1 Cor. i. 2: "To them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus." We heartily endorse the com- ment of Meyer, " the greatest exegete of the nineteenth century ": " In Christ — namely, in^ His redemptive work, of which Christians have> become, and continue to be, partakers, by> means of justifying faith (Eph. i. 4 ; Heb. x. 10)." In the fourth verse, Meyer's note on " in Christ," is " in your fellowship with Christ." His paraphase of the thirtieth verse, " But of Him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sancti- fication, and redemption," is the following: " But truly it is God's work that ye are Chris- tians, and so partakers of the greatest Divine \ ^i ' I I I 156 ANTlNOMtANISM REVIVED. blessings, that none of you should in any way boast himself save only in God." Rom. xvi. 7 ; *' In Christ before me " — Christians before me. Rom. xvi. 10; "Approved in Christ" — i.e., says Meyer, " the tried Christian." 2 Cor. v. 17 ; "If any man is in Christ " a Christian, sa3's the same annotator. Cremer, in his Biblico-Theological Lexicon,- enumerates forty-eight texts where this phrase is used with the above meaning, such as " weak, in Christ " and " babes in Christ," for feeble ^ Christians ; " growing up in Christ," for an ad-^ vancing Christian ; " perfect in Christ," for a~ believer fully sanctified, or, in the words of^ Meyer, " perfect as a Christian, in respect to the^ whole Christian nature." " Holy in Christ " is a' phrase foreign to New Testament diction. The general meaning of the words, "in the Lord," is discipleship to the Lord Jesus, as in Rom. xvi. , 2 : " which are in the Lord "; 1 Cor. vii. 39 ; ' " To be married in the Lord " ; i, e., to a dis ciple of the Lord Jesus. V..'xHv-^ij^ ij-Ul^^e^uy^ HOLINESS IMPUTED. 157 ] (y^ The expressions " in Christ " and " in the* t^. Lord ** are the Pauline way of denoting a sav-' . mg relation to the Son of God, a union with- <• Him by faith, a union which ceases when the • »faith decays. It is quite probable that St. Paul's use of this peculiar idiom is an amplification of the words of Christ, " If ye abide in Mo," in His parable of the true vine, John xv. 1-7. That He does not here speak of an inseparable and eternal incorporation into His person, is evident from these words: "Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit. He taketh away." That this taking away is no mere temporary break in the saving relation to Christ, but an eternal cutting off, will be seen by reading the sixth verse : " If a man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch and is withered, and men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned." This solemn and expressive language is utterly meaningless, if the phrase "in Me," or " in Christ," means an inalienable stand- ing in Christ wholly independent of one's real \ ! -ii ■ '!| i 158 A-yTINOAUANISM REVIVED. I- character. Those modern champions of imputed holiness, and opponents of inwrought personal purity, the Plymouth brethren, find their air- castle rudely swept away when these words of Jesus are directed against it. A branch in the true vine may die and be sundered and burned. This is a complete answer to the words of Rev. John Darby to the writer, that " believers are parts of the glorified Person of Jesus Chiist, wlio does not walk about in Heaven dropping , His fingers and toes by self-mutilation, but re- tains every part and particle of His body for- ever." The revised version, in Eph. v. 30, omits " of His flesli and of His bones," and thus re- moves a seeming proof-text for the incorpora- tion theory. 3. This paper would not be complete if we did not refer to the objective use, by St Paul, of the phrase " in Christ," as representing, not the peculiar union of the believing subject, but the blessings of redemption included in Jesus. In this Apostle's writings, the idiom, "in HOLINESS IMPUTED. 159 Christ," has a Godward, or objective meaning, when he describes the provisions for salvation embodied in the Person and work of the Son, and a manward, or subjective meaning;, when he speaks of the believer as appropriating those provisions. As a specimen of the objective use, we quote Rom. vi. 23 : " But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord " (R. V.). See also Rom. viii. 2, 89 ; 1 Cor. i. 4 (R. V.) ; 2 Cor. V. 19; Gal. ii. 4, iii. 14 (R. V.); Eph. i. 3, ii. 6. 7 (R. V.), iii. 11, iv. 82 (R. V.) ; Phil. ii. 5 ; 2 Tim ii. 10. In all these passages Jesus Christ is presented as God*s treasury of grace and salvaiion. In examining these texts the reader will be impressed with the superior precision of the revisors in their translation of the preposition "ew," in. There are instances in which this Pauline idiom embraces both the subjective and the objective, notably Rom. vi. 11, "Alive unt" God in Christ Jesus" (R. V.). Here the believer appropriates the life that ex- ists in Jesus. 160 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. Writers in classical Greek exemplify only the objective use of " en." Thus Sophocles : " I in- deed am saved wholly in thee " ; Hesiod : *' Wliether Athens shall be enslaved or freed is now in thee " ; saya Homer : " Complete victory is in the immortal gods." But St. Paul's use of "in," as expressing the activity of the subject appropriating Christ, from the very nature of the case, has no verbal parallels in profane Greek. In conclusion, we aver that it is just as rea- sonable to interpret 1 John v. 19, " The whole world lieth in the evil one " (R. V.), as mean- ing that the whole world is in itself inherently saintly, but by imputation is wicked in the evil one, as it is to say that the best estate of be- lievers on earth is to be inherently impure, while by imputation they are spotless in Christ. According to the testimony of that cosmopoli- tan evangelist, Wm. Taylor, imputed holiness, enrobing cherished vileness, is a favorite fiction of the pagans of India. A fakir in his presence i HOLINESS IMPUTED. 161 professing spotless holiness, was rebuked by the crowd as a liar, a cheat, and an adulterer. Ad- mitting the truth of these charges, the fakir triumphantly exclaimed : " I am vile in myself, but perfectly holy in Vishnu." To be holy with a retention of the old man, would be an untruth and a flat contradic- tion (Meyer on Eph. iv. 21.) CHAPTER IX. I PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY, OR LAST THINGS. This school of theologians dwells at great length upon the future history of Christianity as it is unrolled to their anointed eyes in proph- ecy. They differ from tlie ordinary Adventists, inasmuch as they believe in a second and a third coming of Christ — the first /or the saints, and the second with them. In the first, Christ will not appear to the world, which will be in utter ignorance ol that great event. At some day — not fixed in the Plymouth scheme, but near at hand — Jesus will come down with noiseless footfall, like a thief, and raise the righteous dead, and change the righteous living, and snatch them all up in the twinkling of an eye ; and no unbeliever will notice any disturb- ance in the graveyard or see his believing wife or child slip out of this world into the glorified 162 rLYMOUTH EsCHATOLOOr. ,«, state. He nrJTi • " "'-e are three words ll "*''"* ^^-« «hout, the voice otZ *'"^ ""'^^ -« trump of God But P. '"■"''*"^'^' "»<* the -p^ai- th. littjisrrrr ^^^^ ^'ounger, says the shout is i„X p ?"^' *''^ ««nd, heard only by thl. • ""^' "" '='""- -;ts. The in^iwC: oITheT ^'^ '^^' «»d the n,pt„re are argued frl 1"^"'""''" wreotion, and the f. , ^ *^^™t'« «8- p... , "" "'e translation of P„ i. Ehjah, all of which were unoK T^ """^ kicked world. "nobserved by the ^gain,aU you knc w about thpK , yo"r treasures are gone v! . J^^""' *^«t «'ooI^hod feet ; you did 7 " "°' '"^^^ h'« '--.Hding'abCtTouter'THt'"'^''"^ nary readers have ,L " ^^''t ordi- tWef,"isthesuddenne:a'r''^'"'"^'"-» His advent. The p.. . ""*^P««tedness of perfect secrecy of £"'"*' ''"*''^- '^^ the y of His coming, work, and de- 164 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. parture, thus making the comparison teach more than Christ ever intended. The saints caught up into the air will be re- viewed by Christ with a view to the distribution of offices under His millennial reign. It seems that the question of patronage meets Christ at the openhig of His kingdom on earth, just as it vexes every new president of the United States. But Jesus will have no hostile senate to concili- ate. His civil service appointments will be made according to merit, after a rigid examina- tion. In this way the works of the saints, but not their persons, will come to judgment. The question of their personal relation to the divine government was forever adjusted when they put forth the first act of faith in Christ. All the thrones, presidencies, governorships, secre- taryships, judgeships, mayoralties, etc., down to the office of justice of the peace and constable, in all nations, will then be considered as vacant. The time occupied by this inquest into the works of tht*) saints and their assignment to t»LYMOUTH ESCHATOLOOY. 165 jre- to )le, int. the oilice^ is supposed to occupy about seven years. Then when the state of the future millennial administration is made up satisfactorily to all concerned, the King descends with all His reti* nue of saints in all the pomp and majesty of royalty, impressing every beholder with awe and wonder. Now He appears. But the world to which He comes is in a sorry condition. The devil and Antichrists have driven rough-shod over the earth in the absence of the saints, and all the yfcc^ of the book of Revelation have been experiencil ; all the events of that book after the third chapter take place — the trumpets, the seals, and the vials. By this time the world is sadly in need of a universal king, to bring order out of chaos. King Jesus makes Jerusalem His capital, and sends His appointees to their respective coun- tries to enter upon . their various offices. Per- haps St. Paul may mount the throne of Great Britain and the Indies, or become the President to • IGO ANTINOMIANISM IIEVIVED. of the United States, without the bother of an electoral college. The Jews are all going to wheel into line by sudden conversion like that of Saul of Tarsus, and become Christ's right- hand men — the inner circle nearest the throne. They will become the great missionary agency, travelling through all lands, and preaching Christ, the Jews' Messiah and the world's Sav- iour. Satan will be bound in his prison-house a thousand years, and the Gospel, which was a failure for eigliteen hundred years, will now begin its real conquest of the world. In fact, it never was Christ's design that the world should be converted through the great commis- sion, *' Go ye into all the world and preach," etc. That was designed only to keep alive on earth a testimony for Christ, not to inaugurate a victory. In the absence of Satan, and in the presence of so many Hebrew Christian missionaries steaming over every sea and traversing all lands, impelled by their new-born zeal for the Naza- PLYMOUTH ESCIIATOI.OOV. 167 rene, the work of conversion goes on very rap- idly, and a nation is born in a day. At the close of the thousand years there is a review of the nations, and the inquiry is made how they have treated Christ's brethren, the Jewish evangelists. This review of the nations — not of individuals — in a general judgment, is de- scribed in Matt. xxv. 31-4G. If you wish to embarrass a Plymouth brother, ask him to expound the whole passage, carrying through it from beginning to end the idea that nations, and not individuals of the human family, are there judged and eternally sentenced. The brother's embarrassment will be painful, and his makeshifts Will be pitiable. At the end of the millennium Satan is loosed for a season and makes sad havoc with the con- verts made in his incarceration. He raises an army and encompasses the camp of the saints, is conquered, and, with Antichrist, is cast into the lake of fire, the latter being a living man. Finally, the wicked dead are raised and 168 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. judged according to the description of the judg- ment of the dead, in Rev. xx. 12-15. To make out that only the wicked dead are judged, the Book of Life which is brought into the judg- ment is assumed to be bkudv. This is a very violent assumption, as the reader of the passsge will see. After the sentence of the wicked dead, come the new heavens and the new earth — the eter- nal abode of the saints, if I can make out the meaning of the Plymouth doctrine on this point. The effect of this teaching is, first, to belittle the Christian agencies now in operation by as- serting that they are inadequate to the conver- sion of the world. Secondly, it gives a Jewish and highly materialistic turn to the kingdom of Christ, and leads to a depreciation of the spir- itual manifestation of Christ by the Comforter in this life. Thirdly, it calls off the attention from the gi'cat saving truths of the Gospel, and leads believers to dwell upon air}- and baseless PLY^IOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 169 speculations, and profitless argumentation. Fourthly, unless the laws of mind arc all changed in this generation, we predict from the history of Adventism in past ages, that the Ply- ir.outh Brethren will soon begin to fix a definite time for the Advent, which will be followed by disappointment and all the moral and spiritual disasters of Millerism. I I > I J. • , Pl<:SSBIISM. 