p. 79I greet you in the best of good wishes. My greeting may not be acceptable. It is nevertheless sincere, I assure you. It is my desire to bless you. I can do very little to show you this practically. I can pray: and this I do. Rarely do I bend my knee before the Maker of us all without asking Him to open your eyes wherein they may be closed: to bring your steps into paths of wisdom and love wherein they may be straying in other roads; and to attend you with His favour in so far as His will and pleasure may allow. Suffer me, then, to say a few frank words to you which can do no more harm if they fail of any good.
Fellow-sufferers in the present evil state,
I have been recently writing to friends: and it has occurred to me to conclude my epistolary effort in a few words to you, my foes. You are not foes by my will or wish. I wish to speak words of kindness, but will not mock you with “sentimental twaddle.” Nor will I attempt to propitiate your good graces with smooth words of compliment and congratulation regardless of truth. I will not utter the lie of saying that you are all honest men, disinterestedly aiming at the service of God, and differing only in your conceptions of what that service requires. Some of you, I doubt not, are so: but I am bound to recognise that fact which the Scriptures declare, and which experience compels every man of sagacious discernment to note sooner or later, that there are men who are “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God,” and who are consequently haters of those whose love cannot run in the same channel. How many of this sort there are among you, I will not presume to judge. God knows, and will make it manifest in due time. I am concerned to note their existence just now merely as explaining some things that are otherwise inexplicable.
You are on the whole a numerous company. This fact would have distressed me at one time. When quite young, I was smitten with the beauty of the popular dictum, that it was a good thing, and a thing to aim at, to have no p. 80 enemies. I worked under the power of this idea for a good while. Had I been in a worldly line of things, I would, doubtless, have continued to do so — and very likely, with the success of other men. But, having the Bible standard before me in all things, I came to see its futility, and to perceive the reason of the saying of Christ, “Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.”
I found it impossible to avoid giving offence; and after many struggles against the inevitable, I quietly and grimly surrendered.
I saw that I could not prevent the making of enemies without becoming a time server, and a pleaser of men. I therefore made up my mind to accept enmity, and to adopt as the only workable policy, the policy of being on God’s side in all matters, whatever the risks or the consequences. I do not mean that I gave up the idea of being friendly — far from it. I have always had the commandment before my eyes that we are to bless, and curse not: to do good to them that hate us: to pray for them that despitefully use and afflict us.
In this spirit, I have always tried to act, though frequently without the entire success I could have wished. But what I mean to say is, that having once for all made up my mind that I could not prevent the existence of enemies, and that their existence was the inevitable corollary of an endeavour to follow a course of faithfulness to divine principles, their existence ceased to be a trouble to me, in any serious sense. Dr. Thomas told me that if I followed such a course, his experience on this point would be mine. I did not quite believe him at the time. I imagined in my simplicity, that a good deal of the enmity he had to endure, was the result of his own needless brusqueness in dealing with opposition. But experience has shown me that my notions were the result of — well, in plain language, my ignorance of human nature, as it actually is, in the vast mass of the population in the present state of things upon the earth.
You are not only numerous; but you are greatly diversified in the complexion of your antagonism. Many of you are enemies, because of your faith in popular theology.
p. 81 You sincerely hate and detest a movement that not only calls in question, but successfully disproves the claims of that faith to be considered scriptural. Of course, you don’t see the successful disproving, or many of you would cease to be enemies, but you feel the force of the argument, and, as you think it a wrong argument, its very force helps to inflame your animosity through misunderstanding. Your opposition is intelligible. Your enmity is respectable, after a sort. It is, in many of your cases, the sort of enmity that Paul showed to the Christians before Christ appeared to him; and, like his, will disappear in the exhibition of the truth before your eyes at the return of Christ.
You are not all of this sort. Some of you are mere partisans of the orthodox system: you stick to it because your interests are identified with it, or because your friends belong to it. You are in a different position from the first-mentioned class. You are mere Canaanites; the hereditary upholders of the dominant superstition, destined to perish before the storm that will shortly “sweep away the refuge of lies.”
But you principally belong to a class that stands nearer to scriptural things than the everyday supporter of orthodox religion. You mostly consist of those who stand more or less within the sphere that has been affected in these latter days by the revival of primitive apostolic truth. Some of you are friends of the late Alexander Campbell, who did a useful work in his day, but who could not forgive Dr. Thomas’s exposure of the unscriptural features of the partly scriptural movement which he headed; and whose bitterness you have inherited against those who feel scripturally bound to take Dr. Thomas’s views of things.
