A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 12

by William Blair Neatby

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XII
Darby’s Strange Corrective to Newtonianism—The Secession of 1866

In the year 1864 another of the makers of Brethrenism passed away. J. G. Bellett died at his house in Upper Pembroke Street, Dublin, on the 10th of October, in his seventieth year. He had followed Darby’s standard, slowly, reluctantly, haltingly. It is plain that Darbyism inspired him with no enthusiasm, and but for Darby’s immense influence over him his later course might well have been very different. He came to feel that Brethrenism might command the allegiance of its members on the ground of its peculiar share in the deposit of truth; but Brethrenism was far from filling out the orb of his ideal. He had written to Harris on the subject, apparently very soon after the great disruption, in the following terms:—

“What was erected in the midst of us twenty years ago may be a dishonoured ruin—the light then communicated may have become darkness, and the deposit then entrusted be forfeited never to be restored. Still the duty of stewardship is as simple and as abiding as ever. …

“It is a poor thing indeed to occupy a pure position^[1] with less moral power than those who are on lower ground. I feel this, I believe, beyond every element which now appears in the scene. …

“There was, I believe, some light from the mind of Christ conveyed to elect vessels … some twenty-two years ago. I do not believe the Lord has allowed that light to be put out in itself, or even withdrawn from the very vessels in which it was then deposited. … I am neither to disesteem nor to overvalue it. I deeply believe there are vessels in God’s house, made for other treasure, and that such vessels fill their service in both a wide [? wider] sphere, and with a more devoted heart. I do not feel myself even under a temptation to undervalue them. … When I think of such men as Bickersteth and Hewitson, and of such labourers as the missionaries abroad, as the teachers of the ragged schools in London, or as the clergy in the West of Ireland, I am at once ashamed of myself, and desire to honour both them and their work. But I must let the Lord distribute severally as He will. …”^[2]

Such language as this is surely the relic of a better age of Brethrenism than the present generation has known. But Bellett was a strange Darbyite. He caused some scandal to his fellow- Exclusives by occasionally walking arm in arm with Open Brethren along the streets of Dublin; and he was on cordial terms with the late excellent Denham Smith. No one interfered with him; indeed, Bellett’s adherence on his own terms was of some value even to Darby. He is the one great literary figure of Brethrenism. The peculiar position that he shared with the rest of his school in regard to “dispensational truth” will generally be held to discount his value, as it certainly discounts his popularity. But his little works are a valuable addition to any library. For beauty of thought matched with beauty of expression, for frequent depth of spiritual and psychological insight, for an intense and glowing devotion to Christ, his writings have a great and abiding value.

Perhaps no prominent Plymouth Brother ever drew so powerfully the love and esteem of men who had no sympathy with his ecclesiastical position. He and his brother, the Rev. George Bellett, were throughout life singularly closely and tenderly attached. Another clergyman—and he a man of “moderate High Church views”—bore a most emphatic witness in a letter to Miss Bellett.

“How thankful we ought to be to God who gives us every now and again such witnesses as your most dear and honoured father was, to His own glory, love, and character. If the servant were so lovely, what the Master.

“… He was one of the most remarkable and attractive men, if not the most, I ever met, and after thirty years, the tones of his voice, the expression of his eyes, and the exquisite utterances of his heart are as vivid as though I only saw and heard him today. … Never, never shall I see such an one again.”

Bellett, like Groves, gave the keynote of his life in one of his last words,—“Oh, the Man of Sychar!”

It is natural to think of this good man as “taken away from the evil to come”. At the time of his death a fresh and very serious storm was brewing. In 1858 and the following year Darby had contributed a series of papers on the sufferings of Christ to the Bible Treasury—a new organ of the Brethren, destined to run a long course, not yet complete, under the able editorship of Mr. William Kelly. These papers, in connexion with one or two that appeared in other magazines, provoked a tumult of disapprobation on the part of persons unfavourable to Darby’s ecclesiastical action. Prominent among these was Mr. Tom Ryan, an Irish Brother that had been somewhat early connected with the Brethren, among whom he enjoyed a high reputation for scholarship. But the disaffection soon spread to Darby’s personal adherents, and ultimately led in 1866 to a secession of considerable importance.