'One of the most depressing doctrines of the Prc-Millenarians, especially of the " Brethren," is the hopelessness of the world under the dis- pensation of the Holy Spirit. They always and everywhere assume that this dispensation is a stupendous failure. "From the Cross to the Second Advent there is nothing but a parenthesis." I shudder at the disrespect which is thus shown to the Paraclete, the personal suc- cessor to the risen Lord Jesus. It is, moreover, an imputation of a lack of goodness on the part of God to let the world f 170 ANTINOMIANISM IIEVIVED. wax worse and worse, and generation after gener- ation go down to hell, who might have been saved or their existence prevented by the earlier coming of Christ to setup His earthly kingdom, converting the Jews in a day, and, through them, converting the Gentiles in a wholesale way by sheer omnipotence. But if the world is growing better under a purer and more widely preached Gospel, there is a merciful reason for the delay of the second coming of Christ to wind up the period of human history by judg- ing the quick and thf? dead and assigning them to eternal destinies. The Pauadle of the Leaven. Every one of the Plymouth expositors, with- c'ut exception, attempts, by a wonderful exege- sis of the parable, to show that the world is steadily and certainly going to the bad. Here is the exposition : " The leaven does not mean the Gospel ; it everywhere, in the language of the Spirit of God, which is always beautifully PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 171 IS Iv cousisteiit with itself, means something evil. In twenty places, we have mention of leaven, and it always denotes evil. Into the * three measures of meal,' not into the worlds not into society at larye — no, but into the new, unleav- ened lump — into the church — a leavenlike mystery of iniquity is introduced by the * woman,' the seducer, the mother of harlots. The very hiding of it looks suspicious. Could this mean the public preaching of the Gospel ? The whole lump — sad announcement ! — was to be leavened. Has not this announcement been fulfilled ? " Then follows a dismal picture of Christianity, painted with a brush dipped in the blackness of darkness, ending with this question, "Is there one single Christian here whose garments are not soiled, in whose heart ''leaven^ in one form or another, is not work- ing?"* Let us now turn to Matt. xiii. 31-33. The mustard seed certainly represents the kingdom * Eight LeotoTM on Fropheoy. 1 m I WJUIiUB38B 172 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. of heaven in this one aspect, its inherent self- developing power from a small vital germ. The leaven just as certainly represents, not a for- eign, corrupting principle thrust into the king- dom of heaven, but that kingdom itself in another aspect, its power to penetrate and assim- ilate a foreign mass. As the yeast transforms the heavy and indigestible dougli into light and wholesome bread, so does the Gospel transform wicked hearts. For the leaven has its good side as well as its bad, and to this good use the Gospel is compared. This is the traditional explanation of this parable, which is certainly full of good sense. Let us examine the Plymouth view. The meal is the church. This is a pure assumption. The form of words, in both parables, is the same. The kingdom is like a grain of mustard- seed, and like leaven. If it is like it in its progress of corruption and deterioration, surely " there is," as Alford well says, " an end of all the blessing and healing influence of the Gos- pel on the world." •)*. PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 17M The Grain of Mustard-seed. Not content with a pessimistic perversion of the parable of the leaven, they attempt to foist an entirely new mei.ilng upon the preceding parable. The mustard-phuit grows in order to attract to its branches the carrion-eating birds, *' the vidture, the cormorant, the night-owl and the bat." These '' unclean birds " typify the gross abominations predicted by Christ as nest- ing in His Church. But what is the proof? The Lord himself tells us, in the previous para- ble, who are the " fowls " or " birds of the air " ; for it is the same word that is used in both places. " Then cometh the wicked one and catch- eth awu'^ that which was sown in his heart." T)ierefore, the birds which picked up the far- mer's seed scattered on the sidewalk, were not clean, grain-eating birds, such as pigeons and doves, but were vultures and owls! "Thus the kingdom of heaven, as it purports to be, or 174 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. nominal, national Christianity, becomes a vast and monstrous worldly system." A meaning utterly different from that in- tended by the great Teacher is read into His words by a style of reasoning which would pervert and subvert the whole Bible, if it were universally applied. Yet this sophistry is eagerly swallowed by those who desire to prove that the world is on the down grade, nearing the brink of destruction, and the church is crowded with a phetliora of sins, and is so far gone in wickedness as to be past piaying for, and deserves nothing but vilification and denun- ciation by all true lovers of Christ's appearing. We do not wonder that "the Brethren" are all come-outers after they have accepted this inter- pretation of these two parables. Probation Closed in Adam's Fall. One is surprised, in reading Plymouth theol- ogy, by the declaration made by all the writers that human probation closed with fall of Adam. PLITMOUTH ESCHATOIX)GY. 176 The idea seems to be that, since legal justifica- tion is impossible to the fallen race, that '' the era of probation has been finally foreclosed." "The Holy Spirit," says Dr. K. Anderson, "has not come to re-open the question of sin and righteousness and judgment, but to convince the world that it is closed forever." How dif- ferent is this from St. Peter's exordium at Caes- area ! " Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons ; but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him." This looks like probation on the plane ot na,"i Vl theology, the religion of the conscience. Si Paul seems to endorse Peter's doctrine in R >m. ii. 6-16. No one can study this whole pits, age without admitting that pagans, without th ^ law, and without tlie knowledge of the Gospe. are being put to the test by God to show wl. ?ther they have the spirit of faith ; i. e., the lisposition to grasp Christ, the object of faith, /ere He revealed to them ; and the purpose of righteousness, L «., 5^ I 176 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the disposition to walk by the perfect law, were it disclosed to them. This I call probation. I do not see how tlie " Brethren " can, by any possible tlieodice, justify God for bringing countless millions of fallen beings into exist- ence in a state of hopelessness implied in proba- tion " forever foreclosed." If they mean to say that no man since Adam's expulsion from Eden is under the dispensation of mere justice expressed in law, but that all men ever since that sad event have been under justice tempered by mercy, as revealed in the Gospel, and that they are still on probation but under changed conditions, no one would object. For all sound theologians reckon the Gosi)cl dispensation as dating from tiie promise, " The seed of the woman shall bruise the ser- pent's head." A little reflection will siiow that the denial of human probation is a logical antecedent of ilie negation of a geneial jutlgment of the race. If the race is not ou trial in probation, there is no PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 177 of u mo need for such a day. The two errors are yoke- fellows. They stumble and fall together. But the doctrine of the general judgm iit at the end of the world, strongly implying, as it does, that all men are now on probation, must be explained away by the Brethren, for the two doctrines cannot both be true. Let us see how they succeed. Never undeii Condemnation. The constant assertion of the Plymouth Brethren is, that a person, once " in Christ,'' by a momentary act of faith, is forever removed from the possibility of Divine, judicial disap- proval. Let us examine their Scriptural proofs. Humans viii. 1, as translated in the Revision, which omits the last clause, is frequently cited as an absolute and unconditional deliverance from present and future condemnation. I have elsewhere shown that this exemption is condi- tioned on the relative clause, in tlie fourth verse, " who walk not after the flesh, but after 178 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the Spirit," u e., while we walk thus. This con- ditioning clause has as much force in the fourth verse as it would have had in the first. John iii. 18, " He that believeth on Him is not condemned.'' Here the word believeth is in the Greek, in the present tense, which denotes a continuous state of faith. He who believes perseveringly is not, at any point of his faithful life, under condemnation. The same explanation applies to Rom. "^ ii. 33-39. The "we" and "us" of this passfge refer, not to all men, but to persevering believ- ers. In Gal. iii. 13, " Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law." The persons included in "us" are fully described in the eleventh and twelfth verses, those who constantly live by a faith which bears the fruit of obedience. " The * just shall live by faith." PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 170 py a :he The Saints will not be Judged in the Last Day. This doctrine is really included in the pre- ceding. The word for " condemnation " is often translated " judgment " in the Revision. The great proof-text of the " Brethren " is John v. 24: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and comcth not into judg- ment, but has passed out of death into life." (R. V.) Here the " judgment " evidently means the condemnatory side of the great tri- bunal. The life begins with the believing, and continues, and becomes eternal on the condition of faith persisted in through human prf)bation. As Dean Alford well says : ** Where tL.e faith is^ the possession of etenuil life is ; and wtert. the ODe remits, the other is forfeited. Bui aere the faith is set before is £is an andm^mg antl its effects described in their CSee Epli. I. ly, f^O.) ' . IhO ANTINOMIANI8M REVIVED. In all of God's promises of eternal life to the righteous, there is an implied condition which is sometimes expressed, as in Heb. iii. 6, 14, 2 Pet. i. 10, 11, Rev. xxii. 14 (R. V.) • The grand reason why the saints will not be « judged, lies in the fact that their sins were * judged on the cross, and condemned once for all ; and the believer need not have any concern about his sins past, present and future, since in the sight of God they are blotted out forever. Very comforting doctrine, this! The future immoralities of the saints are annihilated by the blood of Christ; and we are the saints. We have a certificate of our heavenly standing signed and sealed by the Holy Spirit. This is my ptii'^-up, non-forfeiting insurance policy. An occasional outburst of unholy tempers or indulgence in the lusts of the flesh may becloud my communion for an hour, but they cannot damage my standing in Christ, or vitiate my title to life everlasting. If one should fall into habitual sin, " he only sleeps." As sleep does pot affect the validity of a man's title-deeds tp PLYMOUTH ESOHATOLOOT. 181 his farms, so spiritual sleep the most profound does not damage my title to the skies. Precious doctrine ! Who is so unbelieving as not to fall in love with it at first sight, especially if he be a periodical Christian, and is most of the time at the aphelion ? But on what is this doctrine built? On ' these two words — in Christ, Let us hear • what Jesus Himself says : ** If any man abide • not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is ' withered, and men gather them, and cast them • into the fire, and they are burned." The mi- t nuteness of this description of a branch of the true Vine, once vitalized by its sap ; the picto- rial and impressive portrayal, just before the apostasy of Judas, of these five particulars, — the withering, the cutting off, the gathering, the casting into the fire, and the burning,— have an import of deep and awful solemnity, disclosing, as they do, that the most intimnto unity with Christ, in probation, does not shut out the possibility of a perverse use of our fre« agency, entailing eternal perdition* #f 182 ATINOMIANISM IIKVIVED. A JUDGMKNT OF PeIISONS AND A JUDGMENT OP WOUKS. Before leaving tliis topic, we should notice the Plymouth distinction between a judgment of persons and a judi^nient of works. They teach that tlie persons of believers were judged at the cross, and they were ac<[uitted once for all. Tlieir works are to be reviewed by Christ, not to determine the question of destiny to heaven or to hell, but to decide on each one's amount of rewards. This, thev s;iv, is not properly called a judgment. l>ut the Scrip- tures make no such distinction. We are to be judged and assigned to a destiny of bliss or woe, according to the deeds done in the body. When a criminal act is condemned, the crim- inal actor is condemned. Unman courts know nothing of a fancied judgment of works aside from the worker. The purpose for which they administer law is to reach persons by their judgments. PLYMOUTH ESCUATOLOOT. 183 or l-im- lOW iide |hey leir A radical error in Plymoutli ethics seems to be a forgetfulness that a moral agent is a unit incapable of division into parts, as the old man and the new man, the person and the works? one of which segments may be innocent, and the other guilty. This error we have refuted in the discussion of the two natures. The General Judgment Denied. The General Judgment at the last day is very stoutly denied by the " Brethren," as may be inferred from tho last paragraph. If the reader wishes to confound tlieiu and make them writhe in pain, ask them to explain St. Paul's words in Rom. xiv. 10-12 : " For we shall a.l stand before the judgment seat of Christ (God — Rev. Ver.) For it is written, as I live, saith the Lord, to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess to God. So tlien each one of us shall give account of himself to God.'