Some of you, again, sympathise with the style of things known as Dowieism, in which a degree of personal worth and sociability is allied with uncertainty, and laxity, and lukewarmness in the protest of apostolic and prophetic truth against the dominant apostacy of the age: because of your sympathy with which, you entertain a pronounced antipathy to those who have had to do battle for clear and strong principles of action in past times, and who do not and cannot repent of their deeds because prompted by convictions generated by the word of truth.
p. 82 Others of you had your animosity kindled into a scorching flame by the hot wind of Renunciationism which blew upon and blighted our little world some 12 years ago. You have never recovered from the hard feelings, nor ceased the hard speeches originating in the unhappy convulsion; and will probably have to see death or Christ here before you forgive the decisive measures that were forced on the friends of the truth at the time, by the plots that were formed against it.
There are others of you with special grievances of your own, arising out of schemes discouraged, principles opposed, doctrines condemned, dignities hurt, in collision with those who felt bound to maintain scriptural precepts and sentiments, as against what seemed your divergence from these. The most recent addition to your number consists of those who disapprove (to use the mildest word) of the strong stand that has been made against the doctrine of the partial inspiration.
Now, I wish to say to one and all of you that I entertain none of the rancour against you such as you imagine me to feel. If I cannot stand where you stand (any more than you feel able to stand where I stand) it is not because I love contention. Contention is odious to me. Fighting is one of the mournful necessities of life. I cannot escape it, but I hate it, and it is unmixed with personal enmity to any of you. I realise too well how helpless many of you are. Your organisation, your natural bias, your surroundings, the untrue things that have been told you — all make it impossible for you to take any other view, or feel any other sympathy than that which animates you. You cannot help feeling, many of you, that you are in the way of righteousness, and that I am in the way of wickedness. I recognise this sincerely, and it takes away the sting of the resentment, and even makes me feel pitiful and patient towards you, and full of yearning for the day when the infallible judge of mankind will put away misunderstandings and unite all his true servants in a glorious unity that will never be broken.
Another thing makes it impossible for me to feel very bitter towards you. Though your estimate of me is altogether p. 83 off the mark I tell you, I have not the high opinion of myself that you imagine. I know my infirmities and my shortcomings. They are not such as would be esteemed heinous by a human standard. Still, they cause me utter abasement in the presence of the Most High, and they help me to feel that, in a certain sense, I give you cause for your hard thoughts and speeches. I am not able to carry myself towards you as I should desire. Between chronic physical discomfort of body and the grimness begotten of constant collision with opposition, and too constant action in one line of things, I realise that I must appear a very repugnant person in your eyes, notwithstanding my strong desire and best efforts to sustain a different part.
But when I have said all this, I will, like Job, maintain mine integrity. I cannot admit the imputations so freely current among you. I am anxious to confess my faults. To do so affords me satisfaction; but do not bring charges I cannot own to. I do not and have not striven in any sense to serve myself. I aim not, and have not aimed at personal exaltation. I enjoy not, and never have enjoyed, the position into which circumstances have forced me. I am anxious only for the ascendancy of principles, and could hide me out of sight if they were exalted. It was a sad day for me when Dr. Thomas ceased from the land of the living. I felt as if the sun had been blotted from the sky. And my feeling ever since has been that nothing would be so great a satisfaction as the uprise of another from any quarter like him, similarly gifted with a clear eye to see divine verities, and detect human quackery; a similarly great capacity to take in the great breadths of things, and to keep details and technicalities in their proper little places; and a similarly fearless heart to be zealous for God, and to maintain the right at all human risks. I have always felt that nothing would be so congenial to me as to stand aside for such a one, and to take a very low and a glad place in co-operating with his initiative.
If God have not given me this pleasure, it is my misfortune: not my crime. Many activities have flitted across the low horizon since then. Charity has suffered them, and striven to put the best interpretation on things; but the utmost stretch of charity cannot change the nature of things and the evidence of the senses. Men who rejoice in the truth are not to be mistaken, neither can those long be mistaken with whom personal elevation is a more controlling influence than the ascendancy of the things of God among men.
p. 84 If I have been compelled to take a prominent and offensive part, it has been to my sorrow, and not to my satisfaction at all. So little has it been a satisfaction, in the sense of your surmises, that at any time I have felt that the greatest kindness God could show to me would be to lay me where all his servants rest, while the present confusion reigns upon the earth.