By a most extraordinary tour de force, Darby found himself arraigned on the charge of teaching the Newtonian heresy.^[3] Naturally he fumed at it, but it is clear at the first glance that no grand jury could have refused to find a true bill. Darby had laid the weight of his indictment of Newton on the fact that Newton had placed Christ (as the expression went) under wrath from God not vicariously endured. That Darby had done the very same thing was now the assertion not only of clever men like Mr. Ryan, who might be considered unfriendly critics, but also of several of Darby’s most devoted adherents. Darby was naturally angry, and publicly declared that people who instituted a comparison between his system and Newton’s were either fools or knaves.

Unfortunately, this summary verdict is not borne out by an examination of the names of Darby’s opponents. Though it was long before they could prevail on themselves to move in the matter, the men who ultimately bore the brunt of the conflict were Percy Francis Hall and William Henry Dorman.

Hall had been for many years a lukewarm supporter of Brethrenism. But for Darby’s tracts, however, he would have “gone on” with his party “in sadness indeed, and with the oppressive conviction that” his “great theory of subjection to the Holy Spirit, as dwelling in the Church on earth, was practically abandoned”. But Dorman had not so far shown any sign of disaffection, although circumstances had probably, unperceived by him, been loosening his moorings to Darbyism. Hall was before his friend in taking action. In 1865, after three years’ uneasy silence, he engaged in correspondence with Darby, but ineffectually. In the beginning of the following year, after prolonged persuasion, he induced Dorman to take up the matter. This initiated a correspondence which was partially published in one of the most interesting pamphlets in the literature of Brethrenism. I refer to Dorman’s Close of Twenty-eight Years of Association with J. N. D.

Dorman’s first letter to Darby, written in a most affectionate and confidential tone, takes up no decided attitude in regard to the doctrine of the incriminated tracts; and it actually ends with a suggestion that the time had come to undertake “something in the character of an ‘Irenicum’ in regard to many faithful men “associated with Open Brethren, among whom he specifies Harris and Wellesley.^[4]

Darby replied “with kindness and cordiality”. A few more notes passed, and the correspondence closed with satisfaction and hopefulness on Dorman’s part. But in a very short time he reopened the correspondence under rather curious circumstances. He had sat down to mark the passages that he judged should be altered, according to an offer he understood Darby to have made. The result was that the whole substance of the tracts impressed him in a new light. For the first time he saw (or thought he saw) that Darby had not merely introduced a new phraseology into his exposition of the Psalms, but a new system of interpretation. “Consequently,” he writes to Darby, “… I fancied your words were perpetually at war with your meaning. … Further than this I may add, there reigned in my mind up to this time, a kind of absolute confidence that it was next to impossible that you should really hold anything that was wrong. And I daresay I am not alone in this conviction.”

The barrier of so influential a prepossession once removed, Dorman’s mind travelled rapidly. His letter, which very clearly marks a crisis, lays down that the question raised derives its supreme importance from its implication “with the fundamental principle of our special association,”—that is, the association of Exclusive Brethren as such. “It must be,” the writer proceeds, “a strange principle of moral righteousness that will allow a man from day to day to go on repelling with unrelenting severity the most distant connexion with an evil, while he is at the same time conscious of being in the very closest association with what he suspects to be but a modification of the same thing. This is no hypothetical case; and I must say that no upright conscience can long bear the strain which is thus put upon it.”

The character of Darby’s reply must be judged from Dorman’s next letter, which affords a glimpse into a controversial method that unhappily is not new to us. It must be remembered that an unbroken harmony had attended the relations of the two men for twenty-eight years; that Dorman had sacrificed all his associations and all his prospects to follow Darby’s banner, and had all too faithfully served the interests of his chief ever since. The remonstrance that follows, coming from a singularly manly and sober writer, is an eloquent testimony to the strength of the personal tie that bound so many hearts to Darby in a life-long devotion.

“I cannot of course gauge the depth of other people’s affection for you, but I know the strength of my own, and how I esteem you for your Master’s sake, and for your unflinching, unflagging zeal and faithfulness in His service: but this is nothing though true. … If … you think it good to impute influences’ which I could in a moment shew you that my heart was inaccessible to, and tendencies the very reverse of which I am conscious, and then quietly tell me I am instigated by the devil in what I am doing, so far as I can see there is no help for it. …

“Your appeal to my feelings as to the effect of my letters on your spirit and work amidst your overtaxed spiritual energies, my heart must have lost all its sensibilities if it had not felt, and felt with an anguish you perhaps would be little disposed to give me credit for. But at the same time there is, on my part, Christ and conscience to be thought about as well as on yours. … I have kept my sorrows in my own bosom. … I have sought to make no faction against you, even if I were able to do so. … I was led into this examination, as I have told you, solely by the desire to deliver Hall from what I thought to be a wrong judgment about it.”