* Here the " Brethren " must choose one of the three horns of the following trilemma : — IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I ^MIIIIM 112.5 IIM 112.2 116 m 2.0 1.8 L25 1.4 1.6 ^ 6" — ► ^. v: i9 /}. ^' •c'l ""l. '/ /A Photogi^hic Sciences Corporation 33 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 872-4503 w^ ;\ rr Ml 184 ASTIKOMIANISM REVIVED. The words " we all," " each one of us," "every," most mean (1), all mankind, saints and sinners, or (2), the saints only, or (3), the wicked only. If either of the first two is chosen, the saints will be judged. But if the third is chosen, how do you account for the fact that St. Paul deliberately includes himself ("we" and "us") among the wicked? His constant habit is to use these pronouns either referring to all men, more commonly to believ- ers. There is no instance of his classifying himself with unbelievers. The same re-^soning applies to 2 Cor. v. 10, with the addition of the fact that Paul here analyzes the words " we all " into two classes, those who have done good, and those who have done evil. This unanswerably demonstrates that the saints are not on the judgment seat as associate judges, but before that august tri- bunal. In Heb. ix. 27 — " It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment " — it is manifest that the judgment is co-exten- ■i; l|; PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 185 it ten- sive with dentil, and is in no way conditioned on character. Hence the saints will come into judgment after death. The strength of this argument is immediately perceived by the Greek scholar when he sees that the word for " men ' is anthropoid a term so broad as to com- prehend the whole race. Then to make surety doubly sure, it is preceded by what grammari- ans call " the generic article," which must often be left untranslated in English, but means all the human race (Hadley, § 529). We could hardly keep from la'ughing in the face of the venerable Christian scholar, when, at my request, Mr Darby gave an exposition of Matt. XXV. 31-46. What pitiable make-shifts to explain away this most solemn and awful passage in the Holy Scriptures ! " It was not a final and universal judgment, but a review of the Gentile nations. Individuals are not here judged, but nations other than the Jews. The point to be determined is, how these nations have treated the Christianized Jews whom I! m : } 186 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. Christ will send forth to convert the Gentiles after His coming and setting up of His visible kingdom on the earth. ' My brethren ' are Jews. Jesus never called anybody brother but a Jew." But when pressed to explain more particularly the sheep and the goats, and the final sentence, the wriggling and floundering of this great evangelist was something wonderful to behold. May I never see another man, mani- festly of so great genius and learning, com- pelled to crawl through orifices so small. There is something very depressing to a gen- erous mind to witness such an intellectual humiliation in the attempt to save a baseless dogma from a manifest overtlirow. St. Paul, a thorough student of the Old Tes- tament prophecies, and illumined by plenary inspiration, never interprets the Old Testament as predicting the literal return of the Jews. He spiritualizes the seed of Abraham, the sac- rifices, the circumcision, and Jerusalem, and he distinctly foretells the spiritual salvation of the './ PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGV. 187 he the Hebrews, not before " the fuhiess ot the Gen- tiles be come in," but after that event (Rom. xi. 25). The faith of the Gentile world receiv- ing Jesus as their Saviour will drown out the unbelief of the Jews, and thev will receive Him as their Messiah. Is not this great Apos- tle, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, a more accurate interpreter of the proph- ets than any uninspired man, or class of men, in modern times? The universal Church of Christ, from the be- ginning to the present hour, has never formu- lated pre-Millenariunism in its creed state- ments of Christian truth. They all speak of Christ as coming "to judge tlie quick and dead," but never to set up an outward and visi- ble kingdom " with Jerusalem for the centre of worship and of blessing." Examine that sum- mary of Christian faith, the Apostles' creed, so- called, not because it was made by them, but oecause it is a compend of their doctrines, and you will find no trace of Chiliasm contained 'J- 188 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. therein. The judicious Bishop Pearson, in Jiis Exposition of the Creed, says, " That the end for which He shall come, and the action which He shall perform when He cometh, is to judge all those which shall then be alive, and all which ever lived." The Nicene Creed, better known and more generally recognized than any other, except the Apostles', teaches exactly the same doctrine with respect to the purpose of Christ's second advent, " to judge the quick and the dead." There is even a verbal agreement. The next most important symbol of the early church, the Athanasian Creed, has these words : " Whence He shall come to judge the quick and dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies, and shall give account of their works." All these tlu*ee great creeds agree in four points: — 1. That Christ will come again. 2. The object of His advent will be *' to judge PLYMOUTH ESCIIATOLOGY. 189 ge the quick and the dead." This they testify with one voice, and as preliuinary, all confess the resurrection of the dead, meaning all the dead. 3. All imply what the Athanasian distinctly states, that this resurrection and judgment will be at His coming. 4. All are silent about any pre-millennial coming, or personal reign, or any of the pecu- liar tenets of millenarians. Now these creeds universally received, in ancient and modern times, by Roman, Greek, and Protestant churches, must be presumed to accord with the Divine Word. The Augsburg Confession, A. D. 1530, says: " It is taught that Christ will appear at the end of the world to sit in judgment, and that He will raise all the dead, and will give to the righteous and elect eternal life and endless joys ; but wicked men and devils He will con- demn, and they shall be tormented without; end." M iff It ';, I 190 ANTl5?OMlAMSM KEVIVED. It adds this significant item : " Others are also condemned, who are now scattering Jewish notions, that prior to the resurrection the right- eous will possess a temporal kingdom, and all the wicked will be exterminated." Substantially the same clause, " to judge the quick and the dead," is found in the Metropoli- tan, 1530 ; Basle, 1534 ; Second Basle, 153G ; Second Helvetic, 1564 ; Heidelburg, 1562 ; Bel- gic, 1562 ; Scotch, 1560 ; Anglican, 1551-1562 ; Westminster, 1643-48; Catechism of Trent, 1566 ; and Orthodox Confession, 1642. This array of creeds, ancient and modern, Protestant, Papal, and Greek, teaches a doc- trine wholly irreconcilable with the first princi- ples of millenarianism, or modern Second Ad- ventism. If it is true that all men are wiser than one man, it is true that all churches are more correct in a doctrine held in common than one small sect which sets up a doctrine incon- sistent with it. The prophecies adduced as teaching the PLYMOUTH KSCHATOLOGY. 191 ;on- tl\e leturii of the Jews, a!i(l tlie temporal reigu of Christ at Jerusalem, present a view of Chris- tianity so grossly materialistfj as to be abso- lutely irreconcihible with Clirist's spiritual kingdom. Isaiah xiv. 1, 2, a commonly-quoted proof-text for the restoration of the Jews, declares tliat they will be slave-holders. " The house of Israel shall possess them (strangers) in the land of the Lord, for servants and hand- maids." After tlie spirit of philanthropy, kin- dled in men's hearts l)y tlie (iospel, has led them to sweep every form of involuntary servi- tude from the earth, it is utterly repugnant to all our ideas of moral, not to sa}'' of Cliristian progress, to read that chattel slavery, the pos- session of slaves, will be re-established under the eye of Jesus, the visibly enthroned King. What a moral absurdity ! Again, Zech. xiv. 21, teaches that the re- turned Jews will offer animal sacrifices in Jeru- salem, and boil the flesh in pots. How can this be reconciled with the abolition of the Levitical V': .V ■i ■I 192 ANTINOMIANISM liKVIVKD. law, as taught by Paul ? What would be the significance and efficacy of bloody sacrifices after the Lamb of God has been slain as u sufficient atonement for sin ? »» « ■> ' ( >1 CHAPTER X. THE PROPHETIC CONFERENCE REVIEWED. i CON8PKCTUB OF ITS DOCTRINES. The author has thought that he could give the best refutation of the Plymouth Eschatology by a republica- tion of his review of " The Prophetic Conference," held in New York in 1878. It was published in Zion's Herald, soon afterward, in a series of eight articles. The recent Prophetic Conference in New York, for the setting forth and advocacy of the general outline of the Plymouth scheme of last things, is the effect of causes which the writer has watched for several years with the deepest interest. It is the natural fruitage of the Ply- mouth literature brought from England and recommended to American Christians by cer- tain popular evangelists in their sermons, Bible readings, and evangelical conferences. These evangelists, though they discard the name of 103 f 1 194 ANTINOMIANTSM REVIVED. Plyinoiitli Brethren, have sown broadcast their doctrines, with u zeal and earnestness rivaling the Brethren themselves. The Conference was for the purpose of advo- cating the doctrine that tlie second coming of Christ is not, as is commonly believed, to raise the dead, judge the living and the dead, and wind up the history of the human race on the earth, but to raise the righteous dead, to set up a visible kingdom, and to reign in i>erson on the earth during a tliousand years. This is called Qhiliasm^ from tlie Greek, and Millenari- miism, from the Latin, word for a thousand. But the more exact term is pre-millennialisra — a term which describes the second advent as occurring before the thousand years. It may be interesting, before discussing its teachings, to look for a moment at the denominational complexion o^ ^^he Prophetic Conference, which was composed of ministers and laymen, the former greatly preponderating ; one Lutheran, one Dutch Reformed, one Reformed, ten Con- tieir ling dvo- g of raise , and 1 the et up )n on his is lenari- sand. sin — • nt as t may kings, tional which n, the heran, Con- PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 196 grega tional, fifteen Episcopal, twenty-seven Baptist, forty-three Presbyterian, seven Meth- odist, and ten undenominational, which, we suppose, means Plymouth. The first impression which this makes on the mind of a Methodist is that his Church has relatively the least stock in this concern. If we had been nnmericail^v represented, we would have had nearly a hundred. But this is not a matter wh^'ch we arr -.isposed 1'^ cry over. It indicates that Methodist -^ are in too close a grapple with this present wicked world to sit down and waste time in speculatin^r upon the future. It indicates that as a Church we are by no means so discouraged with the progress of the Gospel as to pronounce the dispensation of the Holy Spirit as inadequate to the con- quest of the world for Christ. We shall see, as we review the strong Calvinism involved in the pre-millennial scheme, that there are theo- logical reasons for the cold shoulder of Meth- odism. Eighty-one were from Calvinist and ff ■ I 1 J 'I- 196 ANTINOIHIANISM REVIVED. , twenty-two from Arminian Churches. Of the ^ papers on special topics read at the Conference, twelve were by Calvinists and three by Armin- ians. It is not our purpose to go into a review of these papers in detail, but to outline the doc- trines, and point out some difficulties in the way of our assent. In nearly every paper and address there was a declaration tliat the world will never be con- quered by the agencies now in the field ; not because of any failure on the part of the Cliurch to co-work with the Spirit, but because Christ never designed that the present di«pensation should enthrone Him over the world. This is a merely preparatory dispensation to the future kingdom. The Church is not the kingdom, but a temporary institution for tlie training of a people whom Christ is talcing out of the Gen- tiles for Himself. The kingdom cannot exist till the King is present in person, destroying pagan powers by force, and converting the peo- PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 197 *: pie by the wholesale, by the majesty of His glorious presence. Yet this presence is to be localized at Jerusalem ; the Jews are to rally around His uplifted standard, and to be con- verted immediately after His mounting the throne of David, and they, with all the zeal of young converts, are to go forth and preach Christ to the Gentiles with marvellous success. One of the speakers in the Conference assures us that everybody will then be converted. Just how free agency is adjusted to this state- ment the speaker did not tell us, though we are aching with a desire to know. But we suppose Dr. Imbrie would say that all are to be saved by irresistible grace. Hear him: "Regenera- tion is a glorious change in reference to this earth and the race upon it. It comprehends the appearing of the Saviour to accomplish it ; the resurrection by Hiai of His departed saints, and the rapture (catching up) of His living saints to take part in His acts of dominion (holding offices under Him) ; the overthrow of li 198 ANTENOMIANISM REVIVED. all forms of evil on the earth ; the repentance and restoration of Israel ; the outpouring of the Spirit on all flesh ; the renewal of the earth to far more than its original beauty before the curse ; the entire renewal of every child therein honu, and thus the atonement of Jesus made availing and applied to perpetual generations ; the removal of all physical evils as well as moral.