From
by
J. EWING RITCHIE,
author of “british senators,” “the night side of london,” etc.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1870.
What good men have been
persecuted and suffered wrong because they bore the name of a
sect distasteful to an imperious majority! How the mob have
thirsted for their blood!
“These are
Christians—away with them to the lions,” said they of
old Rome. “Down with the Roundheads!”
was the
cry of country squire and rural parson when a few devout men such
as Richard
Baxter and others more or less known
to fame met in a small room to keep alive the spirit of piety and
prayer amongst themselves. It was the same when Wesley and
Whitefield, often at the peril of life, proclaimed in parishes of
England sunk in ignorance Gospel truths. There are
thousands who, like the late Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, could tell
how a “Church and King mob” kept them in perpetual
fear, because they were “Meetingers.” There are
yet parishes in Suffolk and Norfolk where to go to chapel is to
insure your being despised as a “Pogram,” and cut by
all the dignities of the village, even if you have the learning
of a German professor and the piety of a saint.
In the
Babel of London, however, it is different; here, there is a rage
for new names, and there are preachers and people ever ready to
resort to a new name, as if novelty were a possibility in our
day, after eighteen hundred years of theological hair-splitting
and threshing of straw. The Christadelphians are the latest
production in this way. They meet in Crowndale Hall,
Crowndale Road, St. Pancras Road, every Sunday; in the morning,
at eleven, for the breaking of bread, and worship; in the
afternoon at three, when there is a Bible-class especially for
inquirers, when opportunity to ask questions respecting
the one faith is afforded; and at seven in the evening,
when we are told the Word of God is expounded in harmony with the
things concerning the
kingdom of God and the name of Jesus
anointed.
One of the most active teachers is
Mr. Watts,
late of Vernon Chapel, King’s Cross Road. The
Athenæum Hall, Temple Road, Birmingham, seems to be the
headquarters of Christadelphian publications. There are
published there the
Christadelphian Shield, the
Biblical Newspaper, and the
Ambassador, monthly
periodicals, and other publications more expensive, and aiming to
be standard works.
This, I take it, is the epitome of their faith:—
“One God, the Eternal Father, dwelling in
heaven in light of glory inconceivable; one universal irradiant
Spirit, by which the Father fills all and knows all, and when He
wills, performs all; one Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten
by the Spirit of the Virgin Mary, put to death for sin, raised
from the dead for righteousness, and exalted to the heavens as a
Mediator between God and man; man a creature of the ground, under
sentence of death because of sin, which is his great
enemy — the devil; deliverance from death by resurrection,
and bodily glorification at the coming of Christ and inheritance
of the kingdom of God, offered to all men on condition—1,
of believing the glad tidings of Christ’s accomplishment
at His first appearing, and of His coming
manifestations in the earth as King of Israel and Ruler of the
whole earth at the setting up of the kingdom of God; 2, of being
immersed in water for His name; and 3, of continuing in
well-doing to the end of this probationary career.”
This is the teaching of the new sect. They rejoice in
their emancipation from the bondage of orthodoxy.
Mr. Watts
says:
“My past nineteen years of religious life I
regard as so much lost time taken up with the fables and follies
of man’s fleshly mind, systematized upon a pagan theology;
and although I honestly thought myself right, and strove hard to
lead others, yet I am now fully persuaded it was all done in
ignorance of the true knowledge of God.”
He tells us
the Evangelical party in the Church or Dissent do not know the
Gospel.
“Nothing can be more clear,”
he says,
“than that this (their doctrine of the resurrection) first
item of the Gospel as preached by Jesus and the Apostles does not
form any part of the teaching either of those who pretend to be
the successors of the Apostles, or the sects and parties of
Dissenters who have imbibed their system of theology from the
same polluted stream.”
The doctrine of the
soul’s essential and inherent immortality is a pagan
myth. For the heathen there is no future life;
for them what Macbeth wished has come to pass, and life is
indeed
“The be all and the end all here.”
The mere belief of this
doctrine relieves orthodoxy of the
perplexing problem, What becomes of the heathen? and of course
strikes at the foundation of the doctrine of purgatory. Yet
we are not to suppose there will be no punishment for the wicked
and the disobedient; they shall beaten with stripes, and then,
according to the righteous Judge, enter upon that second death
state, from which there shall be no resurrection—an opinion
the direct opposite of that of Origen and
Archbishop Tillotson,
first promulgated in modern times by Dr. Rust, Bishop of
Dromore. The Calvinistic formula is also, in the opinion of
the Christadelphians, a mere travesty of the subject of the
atonement. As to man in general, he is born to die.
God treated the first man federally. He put him on
probation, and in him all his successors stood or fell. We
never read of immortal, never-dying souls in Scripture, and to
foist such a meaning on 2 Cor. v. 8, as that it proves the
existence of a separate state of disembodied spirits, is to
handle the
Word of God deceitfully.
Once
Mr. Watts believed in a kingdom in the sky, a throne in the
heart, a seed of Israel, a New Jerusalem and promised land, all
mystically referring to something at present existing in the
so-called
Christian Church. He does so no longer. His
eyes are opened, the light is come, and he and his friends,
chiefly juveniles, rejoice; and if they have the true light, who
shall say they have no reason to rejoice? Farewell, writes
Mr. Watts, in a poem considered poetically of doubtful
merit—
“Farewell to the false, I welcome the
true,
And begin the year with Christ anew.”
This reference to poetry reminds me that the Christadelphians
have a hymn-book of their own, to frame which appears to have
been a matter of no little trouble. With the hymns used by
Christian churches in general they find much fault. They
require something manly and robust, whereas the churches of all
denominations rejoice in what is sentimental, and their songs of
praise and devotion are described as “oceans of
slops.” Whether the Christadelphians have much
improved theirs, I leave the reader to judge. As a specimen
I quote one verse from Montgomery’s well-known poem,
“The Grave.”
In their
hymn-book I find it printed thus. I quote from
memory:—
“There is a calm for saints who weep,
A rest for weary Weyyah found;
In Christ secure they sweetly sleep,
Hid in the ground.”
At present the Christadelphians do not seem very
flourishing. In their little room—which is miscalled
a hall—there are about forty of them of an evening,
quibbling earnestly, and to the best of their ability.
In taking leave of the Christadelphians, let me refer to a
passage in our Church history. It is notorious that the
celebrated Henry Dodwell,
Camden Professor of History in the
University of Oxford, in order to exalt the power and dignity of
the priesthood, endeavoured to prove that the doctrine of the
soul’s natural mortality was the true and original
doctrine, and that immortality was only at baptism conferred upon
the soul by the gift of God through the hands of one set of
regularly ordained clergy.
p. 300- p305
 |
Women in Industry during the First World War, London, c 1918
- A general view of the central hall of Crowndale Works, an anti-gas
mask factory, in Camden Town, London. A mass of women sit shoulder to
shoulder on long tables to prepare the glass for the mask eyepieces.
- +++
-
|