The following passage shows that Darby had attempted a very common means of intimidation. It seldom was encountered, unhappily, with such unbending sternness.

“Any talk to me about approaching Newton’s doctrine, because I cannot agree with yours, and drawing towards ‘Bethesda’—and danger of losing my moral integrity in doing so—I honestly tell you is lost upon me. I think such things are unworthy of one Christian to impute to another; and it is the direct way to reduce all the power of conscience to a name.”

It was the direct way, and a sure way, as the history of Darbyism to this very day abundantly witnesses.

Dorman proceeds to give his reasons for identifying Darby’s doctrine, as to its essence, with Newton’s.

“The link of connexion between your doctrine and Newton’s, you yourself have forged, so that you need not resort to ‘the devil’ to put the thought into my head. You have done it thus: You make your doctrine and his distinctive of a true and a false Christ. You take the worst features of his (not unjustly), and the best features of your own (not designedly), to shew it; and then you bring the whole force of this distinction to bear upon the severest course of discipline that I think was ever pursued in the church of God. … When it is made the sole basis of our differential communion, the sole ground of an unyielding and unsparing discipline, it becomes the conscience, it forces it, to look a little more deeply into the matter.”

The letter ends with another expression of personal attachment, the transparent sincerity of which Darby can hardly have failed to recognise. “I don’t speak of what it costs me to write, but I do say that I would have spared you, at all costs but one, the trouble and pain of reading even a single line.”

This letter bore date March 14. In the hope that something would be done to set things right, Dorman waited for three months. He then found “that all was to be maintained”. “I learned,” he writes, “that nine of the leaders in London had in effect countersigned the whole doctrine, and had thus sent it on, accredited as far as their names could accredit it, for currency amongst those who acknowledged Mr. D.’s rule.^[5] This of course took away from me every possible court of appeal. … What could I longer have to do with a body whose leaders had bound upon them, as their distinguishing characteristic, the dogma of ‘a third class of Christ’s sufferings,’ for which their originator, in terms, acknowledges the New Testament affords no grounds?” These reflexions were the occasion of a final letter, in which Dorman took up a position of strong opposition to the new teaching, partly on the ground of its premises, partly of its practical results.

“I object, in limine, that a whole class of the sufferings of Christ based wholly on the theory of a non-existent, future, prophetic Jewish remnant, should be forced on me as divinely taught in Scripture; while the author of them at the same time acknowledges that they have nothing to do with the grounds of the common Christian faith, as taught by the apostles. I object to it as the doctrine of development, on the most sacred subject, and in the most mischievous form. …

“Your doctrine is already bearing its bitter fruits. In one gathering, Christ’s position under God’s governmental dealings, was presented in terms so correspondent to those of Mr. Newton, that the doctrine would have been imputed to that source, only the young man who unconsciously was treading this ground, was known not to have read Mr. N.’s writings, nor to have been ever associated with those who had. And I know for certain also, that some younger brethren in a meeting for their mutual edification lately, in reading the history of the crucifixion, were apportioning out carefully the sufferings of Gethsemane to the Jewish remnant—and those of the Cross to the Church. I know that this will be as great a sorrow to you as it is to me.”

The following passage almost at the close of the letter is far more significant of a change in Dorman than (as he fancies) in his correspondent.

“Allow one who never had a moment’s ill-will towards you, and has not now, but the contrary, to say that you cannot conceive how much you differ from yourself in this, from any other controversy I have known you to be engaged in. If I think of the whole history of it and of your spirit and bearing in it, especially since the Portsmouth Meeting, I cannot see the proofs of the leading or presence of God’s spirit in the matter!”

