Earliest known Exit Letter ~ 1920s or earlier
An Open Letter to Cooneyites or Go-Preachers, known also as “Bluelights” in Tasmania
ARE YOU THE TRUE?
Dear Friend,
Doubtless, you have long since heard that I have withdrawn from your sect, but it is doubtful whether you have learnt my reason for doing so. Having been in contact with a large number of your people and having heard a number of your preachers, called by you “the true preachers” or the preachers of “the lowly way” or “Jesus Way” and having duly considered, searched, and prayed about your doctrines and tested them by the Word of God, I regret to say that I found them to be full of error, and they would not stand the test of Scripture.
Your teaching is one of the perversions of the Gospel of Christ of which Paul speaks in Galatians 1, 6-12. It is not another, but a perversion, for there is in it no justification “through faith in His blood” (Romans 3. 24-25), and no salvation through the perfect finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have made many enquiries as to this, and always the reply was in the negative.
The only salvation you believe in is that by receiving these teachers and their teaching you become followers of them, and “thus followers of Jesus Christ”. Then you are taught to have communion with them only, and thus with Jesus Christ and His “Apostles and Prophets”. Any other communion you say is not of God, and therefore of Satan. I find no warrant in all God’s Word for your assumption, or I should say, your presumption.
I believe in an open Bible, and if you think yours is the better way of service and worship, well and good, but you must not make your thoughts a test of salvation and shut yourselves up from all spiritual intercourse with other Christians, whose desires to serve the Lord in all faithfulness may be even deeper than yours. Unfortunately, you are blinded by your own opinions and refuse spiritual intercourse with any but your own people, claiming that you alone are saved. You claim not to be a sect but you are one, and a very narrow one at that, as I have proved for myself, for you do not recognise any one as a Christian except they agree with you. I have been told that, because I will not bow down to, and follow your preachers, I am a child of the devil, and all my fellow-Christians who hold the same faith as myself are likewise children of the devil and on their way to hell.
I thank God I know better, for I know Whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day. I love His appearing, and wait with joy that moment when He will come for His own. My only sorrow is that I have done so little for Him here.
One of the first results of your “lowly way” doctrine is the loss of natural affection. I saw it in others and found it so in my own experience. This is not of God as all Scripture testifies. Christian husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, who were accustomed to kneel in prayer and sing hymns of praise together, may not do so now with the one, whichever it may be, of the family who has joined your sect, for this one accounts all the others as unclean and outcast, thus making themselves out to be too holy to associate with the rest of the family, although the others may have faith in the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. All this is of Satan and not of God.
By making your “Jesus way” a necessity for salvation, you thereby deny that the atoning death of our Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary is alone sufficient, and as this is the foundation of all blessing, (Rom. 3, 25-26; Eph. 1, 7; Col. 1, 14), your denial of it classes you with every anti-christian sect, whether you call yourself “lowly way”, “being in the Testimony”, “The Truth”. “The Spiritual Israel”, or any other name.
We have redemption through His blood (Eph. 1, 7). We are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ. (1 Peter 1, 13-19). Everywhere throughout Scripture, its teaching is, that blessing flows to us through the death and blood shedding of our Lord Jesus Christ, which you deny. The devil does not mind what else you preach about the Lord Jesus so long as you deny the efficacy of His work on Calvary’s Cross. It was there He offered Himself a sacrifice for sin, and it was by His resurrection from amongst the dead that Satan’s power was broken.
In. Gal. 1, 6-12, Paul tells us distinctly that if any man, or even an Angel from heaven, were to preach any other gospel than that which he preached, let him be accursed. He does not say anything of “the lowly way” or “the Jesus way” as the way of salvation, but the way he sets forth is through “faith in the blood of Christ, shed for us” as I have pointed out.
Not that we are to despise the lowly way, for every Christian should manifest something of our Saviour’s lowly grace, and be clothed with humility, but this is not in Scripture put as the means of our salvation. No! Only His blood; for we are redeemed by the precious blood of Christ.
I would notice too that Scripture does not say one word as to which servants we are to receive or hear this message from, but simply tells us that “being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”, the One who was delivered for our offences and was raised again for our justification. (Rom. 4, 25; 5, 1) And again it says, “Being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him”. (Rom. 5, 9).
I know you teach that you are saved by Christ’s life, quoting Romans 5, 10, but no thoughtful intelligent reader of Scripture could take that clause to mean Christ’s life on earth before the Cross. Note verses 6, 8, and 9. These verses speak of the sinful and ungodly being justified by His death, and how can you get the last clause of verse 10 put before His death without throwing the whole teaching of the Apostle in these verses out of harmony?
