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p378 [C Owen] MY DEAR BROTHER, - I thank you for your letter. I have always been ready to explain any expressions, and have admitted the human infirmity of them now these eight years. For, strange to say, my papers have been published these eight years, a plain proof that it is, as of God, some other cause than mere doctrine, and of man and the enemy too. It is this which one has to weigh. I am not afraid of the result, but as a passage it has its importance. I have no wish at the present time to have an exhibition of a controversy among brethren. But it is not only that I have been willing to explain, I have done so whenever I have been written to; and, of course, should; and many minds, I know, set at rest. You will remember as to reading Mr. D.'s and Captain H.'s pamphlets, that I had a long correspondence with each; and I am told that D.'s is substantially his letters without mine. Did I read them I might have to answer them, and that I should with difficulty be brought to do. There is a day when all will be brought to light. I bow, I trust, sincerely to the present chastening; feeling a great deal more for brethren than for myself. I am persuaded with patience everything will find its place. . . . God's meaning in what takes place, I should, and do, weigh with him. It is, of course, an additional pressure on me in my more direct work in this very difficult country, but I do not feel it much now. I am still very glad I offered to stand outside. If it was not to be so, God has His own purpose and blessing in it. If it were to be so, yet I have not as far as yet a thought of giving up a hair's breadth of what my real meaning was. The world with me or against me, I hold [it] firm and unmoved. My judgment is that while I might relieve them by leaving them (and the doctrine is no proper business of theirs) their yielding to D. and H. would be the first step in their ruin.

What I always desired was that they should go on quietly on their own ground; that is their business; but not be terrified by the adversaries.

Was death as death a suffering and sorrow to Christ, for instance in Gethsemane (where H. admits Christ was not accomplishing the work of atonement) or not - I do not mean man's pure action in it, but death as death - when the sorrows of death compassed Him? Was His cutting off as Messiah nothing to Him? Atonement was in the cup, suffering for righteousness all His public course (at any rate) through. Was there no heart-suffering, but man's outward persecutions because He was righteous, and His feeling them - nothing that pressed on Christ's heart but atonement or persecution? They do not seem to know what suffering means, and apply it only to outward actual things coming on a man; nor the true mind of good in the midst of evil. Heart-suffering for others, I suppose, they have never known; I do not envy them. It was neither sympathy for others, nor atonement, when Christ looked for compassion and found none.

November, 1866.

[53276E]

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