“This letter,” Dorman tells us, “brought me a curt note in reply, in which Mr. D. declined any further correspondence on the subject. So readily, and as it appears to me, so remorselessly is he prepared to throw off men, no matter how long or how close their association may have been with him, if they once dare to judge or to question the truth of what he has written. But it is in harmony with his declared sentiments. In a letter already referred to he had said, (not to me) ‘I shall come to London and shall see how far the consciences of the saints there are troubled; that is to me how far the enemy has been at work’!”

I have presented an outline of this correspondence in some fulness, because of the light that it sheds on the Darbyism of the day. No imputation either of arrogance or of pitilessness to Darby can well go beyond what his own published references to this controversy will bear out. Hall had been his friend for thirty-five years; Dorman for twenty-eight. Both were elderly men, sacrificing the friends and associations of a lifetime, when they could have neither the time nor the heart to form fresh ones. In Dorman’s case, as he had lived (at least to a great extent) by his ministry, serious pecuniary loss was added. Yet Darby, in a long introduction prefixed to the second edition of his papers on the Sufferings, has not a kindly word for either of them. Of Dorman he says almost nothing, but of Hall a good deal, seeking to fasten on him, by a wretched sophism, an unconscious participation in Newtonianism. This stroke was doubtless adroit, because of the odium it was calculated to excite; but it is hard to think it anything but unscrupulous. Elsewhere he says of his opponents, “I am inclined to suspect that, not being in communion with Christ in the matter, Satan has deceived them by the ambiguity of the word ‘suffering’. … But if they had been seeking the truth and edification simply, they would not have been thus deceived.” The devil is constantly in requisition to explain the perversity of his critics. “The attempt to connect my doctrine with his [Newton’s] is folly or worse—an effort of the enemy to palliate or cover his work.” At an earlier date, apparently before even Hall had taken the matter up openly, he had written the following intensely characteristic sentences: “But I do see another hand and mind behind what is going on, of which this pamphlet is a clear sign to me. As an attack on myself, I am glad not to answer it. If I have to take my adversaries up because they still carry on their warfare, and Satan is using them for mischief, I here declare I will not spare them, nor fail, with God’s help, to make plain the tenets and doctrines which are at the bottom of all this.”

At no time does Darby’s conduct appear less amiable. If he really felt in conscience unable to retract or modify his doctrines, he might none the less have done justice to the motives of such venerable opponents; he might have given them honour and thanks for long and faithful friendship; he need not have cast gratuitous reproach upon their spiritual condition, or have vilified them as men acting by instigation of the devil. This is not, we may all gladly recognise, the Darby of earlier years. It is not the Darby that Groves and Newman loved for his large-heartedness in Dublin; nor even the Darby to whom his enemies bore honourable witness in Switzerland. I suppose it is well-nigh impossible for a man to be treated as infallible through a long series of years by thousands of his fellow-creatures, without suffering grievous moral deterioration; and arrogance and ruthlessness are obviously the qualities most likely to be developed.

On a review of this controversy, the question whether Darby had actually taught what was imputed to him is really of secondary importance. If the seceders had withdrawn on the bare ground that Darby taught doctrines that made him unfit for Christian communion, what he actually taught would have become the all-important question. But the fact was far otherwise; on that point Hall and Dorman are both perfectly explicit. “I have not felt myself particularly called upon,” says Dorman, “in this examination to prove that these doctrines are false and heretical,” though he evidently thought them so. “It is enough if I have shewn that they make any approach to those formerly held by Mr. Newton.”^[6] And Hall writes: “So like are they to Mr. N.’s doctrines, that even had they not been as bad in themselves as I judge them to be, I should be quite unable to maintain the place of what is called testimony against Mr. N., while connected with those who hold what I think to be as bad”.

The position of the Exclusives was reduced to an absurdity, apart altogether from the question of what Darby had taught. It was the distinctive basis of their communion to cut off “from the Church of God on earth” all those who had the most remote, or even the most unreal and fictitious, connexion with Newton’s old doctrine—a doctrine apparently no longer actually professed by anybody in 1866; while at the same time they harboured a doctrine that two of their very ablest and most respected teachers had to conclude (visibly in spite of themselves and at a great personal sacrifice) to be essentially the same thing. Darby’s personal influence availed to smother the question; and in no other conceivable way could it have been disposed of.

