In a letter from M.E. Barber to D.M. Panton, regarding Watchman Nee and Faithful Luke, part of it said, " For many reasons I think you should not be feeling obliged even to answer their letters. These two young men are in great danger. They have a mental apprehension of God’s Truth which unless lived out will be their peril."
In the letter, she says that they (Luke & Nee) don't realize how busy editors are, and pester them constantly with letters. But then she says, "for many reasons" they should be avoided. I remember the anecdote in the LC that MEB had forbidden WN to read Jessie Penn-Lewis. I wonder, did MEB know that J P-L was heavily involved in Freemasonry? Why did she try to keep WN from J P-L's works? Her letter to Panton is dated April 1926, and if you read WN's preface to Spiritual Man it's dated June 1927. So at the time of her letter, Nee was already heavily into J P-L, in spite of MEB's warnings to stay away.
So her comment that they were "in great danger" because they quickly dig into mental apprehension without solid spiritual (Christian) understanding has double weight, here, if they're digging into J P-L, without realizing what they're into. Excerpts from contemporary biographies that I've seen, show Penn-Lewis as fronting a mixture of Quakerism, Freemasonry, and Methodism, and the Freemasonry influence is substantial. An internet resource of primary writing showing her connection to Freemasonry is found here:
https://faithsaves.net/jessie-penn-lewis/
Here is Nee writing the preface, in June of 1927:
"I am deeply aware that the spiritual life of the readers of this book may vary greatly. If you should therefore come to some points difficult to understand, please neither reject them nor try to fathom them mentally. Such truths should be reserved for more matured life... this book deals wholly with spiritual life as an experience. In no other way can it be understood."
Given the short time between MEB's words warning of "great danger" and those of WN's preface, one can only surmise that MEB was completely wrong in her assessment - and remember, she knew WN better than any - or that he grew an awful lot in a few months, or that she was right and he was madly cribbing something that seemed 'deep' to him but was from another source entirely (i.e., Freemasonry) and passing it off as his own spiritual revelation. (Remember WL's biography of Nee, subtitled "A Seer of the Divine Revelation?)
I look at all this an I'm like, Wow, spiritual deception. Is this what I'm looking at here? Barber's letter brings it right to the fore.
"Throughout his career, Ni [sic] engaged in extensive literature ministry. He began in 1923 by editing Revival, a devotional magazine for free distribution, followed in 1926 by The Christian, which dealt with "truths about church and matters of prophecy" and gained wide circulation in only a few years. In 1926, when he was suffering from tuberculosis, Ni began his first major work, The Spiritual Man, which sought to explain spiritual formations in terms of biblical psychology, especially the radical distinction between 'soul' (self-consciousness) and 'spirit' (God-consciousness). Published in 1928, the three-volume work has been called basically a translation of Penn-Lewis' Soul and Spirit, published ten years earlier, though Ni did not make that clear."
https://bdcconline.net/en/stories/nee-watchman