^ The parantheses and italics are ours. We cannot see why moral freedom in this scheme is not to be crushed out by almiglitiness, and con- verts to ChiTst are not to be made by sheer power, as the Pope converted tribes in northern Europe on the alternative of the sword or bap- tism. To our Arminian eye we see no differ- ence. In the present dispensation men are converted by the suasion of the truth under the gentle and resistible influences of the Spirit. But in the future glorious regeneration of the earth, the Spirit, we are left to suppose, will drop the sword of the truth which failed PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 199 before, and will come down upon the sinner with the trip-hammer of Omnipotence, crush- ing him into the die of sainthood in a twink- ling. But here comes the greatest wonder of all ; why cannot a power, which irresistibly and infallibly converts, infallibly keep the soul in a gracious state ? Dr. luibrie insists that every- body will be converted in the millennium, or world's regeneration, but admits that when Satan is unchained, a countless host of these converts will so thoroughl}^ backslide that Satan will deceive them into enlisting in a war against Christ in numbers " as the sand of the sea," going up on the breadth of the earth and com- passing the camp of the saints about, and fire will come down from God out of heaven and devour them (Rev. xx. 7-9). So there will be a possibility of total apostasy under the glori- ous reign of the Person of King Jesus, while there is, according to Dr. Imbrie's Calvinism, no such possibility under the dispensation of ^o ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the Holy Spirit. This is a wonder, indeed. But to us it is no surprise that machine-made Christians should fail when once the hand of almighty coercive power is removed from them. Converts made by force must be kept by force ; those made by the suasion of truth may be kept by the same means, though Satan constantly roars along their path. Hence we believe that the present dispensation is the most favorable for the development and growth of virtue which this world will ever see, and that the future dispensation which exists in the dreams of Chiliasts — the personal reign of Christ in bodily form on the earth, cowing the wicked into subjection by the awe of His majestic and glorious presence — will not afford the conditions requisite to a fair probation. When free agency is overpowered by some motive of overwhelming weight, as in death- bed repentances, we are always on the lookout for spurious conversions. It is exceedingly di£Bcult to make a virtuous choice under such a PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 201 ;■■ preponderance of terror. Hence we all exhort sinners not to defer submission to Christ till the hour of death. Now, the second coming of Christ is always represented as a thousand-fold more awful than death. He will be revealed in flaming fire, with the holy angels, on the throne of His glory. If He sets up that throne, not as a judgment tribunal for the day of doom, but as a permanent government for a thousand years. He will have destroyed the very genius and spirit of the Gospel, which is the sway of human hearts by truth and love, and He will have inaugurated the reign of force instead. This will be stripping Christianity of its essen- tial glory, the "grace and truth by Jesus Christ," and going back to the iron system of law which came by Moses. It will put the mount, that quaked and burned with fire in the . foreground, completely hiding Calvary from the sinner's eye. It will be a public confession that a fallen world cannot be restored by the i '^■■'( m - 202 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. moral power of truth and love under the sua- sion of the Paraclete, and a resort to force for the triumph of His kingdom. We can see how an old-fashioned Calvinist, who believes in irresistible grace, can accept this doctrine ; but how an Arminian, trained to magnify human freedom and the suasive power of Gospel motives for the renovation of the will, through the Holy Spirit applying truth assented to by the intellect, and taught to reject salvation by mere sovereignty, can accept the Millenarian idea of the universal triumph of Christ, surpasses our poor under- standing. But there is a greater wonder. If the world is to be subdued to Christ by a stroke of His omnipotence, and not by the slow process of redeeming love — the story of the Cross told o'er and o'er in ever- widening circles down the generations, till every creature has heard the glad evangel — why does not that stroke fall now, or, rather, why did it not fall thousands of years ago? If the world is growing worse il: >» PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 203 can rorld His jss of told the the le fall [sands rorse and worse, and there is no hope for its salva- tion under the present Gospel agencies, it can- not be that the second coining of Christ to set up His kingdom is delayed through the Divine compassion and long-suffering ; for these would prompt God to interpose immediately, or rather, it would have prompted Him to interpose long ago to prevent the race drifting hopelessly ' down to inevitable ruin. But if the coming of Christ is to institute the general judgment and execute the eternal doom of the incorrigible, and there is a remedial system gradually ex- tending through all the earth, we have a good reason for the delay of Christ, the merciful Intercessor, to assume the office of an inexora- ble Judge. But if He foresees the inevitable failure of the gradual triumph of the Spirit, and if it is His purpose to discard this mode of \ saving men, and to disentangle Himself entirely from it, and to institute His kingdom by down- right omnipotence, saving the race by force, ; why does He delay ? The pre-millenarian can give no satisfactory answer. i If I f ..V } 11 i^ In CHAPTER XI. DIFFICULTIES OF LITERALISM. In our attempt to accept the teachings of this body of good men, we find an insuperable obstacle in their literal exegesis of Scriptures which are manifestly figurative. By way of illustration, we will examine their method of explaining Zech. xiv. In proof of the person- al reign of Christ at Jerusalem, no Scripture is quoted more frequently and more confidently than portions of this chapter, especially the fourth and ninth verses : " And His (the Lord's) feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives." " And the Lord shall be king over all the earth ; in that day shall there be one Lord, and His name one." Now, we lay down as a canon of interpretation, that a homogeneous passage of God's Word must be expounded homogeneously ; that is, it must be 204 & iJ i !L!!Ulll i W PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOQY. 205 r of 1 of son- f e is ntly the (the the be lere we at a be tbe entirely literal or entirely symbolical. It will not do to mix these methods and dodge an ab- surd literalism by resorthig to a figurative in- terpretation wherfj the passage is a homogene- ous unit. In the light of this principle let us go through this chapter, applying a literal exe- gesis. In verse 2 " all nations " (not some, or all by representatives, but all the nations of the globe) "gather against Jerusalem to battle." This is, of course, to be us real and visible as Waterloo or Gettysburg, only a myriad-fold more bloody. Jesus Christ is to be in tlie field in bodily form as really as General Grant was in the battle of the Wilderness. Whether the Prince of Peace will " go forth " singly " and fight against those nations, as when He fought in the day of battle," or as a general in com- mand of an army, is a question whicli is deter- mined by the fifth and fourteenth verses, in which we find the Jewish brigade in the field and " all the saints " with the Lord. 3 1 i\ Kit I I 206 ANTINOMIAl^ISM REVIVED. The inference is, the saints will not stand as idle spectators, but will all have a hand in the fight. These saints are the righteous dead of all past ages, raised from their graves, and the living believers, who were all caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and who descended with Him at His appearing after receiving their reward — some ofBce in the millennial king- dom. This scene brings vividly to mind the Homeric battles before the walls of Troy, where bloodless immortals — gods and demi- gods — sword in hand, mingled in the gory battles of the Greeks and Trojans. But a scrutiny of our Hebrew Bible develops another difficulty : " And Judah also shall fight against Jerusalem," not at Jerusalem. This compli- cates matters ; for the Jews have all been con- verted, and have become Christ's foremost ad- herents. That they should turn against the capital city of their Messiah King, after He had gathered them to the land of their fathers, is something very mysterious. Will some Chiliast rise and explain ? PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 207 rs, IS Liast But, in addition to all these difficulties, na- ture is to be convulsed, the mount of Olives to be cleft asunder, and a great valley to take its place, running eastward to the Dead Sea, through which a stream of water is to run, and another stream is to run westward to the Mediterranean, possibly, making a sea-port of Christ's capital. The convenience of this ar- rangement will be seen when we read that every one that is left of all the nations which come against Jerusalem, shall even go up, year by year, to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the " feast of tabernacles." This going up of the whole world annually to Jeru- salem, which, according to the Levitical law, must be done by families and not by proxy, would be quite impracticable for the Western nations, with the present difficult landing at Joppa, and a horse-back ride over tlie hills to the Holy City. How many ships it would take to carry, every year, the whole human family, or one half — say 700,000,000 — counting out p •■ I 208 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the children, the very aged, and those near enough to Jerusalem to go by land, we leave to the pre-millennial arithmeticians. It would be safe to predict that the ocean-carrying busi- ness would be exceedingly lively, and that American shipping would not be so depressed as it has been since the great Rebellion. In answer to the question how these annual pilgrims to the capital of the millennial king- dom are to be fed, and who is to carry on the world's agriculture, we have at hand the reply of Papias (A. D. 100), the first great millena- rian : " Iri like manner a grain of wheat will produce ten thousand heads, and each head will bear ten thousand grains, and each grain will yield ten pounds of clear white flour ; and oth- er seeds will yield seeds and herbage in the same proportion." This fecundity of nature reduces the difficulty to that of a sufficient number of harvesters, millers and bakers. We infer from the statement of Irenaeus that there may be some difficulty in securing the grape PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGT. 209 ere ipe crop ; " The days will come when vines shall grow, each bearing ten thonsand brandies, and on each branch there will bo ten thonsand twigs, and on each twig ten thousand clusters of grapes, and each grape, when expressed, will yield twenty- ive metratai of wine (i. e., about two hundred and nine gallons). And when any one of tlie saints shall take hold of a clus- ter, another cluster will cry out, ' I am a better cluster, take nie, and on my account give thanks unto the Lord.' " We infer that when each grape-vine will produce wine to the amount of one hundred and eighty thousand billions of gallons, there will be plenty of work for Gough, Murphy, Dr. Reynolds and Frances E. Willard, during the thousand years of the good time coming ; for even the saints may be in danger of repeating the folly, in their regenerated earth, that Noah did, in his renewed world, after all the sinners were drowned. But let us return from this digression to our literal exposition. What are the human family » 210 ANTINOMTANISM REVIVED. to do after they have all been trausported to Palestine ? They are to keep the feast of taber- nacles. They are to build booths in the streets of the city and on the house-tops. This will require considerable more space than Palestine itself can afford ; for when people are on a joy- ous picnic it will not be in harmony with the spirit of the occasion to crowd them together like Africans in the hold of a slave-ship. But this difficulty ot literalism we must pass by, and inquire into the kind of religious ser- vice these pilgrims are expected to render. We find that in everything except circumcision they are commanded to be Jews. They must attend a localized worship as did the Jews ; they must keep one of the great Jewish feasts, under pains and penalties for disobedience ; " the Lord's house " will be standing, and there will be the " bowls " — literally, " sprinkling bowls " for blood-sprinkling, and the " pots " for seeth- ing the peace-offerings. In short, it is said that "they that sacrifice " shall come and take of PLYMOUTH BSCHATOLOGY. 211 them and seethe therein. " The altar " is spoken of, and its whole ritual is certainly im- plied as obligator}'. The sacrificial slaughter of animals at the Lord's altar and in the Lord's liouse is spoken of undeniably. What will be the significance of these animal sacrifices after the one and sufficient sacrifice of the Lamb of God? Will some literalist who insists tliat Jesus will set up His throne at Jerusalem, be so kind as to tell us ? It will not do to spiritu- alize the sacrifice unless you spiritualize the whole chapter. Our explanation is very simple. When God would convey to the Jews tlie idea that in some future time all the human race would be wor- shippers of Him, he condescendtnl to their own narrow notions of true worship, namely, com- ing to Jerusalem and offering sacrifice. The whole chapter is to be interpreted spiritually. The waters going eastward and westward sym- bolize a spiritual Christianity going forth from Jerusalem to refresh and save the world. The V \\ 1 1 II 212 AimNOMIANISM REVIVED. rending of the mountain to make way for the stream is the prophetic imagery in which is couched the prediction of the providential removal of obstacles in the way of the spread of the Grospel. Thus most of the difficulties of this obscure chapter vanish when we take a spiritual view. Other difficulties press upon the literal inter- pretation of this chapter. We mention only one. If any people refuse to go up to Jeru- salem, they are threatened with drought and the plague. Here both moral and natural evil, or suffering in consequence of sin, are treated j as possibilities, in the very millennium. But, / according to Dr. Imbrie, both natural and I moral evil wUl be excluded. Who will relieve i this discrepancy between millenarian teaching \ and the threatened punishments in this their favorite prophecy ? If any reader of Zech. xiv. still insists that the language must be literally interpreted, we advise him to read the eighteenth Psalm, in PLT^rOUTH ESCHATOLOaT. 