No! It is His life after death, His resurrection life, His living in glory, that saves us, for He ever liveth to make intercession for His saints. (Heb. 7, 25). And so we are kept. His own spotless, sinless, life as a Man here on earth was ended at the Cross. He there offered Himself a sacrifice for sin in our stead. God dealt with Him there as a sin-bearer, and poured out His wrath upon Him in those three hours of darkness, and He finished the work there. God has accepted Him, and He rose triumphant over death and ascended to the right hand of the Majesty on high. And just as in the Passover lamb, Exodus 12, the blood which was its life was of no avail until the lamb was slain, and the blood was sprinkled on the door posts and lintels in order to shelter those inside the house, so Christ’s earthly life does not avail for you nor me, except that it was part of God’s wonderful plan of redemption that Christ should live so before men that they might see His spotless holy life down here before He was offered up.
Seeking to follow His life on earth as you do, does not avail for our salvation. It is His shed blood that alone avails. The chastisement of our peace was upon us and by His stripes we are healed. Jehovah hath laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. To the eunuch who was reading this Scripture, Philip preached Jesus. (Acts 8) He who knew no sin was made sin for us. He bore our sins on His own body on the tree, and righteousness is imputed to us who believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead. This is the consistent teaching of both Old and New Testaments. I beg of you to test your teachings by the unerring Word of God, as I have done.
Your teachings are the “Traditions of men”, and not the Word of God. They are full of error and misunderstanding of the Scriptures, and any one with any knowledge of the Word of Truth can plainly see through them, But when your teachers come along, they seek to shake the confidence of the simple in what God’s Word plainly declares, and in many cases these begin to doubt and think it must mean something else, because the preachers have said so, and they claim to be true preachers. When doubt enters the mind it is then good soil in which to plant the evil teachings by which your preachers delude the simple and attach them to your sect.
Your preachers talk much about the lowly way and persuade people that they are very lowly minded, when in reality they are just the opposite. They go about seeking to establish their own righteousness in contradistinction to the unrighteousness of every other preacher.
Mr. Adam Hutchison spent some time trying to persuade me that the only right way to worship the true God is in a meeting held in the home, or house, of one of your saints. Scripture nowhere makes this a necessity, although in certain cases shows it was done in the house of a believer. Only you look upon it as part of the lowly way, churches, chapels, and meeting rooms being designated the high or false way. Paul, however, preached in the Synagogues whenever he had opportunity, and after all, it is what suits the convenience of all the Saints that is best in all circumstances, for one can easily conceive that a private house might become too small for the numbers.
Another of your teachers, John Harding [Hardie], taught that to be a true preacher one must be unmarried and have no settled home, and that is that is what characterises your preachers. This is Romish in its essence. I understand also that originally, if you prevailed on a married couple to go out and preach, they separated, the woman going with another woman preacher, and the man with another man. This I believe you have modified somewhat, and in a few cases the husband and wife may go out together preaching. But you think it quite wrong for a True preacher to have a settled home and a family, though you allow that a “saint,” as you call a man who joins your sect, and has his own settled home, and a wife children, may be a true preacher. You do not limit saints, so one of your chief preachers said, but what a contradiction it is! These are your strongest points and then compared with scripture, how much they disagree with apostolic practice. Was not Philip married, with a home and children? And also John and Peter? My dear friends, all the points for which you differ so essentially from other Christians are unscriptural and unsound.
Now as to my own experience, in connection with you, I wish I could unveil to you a little of what I suffered through getting under the power of your teaching. I was almost poisoned spiritually by your errors. I thank God for opening my eyes to see, before it was too late, and after much agonizing in prayer before God, and holding on to His promise that if any one will do His will they shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God, I can now praise Him, Who has so wondrously led me and overruled all for my good, and I trust for His glory.
I do not say that you are wrong in all you teach, but I do say that your foundation is wrong, and that salvation, as God’s Word reveals it, is not taught. I found too that the antidote to the poison I had swallowed was the reading and meditating on God’s own Word, His precious and revealed truth, and oh! how lovingly He has led me out, though the suffering has been intense.
There is much more I might have brought before you, but I will conclude with praise to Him Who has used me to help a few who were in danger of being ensnared. I hope my remarks may lead many amongst you to review all your teaching in the light of the Word of God and trust that you may be delivered from the snare of the fowler and be brought into the liberty of the Sons of God.
By Hilda M. Weymouth
Kempton, Tasmania, Australia
(no date; probably sometime in the 1920s, as it was one of the materials forwarded to Loizeaux by W. M. Rule).