As to the minor question of what Darby taught, Dorman frankly acknowledged the difficulty. He speaks of “the whole difficulty of apprehending Mr. D.’s various statements; and the still greater difficulty of reconciling them when they are understood; all the contradictions that so abundantly meet you in dealing with this third point”. It will not be forgotten that the same difficulty had been alleged by many to attend the investigation of Newton’s opinions, although Newton was a far clearer writer than Darby. At the present day there are good men that imagine they can dispose of all charges against Darby’s tracts by reading them for themselves in his Collected Writings. Occasionally they do read them, and pronounce him innocent. Probably they would read Newton’s old tracts with equal satisfaction, if they read them without knowing that Newton had written them. Bellett read them with approval, and afterwards joined a party that had no rationale for its existence except its “testimony” against the tracts he had approved.

Darby’s followers had his authority for assuming that the essence of Newton’s error was that he taught that Christ suffered Divine wrath otherwise than atoningly. Hall, speaking of his correspondence with Darby in 1865, says, “My correspondence closed with the request that he would print some paper which I could shew, to the effect—that he did not hold, or mean to teach that our Lord was ever smitten by God’s hand, save atoningly, but that he thought such a statement ‘false and heretical’. I asked this only because he told me in his last letter that he did not hold any such doctrine, and I very much wished to believe this, and thought such a statement might clear the way for something better; he would not consent to do this.” (The italics are my own.)

Nor could he. Quoting Psalm lxix. 26, he had said, “Here we have evidently more than man’s persecutions. They take advantage of God’s hand upon the sorrowing One to add to His burden and grief. This is not atonement,^[7] but there is sorrow and smiting from God. Hence we find the sense of sins (v. 5) though of course in the case of Christ, they were not His own personally, but the nation’s, etc.” Dorman also quotes from the Synopsis on Psalm cii. “He [Christ] looks to Jehovah, who cast down Him whom He had called to the place of Messiah, but who now meets indignation and wrath. [The italics are Dorman’s.] We are far here beyond looking at sufferings as coming from man. They did and were felt, but men are not before Him in judgment; nor is it His expiatory work, though that which wrought it is here—the indignation and wrath. It is Himself, His own being cut off as man.” In this passage, Darby so abuses his privilege of writing without regard to the principles of grammar that I should be loth to dogmatise as to his meaning; but the meaning that seems to lie the least remote from his words is surely that which Dorman imputes to him.^[8]

These are very far from being isolated expressions. The “third class” of Christ’s sufferings were said to be those that he entered into in sympathy with the Remnant. The New Testament tells us nothing of such sufferings, as Darby seems to have admitted; but we find them in the Psalms. Newton’s enquiry followed similar lines, but it was a serious thing for him that he believed in an “unconverted remnant,” while Darby believed in a semi-converted, but unenlightened one, which might have some very slight tendency to improve matters.

Still it is dangerous work to assign to Christ the inward experiences of a sinful “remnant” of any kind. Darby had written in his Remarks on a Letter on Subjects connected with the Lord’s Humanity, “Mr. N. … declares that Jesus had ‘the exercises of soul which His elect in their unconverted state ought to have, and which they would have, if it were possible for them to know and feel everything rightly according to God’. Now whatever nonsense this may be (for it is a contradiction in terms, because, if they had such, they would not be unconverted) yet, taking it as it is, what feelings does it give to Jesus?” Though Newton guarded himself by reiterated declarations of the perfect sinlessness of all Christ’s experiences, this severe criticism of his words was not undeserved; but Darby fared no whit better when he ventured on the same perilous quest. He says that “man may be looked at morally in three conditions,” i.e., conditions of suffering. The third of these is the condition of one “awakened, quickened, and upright in desire, under the exercises of a soul learning, when a sinner, the difference of good and evil under divine government in the presence of God, not fully known in grace and redemption, whose judgment of sin is before his eyes, exposed to all the advantage that Satan can take of him in such a state—such suffering, for example, as is seen in the case of Job. Christ,” Darby proceeds, “has passed through all these kinds of suffering—only the last, of course as Himself a perfect being to learn for others; I need not say that he was perfect in all.” This sentence gave great offence, and Darby endeavoured to shield himself by a footnote, which does not greatly alter matters. Dorman’s criticism is just. “His adding ‘as a perfect being to learn it for others,’ is not of the least force; because it involves the absolute contradiction of what is affirmed. For a moral condition is a moral condition; and there is but one way of passing through it.” Apparently both Newton and Darby found themselves precipitated by their system on a conclusion against which their heart and conscience cried out. They hesitated, grew confused, and expressed themselves unintelligibly. The important thing is that there should be one weight and one measure for them both.