213 that L, we I, in which Daviil describes his deliverance from his enemies by divine interposition. Can the same reader believe that it is literally true of Jeliovali — " There went np a smoke out of His nostrils, and fire out of His mouth devoured; coals were kindled by it," etc. ? Then let the reader turn to Joel ii. 28-32, and read the graphic account which will convulse all nature, if understood literally. Then read Peter's exegesis of this Scripture as descriptive of the coming of the Paraclete (Acts ii. 17). We venture to say that if Peter's exegesis were not on record, the modern pre-millenialists would stoutly assert that no event in past his- tory corresponds to this picture of " the great and terrible day of the Lord ; " and they would be applying the passage to some future upheaval of nature and miraculous revolution of society, whereas it related only to the com- ing and gentle sway of the Holy Spirit over be- lievers and His work of couvicting sinners. \ CHAPTER Xn. PBEDESTINARIAN BASIS. We ca'iinot receive the teachings of the Pro- phetic Conference by reason of its quite clearly- pronounced Calvinism. This is not a non- essential part of the scheme lugged in by the predestinarian essayists, but is fundamental in the system. The design of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit is not to save all men, but to take out of the Gentiles a people for Christ's name. These constitute His chosen Bride. He meets her for the first time in the air. She is to have special honors ever after. A large mil- lennial family may spring from her, but they are inferior in dignity and privilege to the Bride, the Lamb's wife. Here we have an attempt to revive the moribund doctrine of unconditional election, by detaching and sup- pressing the twin tenet, unconditional reproba- tion. 214 PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGT. 215 Pro- jarly- non- y the tal in ion of >ut to Liist's He he is e mil- they the e an ne of 8up- (loba- Rev. Dr. A. J. Gordon, in his attempt to disprove the simultaneous resurrection of the human race at the second advent, and in his advocacy of the resurrection of the righteous, as "special and eclectic," a thousand years before the rising of the wicked, speaks thus : " The doctrine of election, which we profess to hold, should not be a mere abstraction of the- ology, an article of faith which we find it necessary to adopt in order to insure a con- sistent and Scriptural body of divinity, while we ignore its practical application. It is, per- haps, the most solemn and awful of all Scriptu- ral revelations. It certainly can only be dis- cussed and preached effectively by us in those rare states of mind where the exquisite balance has been reached between tender adoration of the sovereignty and holiness of God, and pathetic sympathy with the helplessness and sinfulness of man. While, therefore, it is the instinct of the truest piety to leave God to carry out what belongs wholly to the domain 216 I ANTINOIMIANISM EEVTVfit). of His will, it sliould be equally the care of an exact and loyal theology to note the application of this principle at the various stages of redemption, and speak accordingly. Thus we speak very constantly of our missionary enter- prises as destined to convert the heathen nations to Christ. The Holy Spirit says that God hus visited the Gentiles, ' to take out of them a people for His name.' We speak about the world being converted. The Lord said to His first disciples what !!« says to us, and what He will say, we believe, to the last that shall be converted under this dispensation : ' Ye are not of this world, but I have chosen you out of the world.' We speak of Christ's coming at the last day to a race that has been redeemed and saved under the preaching of the Gospel. Christ, in speaking of that event, says that ' the Son of Man will send His angels to gather together his elect,' etc. We speak of all men being raised up together at the appearance of the Lord to be judged. Christ speaks of those PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 217 re of an plication tages of rims we ry enter- heathen jays that ke out of sak about d said to and what ,t shall be e are not lut of the [g at the imed and Gospel, that * the ;o gather all men trance of of those who shall be * accounted worthy to obtain that age and the resurrection from among the dead.' " In this long quotation the reader will note a quiet rebuke for what " we say," in the use of terms which indicate the universality of the divine regards, and of the redemptive plan, and he will observe a narrowing of it down to the elect, the selection of whom " belongs wholly to the domain of God's will." Thus it seems that we modern Christians, theologians and mission- ary boards, have become broader in our views and aims than our great Founder, Christ Him- self. To be sure, He once said something about preaching His gospel to every creature, but He intended that it should be only a common call to all, while the Holy Spirit, who had looked into the depths of the Father's secret will, and had seen the names of the elect — a definite number — written there, would infallibly give these a special call, accompanied by irresistible grace. Hence it was absolutely certain before 218 ANTmOMIANISM EBVTVED. \? I V H the foundation of the world that every person whose name was on that precious register, hidden in the bosom of God, would be found arrayed in white at the descent of His Son, the Bridegroom. Dr. Gordon's resurrection for the elect only, needs only an atonement for the elect alone to put a very handsome finish upon the system, making it symmetrical and beautiful. This lacking ornament is supplied by Rev. H. M. Parsons, in his paper on " The Present Age and the Development of Anti-Christ." Hear him : "Each age (religious dispensation) had its assigned work in the recovery of heaven. Our own age has its section. It is to gather from out the nations (Gentiles) the redeemed people of God." Here is plainly taught the doctrine that the Gentiles are not redeemed, but only a people scattered among them are redeemed. The old doctrine of a limited atonement, preached in New England a century ago, but now almost universally banished by the pres- k PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOOY. 219 ence of a biblical Arminianism, creeps forth again into the light of day in this convention of the prophets. Hear the peroration of Mr. Parsons : " Brethren and friends, we are called to preach the Gospel to every creature during this age, that from every nation, and tongue, and people, the Lord Jesus may gather in His dear Bride." We have always supposed that our commission was to every creature because Jesus Christ tasted death for every man. But according to Calvinian Millenarianisra, we are to preach to every creature only because Christ omitted to put a chalk-mark on His Bride. If this mark had been made, it would have 'simpli- fied our work, and we could pass by those whom Christ did not intend to woo and to wed, and devote all our efforts to the affianced ones, on whom He has set His heart. What a pity that preachers should be required to waste so much labor 1 Many things in the paper of Dr. James H. Brooks were to us a means of grace, especially J »»■ .1^ 220 ANTIN03IIANISM REVIVED. liis vigorous and exluuistivo presentation of tlie bearing of the coming of Christ on the fidelity and purity of believers. But we found no nutriment to our spiritual life when we read the following sentence : " The pre-millennial coming of our Lord alone indicates the divine honor and aovereirjnty. Those who reject the doctrine, constantly affirm that it disparages the Gospel by representing it as a failure, and the work of the Holy Spirit, by intimating that it is inadequate to the conversion of the world. But a moment's reflection is sufficient to show that it exalts the Gospel by proving that it accomplishes all it was designed to effect^ and the work of the Holy Spirit by demon- strating that He saves all He intended to save during the present dispensation" If the words we have italicized "exalt the Gospel," they certainly blacken the character of its Author with a heartless indifference to the well-being of a portion of our race while pretending a deep interest in their salvation, and in mockery \ I ! PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 221 \ offering them everlasting life which they could not appropriate without the assistance of the Spirit. Whitticr tells us that the indignant women of Marblehead "tarred and feathered the sea captain, Floyd Ireson, and rode him on a cart " for not saving some poor fellows on a raft at sea when he saw their signals of dis- tress. That he did not intend to save them was his crime against humanity, which out- raged the moral sense and philanthropic in- stincts of these plucky women. It would have made the case no better, but rather worse, if that seaman had changed his course, gone to the wreck, taken off all that he intended to, and then sailed away, with abundant room in his cabin and provisions in his larder for those whom he had left to perish on the raft. It would certainly be an alleviation of Dr. Brooks* doctrine, to attach to it the grand scheme of restorationism advocated by Mr. Barbour, of Rochester, by which all those whom the Holy Spirit did not intend to save I I ■ I 222 ANTINOMIANISM BEVTVED. under the present dispensation, will be raised from the dead and have a fair chance for salva- tion in the millennial age. The only difficulty in this theodicy is the fact that the wicked dead must remain in their graves, and not be raised till after the millennium is past, when they will be raised, judged, and cast into the lake of fire. So our suggested alleviation is an adjustment which cannot be applied. ' A class of millenarians, not represented in the report of the Prophetic Conference, have found out just the number that the Holy Spirit intends to save and to present to Christ as His bride — 144,000. By scrupulously keeping the seventh day, and abstaining from meats cere- monially unclean, they are endeavoring to be among that number. They are the dolefulest saints we ever met. We think they should be despondent, with such a slender hope of salva* tion. I CHAPTER XIII. JEXEQETIOAL ABSUEDITIB8. Israel ^-7 •- The birth of Christ, the King of the Tewfc Matt t — The death and resurrection of Christ A— Ascension of Christ. Acts i. 9. ' D— Descent of the Holy Ghost. AotBii. ' 223 i 224 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. Church— Mystical body of Christ (Epb. i. 22, 23; iii. 3-6; Rom. xii. 4, 5; Col. i. 24-27; 1 Cor. xii. 12-27,) and tho Brido of Christ. Eph. v. 21-23. De — Descent of the Lord (1 Thess. iv. 14) to rocoive His Bride. John xiv. 3. R — Resurrection of the just, Luke xiv. 14; Acts xxiv. 15; 1 Thess. iv. 15, 16; and change of living be- lievers. 1 Cor. XV. 23, 51, 52. Rapture — Translation of tho saints who (like Enoch) are caught up to meet Christ in the air. 1 Thess. iv. 17. M — The meeting of Christ and His Bride. 1 Thess. iv. 17; Eph. v. 21-32; 2 Cor. xi. 2. Thus the Church escapes the tribulation. Luke xxi. 30; 2 Peter ii. 9; Rev. iii. 10. T — Period of unequalled tribulation to the world (Dan. xii. 1; Matt. xxiv. 21; Luke xxi. 25, 20) during which — the Church having been taken out — God begins to deal with Israel again (Acts xv. 16, 17; Psa. li. 18; cii. 16,) and will restore thera to their own land. Isa. xi. 11-16; Jer. xxx. 3; xxxi; xxxii. 36-44; Amos ix. 15; Zecli. viii. 3-8; Rom. xi. Anti-Christ will be revealed. 2 Thess. ii. 8. The vials of God's witith poured out. Psa. ii. 1-5; Rev. vi. 10,17; Rev. xiv. 10; xvi. But men only blaspheme God. Rev. xvi. 11, 21. Israel accepts Christ (Zech. xii. 10-14; xiii. 6,) and are brought through the fire. Zech. xiii. 9. They pass not away. Matt, xxiv. 34; Psa. xxii. 30. Rev — The revelation of Christ and His saints (Col. iii. 4; 1 Thess iii. 13) in flaming fire (2 Thess. 1. 7-10) to execute judgment on the earth. Jude 14, 15. This is Christ's second coming to the earth. Acts i. 11; Deut. xxxiii. 2; Zech xiv. 4, 5; Matt. xvi. 27; xxiv. 29, 80. J — Judgment of the nations, or the quick. Matt, xxv. PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 225 32-46; xix. 28; Acts x. 42; 1 Peter iv. 5. Anti-Christ is destroyed. 2 Thess. ii. 8. The Beast and the False Proi^het are taken. Rev. xix. 20. Gog and His allies are smitten. Ezek. xxxviii. ; xxxix. Satan is bound. Rev. XX. 1-3; Rom. xvi. 20. R. L. — Resurrection of the Tribulation Saints, which completes the First Resurrection. Rev. xx. 4-6. Mill'm — The Millennium. Christ's glorious reign on earth for 1,000 years (Rev. xx. 4) with His bride. 2 Tim. ii. 12; Rev. v. 10; Isa. ii. 2-5; iv. ; xi. 1-12; xxv. 0-9; Isa. Ixv. 18-25; Mic. iv. 1-i; Zeph. iii. 14-20; Zech. viii. 3-8, 20-23; xiv. 10-21. S — Satan loosed for a little season, and destroyed with Gog and Magog. Rev. xx. 7-10; Ileb. ii. 14. Res. — The Resurrection of Judgment. Rev. xx. 12- 15; John v. 29; Dan. xii. 2. J. W. T.