This feeling grows stronger every year. I have been humbled by having it attributed to defective “vivativeness,” as the phrenologists call it. The sympathetic critics who apply this salve can only interpret by their own feelings; but their interpretation is a mistake.
I tell them I am not behind them in the natural love of life; but there are considerations that counterbalance instinctive feeling, and lead a man to say with Job, “I would not live alway.” Life is not desirable in the present state of things upon earth, in which there is an absence of every condition that the love of God and the love of man would prompt a man to desire to see; and in which every human arm is utterly powerless to alter the situation. Some good friends cannot understand the sentiment: we can only have patience, and say, “What ye know not now, ye may know hereafter.”
I desire to justify you to the utmost that justice admits. But after all allowances and concessions, let me reason with you against the unreasonableness of your attitude. Perhaps you are not all inaccessible to reason, though some of you are. What is there in the substantial shape of my life for 30 years past that warrants the hotness of your displeasure? Have I not laboured above all things to make the Bible influential? Have I not sought to defend it from the attacks of all kinds of assailants? Have I not steadily tried to induce people to become daily readers of it? Have I not striven to make its glorious doctrines manifest, and its excellent commandments observed?
Do you think I have done this with too much fervour? Do you really think I have been too “extreme”? Consider the situation among men, and say how, in the midst of so much inertia, any successful work is to be done for God without a degree of enthusiasm that in some relations may be inconvenient? Say where any divine work has ever been done in this stagnant world of human indifference without zeal? Is it not the fact that we have too little and not too much zeal? Is it not true that the word p. 85 of God throughout, has everything to say in favour of zeal, and nothing but words of disparagement for those who are lukewarm in the supremest concern of human life?
And now, if my whole work, and my whole influence have been promotive of the truth in public and in private, in theory and in practice, ought you not to be merciful to what you may consider my infirmities? Ought you not to help in any way in your power, instead of trying to weaken and hinder by unfriendly words and deeds?
Those who are of the truth, rejoice in the truth’s service by whatsoever means promoted; and such will always have a very broad mantle of charity ready for the imperfections that are more or less incident to all human ways in the present state. They do not give the exclusive benefit of this mantle to the faults of those who oppose the truth: surely they have a little corner of it to spare sometimes for those who love the Lord with all their heart, and offend only by their earnest contention for the faith once delivered to the saints against every form of corruption.
It is an everlasting and a universal rule that those who are of the truth hear the truth’s voice and are on the truth’s side, and rejoice in the truth’s prosperity. The truth has been a dividing thing from the beginning; it draws strongly to itself those who are of it, and it repels decisively those who “savour not the things that be of God but those which be of men.”
The one class has always been very small and the other always very large. You remember in which of the two companies the Lord Jesus was found. You remember that he was regarded with extreme displeasure by multitudes of the Jewish people who had reason for regarding themselves as the Lord’s people. Possibly you may reconsider. Possibly you may try to think that I may be on the Lord’s side; and that if so, our averted looks and bitter words will not be to your satisfaction in the day of the Lord.
I have no doubt you feel entirely justified in your attitude by the bad things reported to you. But as to this, I would say, have you done me justice in the matter? “Doth our law condemn a man before it hear him?” Do we not give him the opportunity of answering or explaining what is alleged against him? Experience constantly shows the need for this. You must know human life and human nature enough to know how easily many things are said in private p. 86 talk that are not true, and yet that are perhaps not said with the design of untruth. You cannot, of course, shut your eyes to all you hear; but you can resolve to be uninfluenced by it until you have given the person affected the private opportunity of explanation (if the matter is serious enough to call for it). You will always be able to judge by the way the opportunity is used as to how the matter stands. A guilty man will not be anxious to have such an opportunity; and will shuffle if it is given him. A righteous man will be anxious to court the fullest enquiry, and to afford the fullest explanation.
