William Blair Neatby

“ His name to this day is regarded with absolute loathing by thousands who have never troubled to read a single tract of all that he has written; and there are certainly hundreds, scarcely a whit better informed, who have made it one of their chief objects to perpetuate the frantic prejudice. ”

“ The most offensive tenets commonly charged upon Newton are much more often the unfair constructions, or at best the legitimate deductions, of his adversaries than tenets that he himself ever expressed. ”

“ He declares his value for things, which not to value would discredit him; but fatal error is slurred and glossed over without a regard for the Christ it denies, and fatal ignorance of essential truth displayed. This I shall now shew, as a solemn warning to brethren, not to give heed to this seducing spirit.” Darby was blinded by passionate prejudice. Whatever Newton’s speculative errors may have been, there is not, I am persuaded, a single paragraph in all his writings that would afford colourable ground for charging him with indifference to the glory of Christ. ”

“ One of Newton’s adherents, who, under the pseudonym of Vindex, wrote a vigorous and caustic pamphlet against Darby and his party, mentions a curious misunderstanding that arose out of a footnote in the earlier of the “two tracts”. Newton had quoted Darby, without naming him, to the effect that Christ (apparently in the Wilderness of the Temptation) “could not take the place of Adam in the midst of all that which would have sustained His soul; it is the place rather of Cain; the place of estrangement from God, in the absence of all sustaining power from without”. ”

“ It is of the utmost consequence that Newton from first to last with unfaltering voice affirmed the catholic doctrine of the Person of the Saviour. Christ was to him very God of very God, yet truly man, free from all taint cleaving to fallen nature, having no sin, original or otherwise. Newton never remotely hinted even the abstract peccability of Christ, and the analogy of his system to Irvingism was only fanciful ”

“ Newton was always very zealous in maintaining, in an extreme Calvinistic sense, the imputation of Adam’s guilt to all his posterity; and he had actually brought Christ beneath the imputation, as coming by His human birth under “Adam’s federal headship”. He further taught that Christ, as born into Israel when the nation was under the curse, came by this association under the curse in some sense Himself, and endured its penalties. At the same time he denied that the sufferings in which the Saviour was thus involved were his atoning sufferings. ”

“ On the 10th of January, 1848, a reply to parts of these Confessions appeared under the title of A Statement from Christians Assembling in the Name of the Lord, in Ebrington Street, Plymouth. It was probably drawn up under Tregelles’s guidance, and is certainly a sufficient guarantee of the substantial orthodoxy of the remnant of the Ebrington Street Church. To the calmness and patience of Newton is added a certain tenderness of charity singularly attractive in men that had endured the stormy vicissitudes of the previous three years. ”

“ I have not the slightest doubt that Newton would at any moment have laid down his life rather than consciously derogate from the glory of Christ. So, I fully believe, would Darby; but this only completes the horror of the fratricidal strife. It is a signal illustration of how much harder it is to live by Christ’s teaching than to die for it.
Newton’s Observations in reply to Harris appeared on the 1st of September. A calm and dignified forbearance was their distinguishing feature. ”

“ If all nutriment had been withdrawn from Him from His birth, yet God, His Father, would have sustained Him by perpetual miracle, or He would have so sustained Himself, rather than that death should have fallen, in any way, except substitutionary—on the One who deserved only blessing and life.”
In the letter of 1850, not content with citing such writers as Pearson and Bengel, Newton actually called to his aid one of the leading supporters of the attack on the doctrine of his two tracts. This was James G. Deck, widely and honourably known as a hymn-writer far beyond the limits of his own sect. ”

“ Newton’s later attitude towards his former associates was one of intense and somewhat extravagant antagonism. He thought their theology quite as heretical as they thought his. But he is entitled throughout to the credit he claimed for himself in the hapless “letter to Clulow”; his “hostility is against a system, not against individuals”. [12] The execrations of his adversaries pursued him to his distant grave, but not once in half a century did they avail to provoke retaliation. ”

“ Not that Newton persisted in this view, for, on the contrary, he withdrew both the incriminated tracts “for reconsideration”. Darby, however, without awaiting the results of the reconsideration, hastened to issue a Notice of the Statement, in which he set it aside as worthless. He was not without a well-grounded apprehension that he would be “considered relentless,” but he thought “of the interest of the Church of God in it, and even of Mr. Newton’s own”. The charity of the pamphlet how- ever is not such as to constitute Newton greatly his critic’s debtor. ”

“ Mr. Newton’s adherents claim that the ripe results of his reconsideration are contained in a pamphlet published in 1858, under the title of Christ our Suffering Surety. That Mr. Newton’s ultimate position was one of ultra-orthodoxy is of course notorious, [2] but it is highly unfortunate that he never explicitly declared his attitude towards the doctrine of the suppressed tracts. In the end he substituted for it a different doctrine, and left the matter there. This may fairly be taken to imply retractation, but to exclude confession ”

“ George Müller was afterwards greatly blamed by the Darbyites for calling Harris’s act a “work of darkness”; but surely the term may be justified, however much we regret that so excellent a man as Harris should have shared, in an evil moment, in a policy that denied to Newton the common rights, I do not say of a Christian brother, but of a fellow-creature.
Newton, before making any reply to Harris’s tract, issued an authoritative account of his own views, under the title of Remarks on the Sufferings of the Lord Jesus. Darby immediately struck in with Observations on a Tract, etc. ”

“ As early as July, 1848, he was teaching that all Christ’s “living sufferings” were vicarious in the sense of being endured “exclusively on behalf of others”. [3] Afterwards he went further, and affirmed vicariousness in the full sense of substitution. It may be said therefore that he did not return to orthodoxy by a retreat, but rather advanced to it, emerging, as it were, on the opposite bank of the stream of error.
Newton’s colleagues in the oversight of the church in Ebrington Street were not moving in any such direction ”

“ Yet this paragraph is not the work of a man who had earned a cheap reputation by a sanctimonious deportment; but of one that had cheerfully sacrificed everything to his principles, and who united to a lofty disinterestedness a gracious benignity that won all hearts. I can well believe that I have rarely read a paragraph written by a better man ”

“ Such a man is entitled to a charitable judgment if, under the impression that the ark of God was imperilled, he was betrayed into an unworthy action in its defence. His Whole Case of Plymouth and Bethesda vies with the Narrative of Facts itself in advertising its own untrustworthiness. With regard to the Bath meeting, Trotter states that “the brethren who had been rescued from the doctrinal errors of Mr. N. ... made further confession, full and ample, as to their implication in the charges made against the untruthful, immoral system of Ebrington Street. ”

“ The imputation was made in ignorance, for Newton had not yet disclaimed all knowledge of the manuscript, but the passage is a good example of the settled principle of its author,—to condemn Newton unheard on every possible count. After this, we do not expect Newton to receive any quarter in respect of his character as a Christian.
“The ignorance of some things proves there is no knowledge of God. ”

“ He endeavours to fasten on Newton the full responsibility for the notes—a responsibility that Newton afterwards disowned. “The person from whom it came, residing in the house with him ... stated that it was the substance of Mr. N.’s lecture correctly given. One can understand that he could not disown, and that he dared not own it.” Harris’s action is justified in the following remarkable passage:—
“A man manufactures poison and distributes it without avowing his name, and disseminates it assiduously in secret to destroy and ruin. ”