The question is in itself a wearisome one. Its importance lies in the huge contradiction in which it involved a party committed at once to the persecution of Newton’s obsolete errors, and to the sanction of their recrudescence in Darby’s doctrines.

Dorman refers pathetically, but in no unmanly tone, to the strange trouble that had befallen him, in that he was compelled for the second time to make for the sake of truth the surrender “of everything in the world, which it is in the power of a man to surrender”. He explains his action in the following terms:—

“I cannot any longer pursue to ‘the tenth generation’ people who have no more to do with Mr. Newton’s doctrine than I have, nor any more leaning towards it—merely because they cannot endorse Mr. D.’s decree. … My heart has been withered by the necessity of schooling Christians—young and old, ignorant and well-informed—in the mysteries of an act of discipline of eighteen years’ standing, and in endeavouring to shew the present bearings of ‘the Bethesda question’ and ‘the neutral party’—hateful phrases as they have become. At first, of course, all this was pursued as necessary to the maintenance of purity of doctrine and of ‘a true Christ’ … and I honestly thought it so myself. But this guise is now utterly and rudely stripped away.”

The following description of Exclusivism is as true as it is forcible.

“What possible correspondence is there between a company of Christians, or ever so many companies, meeting simply in the name of Christ, pretending to nothing, but counting on His presence as the spring and security of their blessing, when so met, and that of an immense ecclesiastical ramification, which is everywhere subject, and in all things, as to its order, doctrine, and discipline, to Mr. D.’s decrees? enforced by a ubiquitous, unseen, spiritual supervision, from which, as there is no escape, so is there no appeal? The one is as wide and as free as the gracious heart of Christ can make it. … The other is as narrow and sectarian, and as hard also, as the domination of man can desire it.”

Dorman retired in silence from his “ordinary fellowship with the meeting at Orchard Street, Bristol; contenting” himself “by saying, in an informal way, that the doctrines of Mr. D. had compelled the step” . Whether he acted wisely or unwisely, it is impossible not to sympathise with his motives. “I had then made up my mind,” he says, “to encounter any obloquy on account of my course rather than incur the responsibility of bringing on indiscriminate discussions, which I am satisfied would have resulted only in blighting the best and holiest feelings of the heart toward Christ and His suffering and cross.”

The two leaders were not alone. Among a good many other seceders, the names of Joseph Stancombe and Julius von Poseck may be mentioned. Stancombe had left the peaceful communion of Bethesda to follow Darby’s standard. Like Dorman he had for the second time to sacrifice his cherished associations to the claims of conscience. Von Poseck’s was an interesting story. He came of a noble Pomeranian family, and as a young man suffered imprisonment for a refusal to serve in the Prussian army. From prison he addressed to the King an appeal based on the principle of religious toleration. The King, it is said, directed the prisoner to forward to him such publications as would explain the religious principles on which the refusal to bear arms was based. Von Poseck accordingly sent a selection from the literature of the Plymouth Brethren. It is not likely that the Government attempted to master this theology, but a glance at it would show that the prisoner was harmless. He was liberated by the King, on the condition that he should leave the country. This brought him to England, where he exercised his ministry for many years among the Brethren, and was justly esteemed as an interesting and original preacher. Some time after his secession he returned to his allegiance, I believe under Darby’s personal influence. In his later years he became a strenuous supporter of Mr. Kelly’s cause.^[9]

The seceders had occasion to count the cost. Probably scarcely one of their former friends would betray any consciousness of their existence again. It is truly pathetic to catch glimpses of them in their old age, inured to total neglect, or profoundly affected by a friendly message from some old friend less illiberal than the rest.

The cause they had forsaken stood badly in need of any help that terrorism could lend it. Secret misgiving was widely spread. One of “the Nine,”^[10] to my knowledge, was never quite at ease about the exculpation of Darby to which he had contributed; and I learned, from private conversation with him, that he had broken entirely away from the principle of applying the whole of even the Messianic psalms to Christ. Nor was he alone in this, even amongst Darby’s devoted followers.