— Judgment at the Great White Throne of all the remaining dead. Rev. xx. 11-15. Death and Hell destroyed. Rev. xx. 14; 1 Cor. xv. 26. E. E. — Eternity. Isa. Ivii. 15. [The above diagram is taken from a pam- phlet circulated at the Conference with the endorsement of its president. It is also found in a book entitled " Maianatlia," by Rev. J. H. Brooks, one of the speakers in the Conference, and the first signer of the call. It is the basis cf most of the papers as reported in the Tri- hune,'] I II H h'l III ft'. ! ^i .1 r^ 226 ANTmOMIANISM EEVIVED. The most vulnerable point of this pre-millen- aiian theory is found in the exegesis of Matt. XXV. 31- '.6. The necessities of the theory re- quire its advocates to do violence to this most solemn utterance of the Son of God while on the earth. It is indisputable that He discloses four facts in this passage : (1) The judgment will be general, including the whole human race. (2) The righteous and the Wijkc' vrill be simultaneously judged and sente/iced. (3) The judgment will be individual, and not national ; each person will be rewarded or condemned according to his treatment of Jesus Christ in the persons of His brethren, either believers or human beings generally. (4) This day of judgment is a finality, a winding-up of the history of man on the earth. Henceforth man- kind will be found in only two conditions — in everlasting punishment or in life eternal — wii Ti the intimation that the former is a place prepaie 1 for the devil and his angels. The pre-miilenia- rian, finding it impossible to wedge in an earthly 'L. llen- latt. y 1'^- most e on jloses ment uman PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 227 (3) I not )d or Jesus either This of the man- — in wii 1 ipave^l lillena- irthly reign of Christ, called the millennium, between the coming of the Son of Man in His Glory and His final sentence, " Come, ye blessed I " and " Depari, ye cursed ! " deliberately goes to work to pervert these awful words by whittling them down to a review of living nations, ending in the mfliction of certain temporal punishments which do not sweep them from the earth, but leave them still living, to be converted or held in check, by millennial agencies. This is the teaching of the Prophetic Confer- ence. We call this the willful perversion of the plain words of Jesus Christ, the Judge eternal. If the reader will look at the above diagram, he will find the letter J descriptive of the place which the judgment in Matt. xxv. 31-46, occupies in the Chiliast's eschatology. In- stead of being the end of man on the earth, it is about the middle point of his earthly history, and he will be found, after the sentence of eternal doom, begetting children (Isa. xi. 6, 8 ; Ixv. 23), black-smithing (Isa. ii. 4), house- i w :pl !:fil '1 , m ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. building and vine-planting (Isa. Ixv. 21), the old man with his staff in hand for very age, and the boys and girls playing in the streets (Zech. viii. 4, 5) ; while others shall suffer from plagues inflicted on them and their cattle, and still others will go to battle and gather great spoil (Zech. xiv. 13-15). The references ire those which accompany the diagram. One of the essayists, Dr. J. T. Cooper, argued that only the Gentiles are judged in Matt. XXV. 31-46, and that the Jews were exempt. According to this writer, and the Plymouth teachers generall}', this judgment turns upon the question how each nation has treated Christ's brethren, the Jews. Let the reader peruse this whole passage, putting nations, or Gentiles, after the pronouns " ye " and "you," and in place of " them," and substitute Jews for "my brethren," and he will get some idea of the monstrous misinterpretation which Chiliasm is forced to put upon this plain pas- sage, in defiance of common sense. PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOQY. 229 ), the age, treets suffer 3attle, yatlier rences Jooper, Dred in 3 were [id the Igment on has et the ations,, I" you," Jews e idea which n pas- By making two last (?) days, or judgment days — one for the living and one for the dead (Rev. XX. 11-15) — a space is gained for the millennium after the Second Advent. It is nothing to these expositors that the words, the " quick " and the " dead," in Acts x. 42 ; 2 Tim. iv. 1 ; 1 Peter iv. 5, are thus violently riven asunder by thrusting in a thousand years be- tween them. Jesus says: "For the hour is coming in the which all that are in their graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation." Here Dr. Gordon finds no difficulty, by stretching " the hour," to make two resurrections, a thousand years apart I The millenarians find no difficulty in splitting the judgment day into fragments, locating one in the air before the Epiphany, or appearing of Christ, another on the earth after that event, and still another after a thousand years. The Plymouth Brethren add a fourth judgment day, I p ■ (-■'•' |: ■} 230 AMtlNOMIANISM REVIVED. when the sins of believers were judged on the Cross — the only judgment of their persons as distinguished from their works. But since the resurrection is always intimately connected with the judgment, this theory easily invents as many resurrections as are requisite to its demands. Hence we have a resurrection of the saints, to meet Christ before He descends to the earth ; then the resurrection of the mar- tyrs, who by some unaccountable agency have been converted and beheaded while Christ was reviewing the saints in the air, and not a holy soul was left on the earth, but Antichrist was for years, and perhaps centuries, riding rough- shod over the God-forsaken earth, and all the woes and vials of the Apocalypse were being poured upon the human race, amid the crash of all the regular governments and the horrors of anarchy. Then we have a third resurrection — that of the wicked — after a thousand years plus the period in which Satan is loosed, which may be ten thousand years more. For all PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 231 these resurrections and judgments Scripture proofs are quoted with great profusion and perfect confidence, although the Church from the beginning till the present day has believed in one resurrection and one judgment of the whole human family. But still greater difficulties, not to say ab- surdities, are encountered when we examine the mixed state of things on the earth after the judgment of the living nations, or "the quick." Here we find living side by side in the millennium the remnant who have survived the judgment, and are still flesh and blood; the saints who were changed when the Judge reached the air ; and the righteous dead who have been raised and endowed with spiritual j bodies. How these three sorts of folks are to have intercourse — mortals and immortals thus mixed together — is inconceivable. But as children are to be born, still more difficult social problems arise. There will be a class capable of marriage, beoause they are still in if ;i: 232 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the flesh ; a class incapable of that estate, be- cause they are "in the resurrection;" and a class of whom we are doubtful, namely, the changed saints. This exceeding complex state of society is entirely out of analogy v/ith the constitution and course of nature, and is en- tirely abnormal and incongruous. The moral government of such a world by the second Person of the Trinity in person will be one continued reign of supernaturalism, wholly unadapted to the purposes of probation. Ilie change will be so great that there will be need of a new Bible, for the new state of things will render the Holy Scriptures as obsolete as Noah's almanac. This is admitted by distin- guished pre-millenarians. One of them is quoted by Bickersteth as saying that " the Scriptures of the New Testament, written for a tempted and suffering Church, are unapplica- ble to this state of things." Dr. McNeile says : " It is obvious that, in the passage from our present state to a state of universal holiness, PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOQY. 233 L by- will [ism, tion. 11 be ings as tin- is the for ica- ys: our ess, these characteristic sayings of the New Testa- ment must cease to have any application, and become obsolete, not to say false." If the human race is to be continually propa- gated througli a thousand, or, as some assert, through three hundred and sixty-five thousand years, and none die, the world would soon be so uncomfortably crowded that there would not be standing room. But if death does his work of depletion then as now, only after a longer average longevity — the child dying an hun- dred years old — there must be another resur- rection distinct from that of the wicked for the accommodation of these deceased millennial saints. This will make four resurrections in all. Thus the difficulties thicken as we dwell on this theory of the personal reign of Christ on earth before the last day, which is certainly " another gospel " from that which Paul preached. To the people of the United States this judgment of nations by the test of our national 234 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. treatmemt of the Jews, is '^ne which we may approach with greater boldness than any other nation of modern civilization, for we have never discriminated against the Hebrews, " these my brethren," in our legislation, though we have abused the African, the Indian, and the China- man, who are not supposed to be so closely related to Jesus Christ. Hence the great American Republic stands a good chance to be the dominant nation in the regeneration, or millennial age, which begins immediately after the award to the nations of eternal life or ever- lasting punishment. , CHAPTER XrV. DIFFICULTIES IN THE THOUSAND YEARS. We object to the millenarian scheme, because it is grounded chiefly on those portions of the Bible which are symbolic, and enigmatic, and difficult to be understood. The personal reign of Christ a thousand years is not found in the Gospels, nor in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in the Epistles of Paul, Peter, James or John, but only in the Apocalypse, wnich is the dark- est book in the New Testament. Its striking symbols and gorgeous imagery impress the imagination and awaken the feelings. The visitor in London will find in one library a thousand commentaries on this book, all pro- fessing to unfold its mysteries, all differing, so that only one of them can be true. These writers have tried to interpret the apocalyptic numbers, and they have sigiiu Lly failed. From 286 • '•^f^ 236 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. Hengel's date of the binding of Satan in 183C down to the present time, the years fixed foi the coming of Christ have passed away, and the expositors who have survived *r disap- pointment have courageously tried again, by shifting their ground into the safer future. There are three great schools of interpreters of the Revelation : (1) The Prceterists, or those who teach that tlie whole, or by far the greater part, has been ful filed. Some of the most emi- nent German expositors, as Ewald, De Wette, Lucke, and Dusterdieck, belong to this school ; also Dr. Davidson in England, d Moses Stuart in America. (2) The His^ ..Is, who hold that the Revelation embraces, the whole history of the Church to the end of the world. (3) The Futurists, who insist that this book, after the third chapter, relates entirely to future events. Some include the first three chapters, and assert that they refer to the future also. This is the grand outline of opinions held by PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 287 who lole orld. )ook, to hree the dby men equally learned and honest ; yet on a book whose interpretation is in so great dispute, the doctrine of a thousand years' personal reign of Christ on the earth before the last judgment is grounded by those who would interpret the plain and the literal teachings respecting the last thinj^s by the symbolic and tyi)ical, thus inverting n acknowledged canon of interpre- tation. The twentieth chapter of the Revela- tion is the basis of pre-milleniiriunism. Let us now examine this chapter, and see what is not proved by its tesiimony. 1. There is no mention of the second advent of Christ before the thousand years. The chapter opens with the vision of an angel descending from heaven with a chain in his hand. This angel can never be proved to be Christ. Says Alford : " Angelas^ in this book, is an angel; never our Lord,''^ Thus far in the Apocalypse there is not the slightest intimation that He has made His second advent in visible form. In cjiapter xix. ll-21i He wars against '! ■r 288 ANTINO^UANISM EEVIVED. mi 1 the beast, and the kings of the earth and their armies ; but the assumption that this is a literal battle fought on the earth by Jesus in person, riding on a white horse, with a sharp sword going out of His mouth, is a literalism which cannot be endured, besides being a begging of the very question in dispute. John saw ''le things in the opened heaven, and he saw " the armies which were in heaven." The Scriptures are unanimous in making heaven the fixed abode of Christ, until He shall come to judge mankind at the last day. 2. John saw only the souls of the martyrs. He makes no mention of their bodies. There is a grave doubt whether a bodily resurrection is here intended ; but we are inclined to the literal resurrection of these martyrs. Ir John V. 25, we have a resurrection of souls, followed in verse 28 by a bodily resurrection. This, in the opinion of many, explains the first and the second resurrections in this chapter. The pas- sage is obscure, admitting of different interpre- tations. PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOQY. 239 IS, m the pas- [•pre- 3. There is here no proof of the resurrec- tion of all the righteous dead, but only of the beheaded martyrs ; so that allowing the literal resurrection of these does not prove that all the saints rise at this time. Eveiy man is to rise in his own order. Some arose at the resur- rection of Christ, and doubtless were His con- voy to heaven. It may be that a special honor and blessedness await the belieaded martyrs in the fact of their resurrection and translation to heaven before the rest of the dead saints : '" for one star differeth from another star in glory." This does not preclude these from standing with Enoch and Elijah, in holy boldness, before the judgment seat of Christ in the last day. This may explain Paul's aim at a martyr's death and the resurrection of the beheaded (Phil. iii. 10, 11). '' On such the second death hath no power." The dying of these martyrs, in a manner so heroic, utterly vanquished the mighty enemy. An early restoration from the dominion of death, suffered prematurely for '4: : 24C ANTINOMIANISM EEVIVED. Christ, is an eminently appropriate reward: " Holj and blessed is he that hath part in the first resurrection." 4. There is in this chapter a total absence of proof that these raised martyrs reigned with Christ on the earth. The visions thus far have been located in lieaven. Jonsistency with the whole context requires that they should reign with Christ in heaven, and not that Christ should reign with them on earth. Bengel, Wesley, Muses Stuart, and many others, say, **in heaven and not on the earth." 5. There is no evidence here that a single milleDnium is spoken of. The best scholars, and among them Bengel, Wesley, and Dr. Owen, assert that there are two distinct periods of a thousand years spoken of in verses 1-7. The Greek article sustains this view. The first period extends through the renression of Saian which, Bengel says, indicates the great pros- perity of the Church. The second is the reign of martyrs. Both of these periods are before PLYISIOUTH ESCFIATOLOGY. 