You think unfavourably of my course towards our two ex-“rev.” brethren. It is not in my heart to blame you much for this. I realise that you could not well think otherwise in the limited knowledge of all the circumstances possible to you. I trust to the effects of time and reflection to soften your feelings somewhat on this head. When you have finally put all things together, perhaps a little pity may take the place of censure. You will not, of course, condemn the first part of my course towards them. I took them in when they were in extreme need, and because they were in extreme need; and in Bro. Ashcroft’s case, because I thought the truth would everywhere be benefited by what he would be at liberty in a free position to do on its behalf. At the same time, I thought it would save him from the danger of being manipulated by those who might wish to use him to the detriment of apostolic principles in the house of Christ. I undertook more than the upshot showed I was able to do. I felt that in the special circumstances of both cases, duty left me no escape in assuming another burden if I was able to bear it, which I hoped and believed I should be able to do. The burden thus undertaken I did not throw up, and would not have thrown up of my own accord, except in Brother Chamberlin’s case.
It is the second part of my course that you blame. You blame me for breaking with them. All I have to say is, that I had no choice. This has been a pure misfortune and an unmixed grief, the bitterness of which was aggravated by the certainty that it would lead to what I have experienced. But I could not hesitate. The “thin end of the wedge” is p. 87 proverbially the thing to be resisted. They promulgated principles with respect to the character of the Scriptures of truth that logically took away the basis of our co-operation. I cannot help thinking that if you realised this clearly that is (presuming you sympathise more with God than with men), you would sympathise as much with the second part of my course as you did with the first.
The judgment seat will presently settle the matter. In this direction I have no misgiving as regards this particular case. I do not presume to anticipate the verdict of the august tribunal; but there is such a thing as the answer of a good conscience. The Gentile maxim that “conscience makes cowards of us all” does not apply to those who labour, with Paul, to have “a conscience void of offence towards God and towards man.” It applies only to those whose actions and speeches are dictated by a sense of present advantage irrespective of the revealed will of God.
I am not sanguine of any good in thus appealing to you. It may not be without effect as regards some. As regards others, we must recognise that they belong to “the children in the market-place,” to whom it is all one what is said or done: they are bound to be displeased. Jesus came under their censure because he ate and drank; John the Baptist, because he did not. To such, the object of their aversion cannot do right. If he is silent, he cannot answer; if he speaks, he is boastful. If he takes no notice of accusation, it is because he dare not. If he answer, it is because he has a presumptuous and egotistical spirit.
I have nothing but good wishes for the unhappy subjects of such perverseness of spirit; but it is impossible to take them into account in a practical way. They must be quietly and good naturedly left alone, in the hope that they will be no more likely to come to reason in that way than by any other line of treatment.
I would say, in conclusion, there are many reasons for mutual compassion and forbearance, if we could but fully open our mind to their power. We are permitted to breathe God’s beautiful air together for only a short time. It is not long since we stepped out of the oblivion of the measureless past: we are busy performing the various movements belonging to our allotted perishable days. And it will not be long, in the order of nature, before we shall cease all p. 88 our activities and disappear from the scene as entirely as the froth-bubble that bursts on the water.
The earth we inhabit with such splendid capabilities of well-being, is full of human misery. Our days are few and evil. Why should we add to the inevitable affliction that is wearing us away? Wherein we are powerless to abstain (as when Christ caused hatred by telling the world its works were evil)—we must needs be resigned: but let us be sure that, in some courses, we may not be “kicking against the pricks.”
Furthermore, we are on the verge of great events, in the presence of which all our grievances and misunderstandings will sink to utter insignificance, and the minds of men be made to fear a fear that will drive away many of their present views and impressions.
The judgment of God upon the Gentiles is about in a few years, to come forth with Christ, whose arrival upon the scene is dispensationally due. The thunder of his manifested power will silence all bicker and extinguish all animosity, and confound all sympathies of all merely human origin. If we are in harmony with divine ways and thoughts, we will be safe in the terrible convulsion that will destroy Gentile wickedness and lay Gentile power in the dust in all the earth.
“The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down: and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day.” I sincerely say that there will be no greater pleasure for me in that day, if happily I am myself accepted, than to see you all acquitted and owned of God. Your enmity will in that case be changed to friendship and love, and we shall rejoice together in eternal peace. That this may be our portion I pray, and subscribe myself,
Your sincere friend and well-wisher, who never grieves so much as when compelled to appear in the attitude of apparent unfriendliness.
Robert Roberts.
May, 1885.