It was with a singularly bad grace that Darby continued to take the loftiest ground. With an evident reference to Dorman’s suggestion of an irenicum, he writes in the introduction to the edition of his Sufferings that appeared in 1867, “I reject Bethesda as wickedness, as I ever did. … When the blasphemous doctrine of Mr. Newton … came out, Bethesda deliberately sheltered and accredited it. … It is all one to me if it be a Baptist Church or anything else, it has been untrue to Christ, and no persuasion, with the help of God, will ever lead me a step nearer to it.” Now the words printed (by me) in italics are not merely untrue, but they simply are destitute of the remotest connexion with truth. If Darby did not know that he was writing a lie, it could only have been that the Bethesda frenzy had rendered him incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. It was only in the previous year that he had written affectionately to the dying Craik, describing himself as “ecclesiastically separated from” him.

Darby had let loose a flood of odious speculation on the sufferings of the Saviour, which, whether it were heresy or not, was certainly sacrilege.^[11] This I prefer to pass over, but an article in the Bible Treasury for August, 1866, cannot be so lightly dismissed; for we read in it that Christ “entered into all the darkness and the wrath of God, but before He went out of the world He had passed through it all, and went out in perfect quiet. The work is so perfectly done that death is nothing.“ (The italics are mine.) Now, whatever the writer^[12] meant, this is formal heresy. I do not know whether the heresy was ever repudiated; but there is no doubt that the whole subject was to a great extent quietly dropped among the Brethren. At that time, as Dorman tells us,^[13] it was “common to hear persons in popular addresses saying ‘the three hours of darkness in which atonement was made’”; but the tumult did good, and the brave men that fell did not sacrifice themselves in vain. I do not affirm that evil echoes of this miserable divinity were never heard, but on the whole the public teaching of Brethren in the seventies contained little of it. Probably the leaders did not, to use Soltau’s distinction, hold these principles “in their consciences,” and certainly the rank and file remained quietly evangelical.

Dorman never formed any new ecclesiastical ties. He was present with Hall in 1869 at a conference of the Open Brethren at Freemasons’ Hall, London; and Dorman took a prominent part in the proceedings. Invitations to attend had been sent to all the leading Exclusives, but very few answers were received. Copies of an open letter signed by Stoney, and addressed to “the believers meeting at Freemasons’ Hall,” were distributed at the doors. The letter, which began (rather inconsistently) “Dear Brethren in the Lord,” suggested that the Open Brethren were “occupying the place of Joshua when he rent his clothes and fell on his face to the earth, and that in consequence the Lord had to rebuke him and say, ‘Wherefore liest thou upon thy face? Israel hath sinned.’” When Dorman addressed the meeting he took up Stoney’s letter in some excitement, and threw it behind him, saying, “The Achan you are required to get rid of is Bethesda, but the very doctrines about which the division was first made, are now being circulated by all the Exclusive leaders, under the title of ‘advanced truth’”. But whatever momentary excitement there might be, it was evident that Dorman was now an utterly broken man. His speeches seemed, singularly contrary to his wont, almost incoherent; and his voice was often inaudible to a portion of the company. He declared, however, with great emphasis that he hated the very name of Brethrenism. Unless he meant Darbyism, the declaration was in questionable taste, but he evidently distrusted the system of the Brethren at large. He had come to attach a decisive importance to the due and formal recognition of elders, and apparently to the regulation of public worship by them.

Dorman doubtless saw that the want of a powerful local eldership was the great negative condition of Darby’s autocracy, and consequently of the whole system of Darbyism. In 1868 he had pleaded the cause of the eldership in a series of six powerful Letters to Harris. Mr. Mackintosh had published a book on The Assembly of God, or the All-sufficiency of the Name of Jesus. If the growing popularity of the writer had not lent his book a fictitious importance it would hardly have been worth Dorman’s while to attack it, for the argument was very incoherent. “The Assembly,” with which Mackintosh was continually confounding the Exclusive community, was a place where God was allowed to rule,—a place from which “numbers” had “departed,” “because their practical ways did not comport with the purity of the place,”—a place in which “you cannot get on … if you are living in secret sin”.