241 I ti liars, Dr. Iriods 1-7. first latan ipros- L-eigii lefore the second coming of Christ. Thus Beugel and Wesley, instead of being pre-millenarians, were, in fact, what most modern Methodists are, post-millenarians. Beugel styles those who confound these two distinct millennial periods, " pseudo-Chiliasts." The Prophetic Conference thus falls under Bengel's censure as pseudos. He says : " Whilst Satan is loosed from his imprisonment of a thousand years, the martyrs live and reign, not on the earth, but with Christ ; then the coming of Christ in glory at length takes place at the last day ; then^ next, there is the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem." Thus the coming of Christ is two thousand years plus a little season after the binding of Satan. A harmless sort of Chiliasm is this. Says Bengel : " The con- founding of the two millennial periods has long ago produced many errors, and has made the name of Chiliasm hateful and suspected." 6. It is a very important point for tlie mil- leuarian to prove, that the judgment of the 242 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. dead before the great white Throne is that of the wicked dead only. But this vital point is not proven by this chapter. In fact, the bring- ing forth of the Book of Life and the casting into the lake of fire of those whose names are not written therein, imply that some were found inscribed. Dr. Brooks' declaration that this Book of Life is a blank book, is a baseless assumption. This is not proved by the words, *' the rest of the dead lived not," etc. Says so eminent a Greek scholar as Dr. Owen : " Yet as the words here stand, we cannot, without great violence, make * the rest ' (in Greek) em- brace any other than the class of the pious dead, from which the martyr saints have been previously taken to participate in the first resurrection." We quote Dr. Owen, not to endorse him, but to show the difficulty of prov- ing that this is a judgment of the wicked dead alone. We believe that it is the general judgment of the race described in Matt. xxv. 31-4(j, and ii PLYiMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 243 lat of int is bring- isting BS are were 1 that iseless words, ays so '^Yet pthout :) em- pious been le first (not to prov- dead [{Tine at ;, and that " the rest of the dead " include all the human dead, both righteous and wicked, except the martyr saints, and that the good and the bad will be raised in the general resurrection and sentenced in the general judgment. 7. We look in vain, in this account of the millennium, or millenniums, for any reference to the Jews as being gathered to Jerusalem. The Revelation strangely omits to associate them with either of these chiliads. In chapter seven, the angels seal exactly twelve thousand of each of the twelve tribes, but there is no hint of the restoration of the Hebrew nation to their own land. After tha day of general doom, the last great day, there descends a new Jerusalem into the new earth which has no more sea. Even then " the tabernacle of God is with men," not with the Jews. Considering the fact that the t)ld Testament prophecies are constantly quoted by the millen- arians in proof of the personal reign of Christ on earth, with the Jews as His most loyal sup- porters, it is to us an insuperable objection to 1^ ! 244 ANTLNOimANISM REVIVED. the doctrine, that the book of Revelation omits to place the restored Hebrew nation in any such relation to Christ, either in the old or the new Jerusalem. If there is to be a personal reign of Christ on the earth, during a thousand years, to sub- due the nations, as a substitute for the conquest now being made by the Holy Spirit, it is remarkable that these seven essential facts should be absent from the only account in the whole Bible where the millennial period is spoken of. These important items are culled from dark prophecies, often violently wrenched from the context, and are fitted together on tlio pedestal of this chapter of a book which hfis been an inexpHcable enigma to the scholarship of all the Christian ages. This style of interpretation may be satisfactor}"- and convincing to those who accept imagery for doctrine, symbol for substance, and rhetoric for logic ; but there are Christian minds which have an unconquerable aversion to stitching together selections from i PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 245 dark the lestal 511 an )f all tation Ithose )1 for re are arable from the symbolry of the prophets, literalizing the whole patchwork, and holding it up to the world as God's truth. Yet thi is what the pre-millcnariaiis uve perpetually doing. They opened their recent Conference with the dis- claimer that they had not brought their ascen- sion robes with them. But such is the perilous fascination of their method of prophetic stud- ies, that they will soon be attracted to an interpretation of the apocalyptic numbers and a determination of the year and day when, in the language of Mr. Barbour, " Christ is due," as we say of an express train. History always ' repeats itself. This has been the outcome oi every great millenarian movement. The leaders may keep their own intellectual balance quite well, but by deluging Christendom with theii* literature, they will soon shake the minds of Christians of less steadiness who will insist on bringing to the next Prophetic Conference their arithmetical charts of Daniel's animals, if not their ascension robes. We who survived 1843 know the sequel. CHAPTER XV. THE CHURCH NOT THE KINGDOM. We object to tlie pie-millenarian theory be- cause its definition of the kingdom of Christ makes it an institution altogether different from tlie Church, and entirely in the future. A glance at the diagram will show the church as coming to an end on the earth before the king- dom is set up. Tlie Chiliast represents tlie kingdom as coming only at the descent of the King in person, and as then set up suddenly by almightiness without the aid of human agency. But when we look into the New Testament, we find no such difference in the use of the terms " Church " and " kingdom." They seem to be used interchangeably. The kingdom is to be established by preaching, and it is to develop gradually till its ultimate triumph. The gener- ation to whom John the Baptist and Christ 216 ^yn' PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 247 preached, were urged to repent because the Idugdora of heaven was at hand. We fail to see the cogency of this motive if the kingdom was not to be set up till after 1,800 or 18,000 years. St. Paul writes a thanksgiving epistle to the Colossians in which he expresses his gratitude to the Father "who hatli translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son." Christ himself spoke of the kingdom of God as within, or among. His hearers. The disciples were taught to pray for its complete triumph on the earth. Parables illustrative of its slow progress, but ultimate universality, were spoken. The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard- seed, which becomes a tree so great that the birds lodge in the branches. The astonishing development of Christ's kingdom from small beginnings through long ages is here plainly taught. It is perfectly puerile to assume that these birds are foul birds of prey, symbolizing the gigantic corruptions of the Christian Church I Yet we have ag^In and again met II 248 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. with this exegesis in the writings of modern millenarians. In Christ's comparison of the kingdom to leaven deposited in the mepl, He intended to teach the gradual diffusion, the pervasive and assimilative power, and the universal prevalence of the kingdom of heaven. Every unprejudiced reader, even in the infant Snn day-school, sees this meaning in the parable. How do the Chiliasts dispose of this parable ? The wise ones do as the Scotch preacher did with a pas- sage which he could not harmonize with pre- destination : " My brethren, let us look this verse square in the face and pass on." But some millennarians are not wise enough to fullcw so good an example, but confidently ex- pound it thus : " Leaven is always used in the Bible to represent evil or corruption." Hence in the language of Rev. H. M. Parsons : " The parable of the leaven represents the results which will be manifested in the same kingdom during the age from the corruptions introduced PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLiuGY. 249 by those who are within the Church. The meal will be leavened with heresies and perver- sions during all this dispensation." Well may Dean Alford say : " It will be seen that such an interpretation cannot for a moment stand, on its oton ground ; but much less when we connect it with the parable of the mustard- seed. The two are intimately related. The latter was of the inherent^ self-developing power of the kingdom of heaven as a seed containing in itself the principle of expansion ; the former (the leaven) represents the power wJiich it pos- sesaea of penetrating and assimilating a foreign mass, till all be taken up into it. This gifted annotator, a strong Chiliast, but not run mad with millenarian vagaries, proceeds at length to show the power of the Gospel leaven (1) to penetrate the whole mass of humanity, and (2) the transforming power of the " new leaven " on the whole being of individuals. Says Trench : " In fact, the parable does nothing less than set forth to us the mystery of regeneration, both in Si 250 ANTINOMrANISM BEVIVED. 1! Sil li! ll' ^^ ^ 1 u I 1 its first act, which can be but once, as the leaven is but once hidden ; and also in the consequent renewal of the Holy Spirit, which, as the ulte- rior working of the leaven, is continual and progressive." Thus we array these scholarly and sober expositors against the strange and erroneous exegesis of millenarians so intent on removing a difficult text out of their way that they foist upon it a meaning never intendf \ by Christ, in order to make Him teach their dole- ful doctrine, that the church is becoming more and more corrupt, the world is hopelessly ship- wrecked, and the pentecostal dispensation is a stupendous failure. From such a dismal view of Christianity, and from such, a misinterpreta- tion of a plain parable, giving a hopeful view of the expansion and universal prevalence of the kingdom of heaven established by Christ, we beg to be delivered. We believe with Neander that the relation of the Church to the kingdom is that of a species to a genus, or of a part t a whole. The Church is the kingdom ' li. PLYMOUTU EStJHATOLOCiV. 251 The millenariau conception of the earthly kingdom of Christ, entirely different from His present spiritual reign in the Church, is strik- ingly like the Jewish idea of the Messianic kingdom, founded on a literal interpretation of the prophecies. If their gross literalism is at last to be realized iu an earthly and visible kingdom, we do not see the culpability of the Jews in rejecting the Nazarene, who failed to exhibit those signs of Messiahship which their own prophets had taught them to expect when His kingdom should be set up. For it has been well said that there is no perspective in proph- ecy. Hence it was absolutely impossible for the Jews to discriminate between Christ's first coming to found His Church, and His second advent to found His kingdom. The brightness of the earthly Idngdom so entirely eclipsed the colorless, spiritual kingdom, or Church, that the Hebrew nation seems to be justified in dis- carding the spiritual kingship of Jesus Christ, who was attended by no such signs of world- \ 262 ANTINOMIAKISM REVIVED. ■Ml i i wide temporal dominion as the millenarians now find in the Old Testament prophecies. But there is no such vindication of the Jews possible, because their culpability lies in the fact that while there is but one kingdom of Christ on earth, and that is spiritual, they were, as a nation, not dwelling in those spiritual alti- tudes which would have enabled them to view the Star of Bethlehem in its true character, undimmed by the clouds of sensuality and worldliness. Hence, on the commonly-received view that the Church is the spiritual kingdom of Christ, and the only kingdom wiiich He will establish on earth, the ancient and modern Jews have no excuse. On the theory of the Chiliast, they have an excuse for rejecting Him who came to them without the prophetic insignia of a king. No Motive for a Jew to Believe in Christ. Another very curious fact in the millenarian scheme is that the nearer the Second Advent, PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 253 nan rent, the less influential is it to induce in the Jew submission to Clu'ist. Let me amplify this poiut : My commission is tc preach the Gospel to 'every creature. This includes the Jews. Let me suppose that I have a congregation of Hebrews whom I wish to lead to Christ. My first effort would be to gain an intellectual assent to the proposition that Jesus is the true Messiah, by reasoning with them in Pauline style out of the Scriptures. Having produced an intellectual conviction, I should next proceed to sway their wills to an immediate acceptance of the Nazarene as their personal Saviour. What would be my great argument ? " The Lord Jesus yhall be revealed from lieavcn, with His mighty angels, in flaming Arc, taking ven- geance on them that know not God and that obey not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting destruc- tion fr'^m the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power." My Israelites, in terror, ask me if this is a final and irreversible .( 254 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. 11 sentence for disobedience to Christ. I tell them, with tears, that it is even so. Under the power of the Spirit attending the Word, some are constrained to bow the knee to Christ cru- cified who had been a stumbling-block to them all their lives, Knowing the terrors of the Lord, I have saved some. But suppose I had ' called in a millenarian to do this critical work of presenting motives to sway their stubborn Jewish wills ? His course of argument would be thus: Repent of your sins, and receive Jesus as your Saviour and Lord because He is soon coming to set up a kingdom, gathering the Jews, at least a third of them, to Jerusalem, where they will all be suddenly converted and be the chief promoters of His kingdom among the Gentiles. " How long," ask they, " before this great event ? " " It may occur to-day ; all the signs indicate that it is near," is the answer. **■ If this is so, we think that we will not put oarselves to the inconvenience and suffering of the persecution of our brethren for embracing PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 255 Jesus. We will wait and take our chances of being aUve and of being converted en masse when Jesus comes. This will be easier, and will be attended by no persecution by a stubborn re- mainder." Thus the nearer the Second Advent, the less is its motive power for the Jew to be- lieve in Christ. Can such a system of doctrine be true which thus weakens the grand motive to evangelical faith? The common, or othodox, view of the second coming of Christ to pa^s final sentence upon the race, affords just as great inducements to repent to the Jew as to the Gentile, and the motive in both cases is intensified by the near approach of the Judge eternal. In CHAPTER XVI. ELECT NUMBER OP THE GENTILES. Having shown that the personal reign of Christ for a thousand years before the general judgment is not found in Rev. xx., we proceed to examine other passages in the New Testa- ment perpetually quoted as proofs of Chiliasm. Matt. xix. 28 is literally expounded by Chili- asts, and the "regeneration" is explained as the new order of things on the earth after Christ has set up a visible tlirone. Then the twelve apostles are to have inferior thrones, or governorships, over the twelve tribes of Israel. In answer to this we cannot do better than to condense the comment of Dr. Whedon, one of the ripest Greek scholars m America, and second to none as an exegete : The words "in the regeneration " are in contrast with " in my temp- tations " in the parallel passage in Luke xxii. PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 257 28-30. The contrasted periods are before His death and after His ascension, when the Church was renewed and regenerated from the old to the new dispensation. Then Jesus would sit on the throne of his glory at the right hand of the Majesty on high till He shall, on the same throne, descend to judge the world. The twelve apostles were to receive twelve apostol- ates, or thrones — not thrones of glory — sym- bolizing the fact that Christ is King over Israel, and that the New Testament kingdom is only another form of trie Old Testament Church. Then follows, in verse 29, a promise of the hundred-fold now in this time (Mark x. 30), with persecutions, showing that the time spoken of when the twelve should enjoy their apostol- ates, or sit on their spiritual thrones, is during their present lives, after which they will receive life everlasting. Hence we are living in the regeneration, or new dispensation. Another text, quoted in nearly every paper read in the Prophetic Conference, as a proof that the whole 258 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. world is not to be converted under the dispen- sation of the Holy Spirit, but only a definite number — the Bride of Christ — is Rom. xi. 25. The word " fullness," Dr. E. R. Craven, and the millenarians generally, interpret as the completion of the definite "elect number of the Gentiles " who are to be saved ; if but a thousand, then the nine hundred and ninety- nine saved persons lack but one to complete the fullness. Since quite a parade has been made of the great scholarship of the millenarians, we, in Pauline style, in self-defense, wish to magnify the scholarship on our side. Our limits forbid giving Meyer's extended note. We insert only his conclusion : " A part of Israel is hardened, until the Gentiles collec' tively shall have come in, and when that shall have taken place, then all Israel will be saved. The conversion of the Gentiles ensues by suc- ' cessive stages ; but when their totality shall be converted, then the conversion of the Jews in . their totality will ensue ; so that Paul sees the PLYMOUTH BSOHATOLOOY. 259 Lispen- efinite xi. 25. n, and 18 the ber of but a ninety- Lete the 1 made larians, sdsh to tended Apart s collec' it shall saved, by suc- ihaU be Tews in kees the latter (which up to that epoch certainly also advances gradually in individual cases) ensuing, after the full conversion of the Gentiles, as the event completing the assemblage of the Church and accomplishing itself, probably, in rapid development. All this, therefore, is before the Parousia (personal coming), not hy means of it." The italics are Meyer's. Turning to Dr. Robinson's Lexicon, we find him defining pleroma (fullness), in his text, as " all the mul- titude of the Gentiles." But lest Dr. Robinson may be considered obsolete, we turn to Cremer's Biblico-Theological Lexicon, 1878, fresh from the living author. His rendering is, " the totality or completeness of the Gentiles," under the same sub-heading of definitions as *^ the fullness of the God-head " — " the sum total of all that Grod w." After this presentation of the latest and most erudite researches into the meaning of this text, the challenge of the Pro- phetic Conference to produce one proof-text for the conversion of the entire world under 260 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. the present dispensation, does not exhibit an acquaintance with the best sacred scholarship of the age. Restitution of all Things. Another text, supposed beyond all dispute to contain an unanswerable proof of Chiliasm, is Acts iii. 21. We are told that " the restitution of all things " is the renovation of the earth at the second coming of Christ. But how can all things be restored so long as the vast majority of the dead are in their graves during a thou- sand years ? The word " restitution " in the Greek is found nowhere else in the New Testa- ment. It is, therefore, of doubtful meaning. But the cognate verb is used in Matt. xvii. 11 : '' Elias shall first come and restore all things.''^ Christ declares that '' Elias has already come." But did he restore all things in the sense thrust upon the derivative noun by millenarians ? John the Baptist as the forerunner of Christ , fuljih'd all things spoken concerning him by PLYMOUTH ESCUATOLOQY. 261 lit an irship ute to Lsm, is tution irth at jan all ijority I, thou- in the Testa- laning. II .11: lings. ^^ ome." thrust ,rians ? Christ im by the prophets. Now read Acts iii. 21, substitut- ing /mZ/J^twcw^ for restitution^ and see how com- plete is the sense and how perfect the harniony with the next verse : " Whom the heaven must receive until the times of the fulfilment of all things spoken of by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. For Moses truly said unto the fathers," etc. Whatever is the meaning of the word "restitution," the work must be completed before Christ comes, not by His coming. Says Meyer : " Before the times set in which all things will be restored, Christ comes not from heaven. Consequently the age to come cannot be meant; but onXy such times as shall precede the Parousia^ and by the emergence of which it is conditioned that the Parousia shall ensue." "Christ's reception into heaven continues — this is the idea of the apostle — until the moral corruption of the people of God is removed, and the thor- ough renovation of all their relations shall have ensued." Even Bengel can find no foot- 262 ANTINOMIANISM REVIVED. i hold for millenarianism in this speech of Peter. " Peter comprises the whole course of the times of the New Testament between the Ascension of the Lord and His Advent in glory, times in which that apostolic age shines forth pre-emi- nent (ver. 24), as also corresponding to the condition of the Church, which was to be con- stituted of Jews and Gentiles together. Justas Jonas says, * Christ is that King, who has now received heaven, reigning in the meantime through the Gospel in the Spirit until all things be restored, i. e., until the remainder of the Jews and Gentiles be converted.'" Ben- gel seems to endorse Jonas. This certainly teaches that the world is to be converted before the Advent, and not by it. Why Chbist Delays His Coming. Now let us turn to the third chapter of the second epistle of Peter for a commentary on his meaning in Acts iii. 21. He gives in this chapter an answer to the scoffers who say, PLYMOUTH ESCHATOLOGY. 268 say, " Where is the (fulfiled) promise of His com- ing?" He then gives two reasons for Christ's delay in coming to burn up the earth and the works therein, namely : (1) The different con- ception of time in the divine Mind, a thousand years being as one day ; and (2) the long-suf- fering of God in affording a further space for repentance. From this second reason the inference is irresistible that there will be no chance for repentance unto salvation after the Christ's advent. If this be so, what becomes of the theory that He will come to supersede the dispensation of the Paraclete by the estab- lishment of a dispensation in which Jews and Gentiles will be converted in a wholesale way ? If a thousand people were perishing on an ocean steamer wrecked at the entrance of the harbor of New York, and a small dory were rescuing two or three at a time while a well- equipped, life-saving government steamer was lying in sight of the wreck, could it be believed that the commander delayed to hasten to help 264 ANTLNOMIANISM REVIVED. ^^1 n I the unfortunate, through his excessive compas- sion for them ? This is the exact attitude of Christ towards a perishing world according to millenarianism, purposing to institute a dispen- sation more favorable to the salvation of the lost world, and delaj^ng out of pity ! ' When we ask why does Christ delay His coming to set up a more effective scheme of salvation, we are told that this question is like the conundrum, why did not God create the world sooner? But Peter has answered our question in a way which grinds millenarianism to powder. He delays through a long-suffering which implies that He will come, not to save, but to condemn; not to set up a visible king- dom on the earth, but to wind up His media- torial reign and deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father. This is what St. Paul avers will be done at the second advent (1 Cor. xv. 23, 24). Also contrast John iii. 16, 17 ; xii. 47, with Matt. xxv. 31-46 ; 2 Thess. i. 6-10.. , PJA'MOUTH ESCHATOLOGX^. 266 Conclusion. I have discussed this subject from a sense of duty to my fellow-Christiana. I believe that the general prevalence of pre-railleuialisni would be disastrous to the best interests of the Kingdom of Christ, now being spread over the earth by the joint agency of the Holy Spirit and consecrated believers. The command, " Grieve not the Spirit," cannot be fully kept by any person whose theories belittle His effi- ciency in the work of His office. Nor can any man put forth his best endeavors while dis- trusting the agency with which he co-works and looking for a superior one soon to appear. Against all the disclaimers of diminished zeal for the evangelization of the whole world, put forth by pessimists of the Second Advent school, they fail to convince me that men, how- ever good, will ever exert themselves to the utmost to prove themselves false prophets. r 266 ANTINOMIANISM EEVIVED. This is contrary to human nature even in its highest state of grace. Gen. Grant would have failed to conquer G«n. Lee, if he had be- lieved it impossible. t HAND-BOOK ON " ROMANS." A CONDENSED HELP TO A?.L WHO N^'OCLD UNDERSTAND THE GREAT TlIEOLOGiCAL EPISTLE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 3^- 3BTJR"V^-A.SI3:, S.T-ID. if^mo, Clotli, 266 pages, $1.26. JUDGMENT OF THE CRITICS. The rhrliitinn Gnnrdlan.— Dr. Bunvosh has produced a work that indi- catefl hia ri^ht to a high place among the Hiblical expositors of the day. We know of DO work heretofore published in Canada which presents in equal degree evi> dences of thorough Biblical scholarship and theological acumen. The New York t'lirlstinn Advocate.— We congrdtulate our Canadian brethren on the appearance of such a scholarly work. . . While not as pre- tentious in size as some other works on the same epistle, it is learned, careful, and richly exegetical and expositorv. We have been especially delighted with the exposition of the difficulties of the famous eighth chapter. . . . The book has many such valuable pMUges, and establishes the author in the front rank of theo- logians. Canadian MetliodllC MaRazlne.— The commentary is lucid and con« vincing, evading no difficulties, but patiently grappling with them and seeking their solution. To all Bible students, but especially to the ministers of our Church and candidates for its ministry, we cordially commend this volume, one of the most important contributions to the exegesis of this epistle yet given to the world. Rev. Pror. §liaw, LL.D., Wesleyau Tlieol. Coll., Montreal,— <^ou n.ay most profitably consult Dr. Burwash on any of the great passages wiiich ir this epistle deal with the difficult problems of man's condition, and in all hit exegesis you find evidence both of thorough research and of wise and independent judgment. Read for example on Romans v. 12, "And so death passed upon all men," etc., one rf the most difficult sentences in the epistle, and views similar t4 those of Hofman and Dietzsch, which Qodet and Meyer so Kummarily dismiss, are ably, and, I think, correctly defended. The work is a credit to Caoadian scbolajr* ship and to Csaadian Methodism. WILLIAM BRIG6S, 78 & 80 King 8t. E., Toronto. C. W. COATW, Montreal, Q' ». S. F. Hussris, Halifax, N.& ■^voi?.i5:s REV. J. CYNDDYLAN JONES. !::>'' THE WELSH PULPIT OP TO-DAY. Edited by Rev. J. Cynddylan Jones, Aidhmr«f"StxuiU$ in John," ** Studies in Acts," and " Stuiiet in Matthew." Small octavo, cloth, 496 pages. $2.00. "IWs in m nra>:h larger book than " Stiidies in John " or " Acts," and sells ftt only |i.(Ki. Tbe Cnt^lish price of the oook ia ^2.65. " Tbta* »re ^■>d sermons, some are very pood, and in our judgment, one af tht t.C't is Ukt cmely discourse by the accomplislied editor on the ' Life of Je-u«,' d(>me««ae. «>ci:kl, industrial, and reli(;iou8. . . . Welsh ministers have a liiirh reputnitiKMt for preai-hin^ amonf^iit their Enpflish brethrun, and this fir:-t series of Weigh •enBoas tliows that it is well merited."— if e/Ao(itA( Recorder, Knd tfaic B |)«»iritely the kind of audience w'.iich the Welsh preacher has a riu'ht to expect. 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