Mackintosh sufficiently refuted his own magniloquent phrases by the following instructive passage:—

“Alas! alas I we often see men on their feet in our assemblies whom common sense, to say nothing of spirituality, would keep in their seats. We have often sat and gazed in astonishment at some whom we have heard attempting to minister in the assembly. We have often thought that the assembly has been looked upon by a certain class of ignorant men, fond of hearing themselves talk, as a sphere in which they might easily figure without the pains of school and college work.”

A far weaker man than Dorman might well have given a good account of so feeble an antagonist. Much more important is the powerful and eloquent denunciation of Darbyism. Referring to the excommunication of the whole meeting at East Coker “for having received to the Lord’s Table persons who were judged to have implicated themselves with ‘Bethesda,’”—and treating the excommunication as typical of the whole system of Exclusive discipline,—he justly says:“I make no further comment upon it beyond saying that no legal fiction ever went half its length in absurdity; nor was any ground of ‘constructive treason,’ I believe, ever pleaded before the most flagitious court half as unrighteous as this plea of these brethren in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. The simplest statement of such a procedure is its deepest condemnation.”

The following statement, however startling, is not satire.

“Whoever gives attention to this subject can see at once the differences of the prophetic theories that gave rise in each instance to this exceptional ‘third class of the sufferings of Christ’; but he will at the same time see that the position in which Christ is placed—viz., enduring sufferings and smiting from the hand of God, not in atonement—is the same in both. A person voluntarily taking his place with an ‘exiled family’ may be the illustration of the one; and a mother voluntarily taking her place with ‘a son in prison’ may be the illustration of the other: but he must be a bold as well as a clever person, who will assert that the difference between the two constitutes the sole difference (in the case in question) between a ‘true and a false Christ!’

“So that it comes out at last, that when this difference has been calculated (if it can be calculated), the exact amount of the guilt of Bethesda will have been found. … This is the exact ground on which a warfare, the most vindictive and unsparing in character, has been carried on against a congregation of Christians, and against all who did not condemn them. … This difference alone has been the ground of endless calumnies—calumnies the most base and groundless, during the whole of that period. It has been, too, the occasion of the bitterest animosities, far and wide, between former friends and fellow-labourers in the gospel. It has occasioned in innumerable instances the severing of family ties, the sundering of the truest affections, and the sending many a faithful Christian broken-hearted to the grave! …

“‘I reject Bethesda as wickedness, as I ever did,’ writes the author of these doctrines, when re-asserting them in his preface lately to a second edition of his tract on The Sufferings of Christ.

“Such a sentiment (if it were only individual) deserves the severest reprobation on the part of all good men. But when it is uttered in order to give the tone of feeling and the ground of practical action to a whole religious community towards other Christians, the heart revolts from it with unutterable loathing.”

It is a relief to observe how fully the writer felt that he came himself within the scope of his own vehement denunciations. “Here,” he says, “I have to bow my head—lower it may be than all besides; still, I will not conceal the truth from myself or others that intolerant dogmas and immeasurable conceit have usurped to a large extent the place which was once occupied by a divine charity, and a living expression, however imperfect, of love and meekness, and a desire only for the glory of Christ.” (The italics are mine.)

J. E. Howard, in a very clever and rather caustic pamphlet that appeared in March, 1866, under the title of A Caution against the Darbyites, affirms that “the sickly existence of Darbyism has been reinvigorated by young blood from the ‘revival’ movement”. There is certainly every sign of an increased vigour about Darbyism in the sixties and seventies, especially in respect of evangelistic zeal, for which, on the whole, the system has not been remarkable. In the Ulster Revival two men were associated, (not indeed for the first time), whose long cooperation was destined to produce a very considerable influence on the younger generation of Darbyites. These were C. H. Mackintosh and Andrew Miller. Mr. Mackintosh had been a schoolmaster, but he subsequently devoted himself exclusively to the ministry. He had very marked popular gifts, both as a speaker and a writer, and became by means of his Notes on the Pentateuch the principal interpreter between Darbyism and the Church at large. Unfortunately, he was an interpreter and nothing more. His thought was loose and unsystematic. He was profoundly unoriginal, and carried no compensating weight as an authority. In private life he was one of the most amiable of men, and is now remembered with kindness by all who knew him.

Mr. Miller, a London merchant of Scottish birth, had joined the Brethren about 1852, bringing over to them a chapel that he had built in Barnsbury for his own ministry amongst the Scotch Baptists. For many years he spent nearly half his time in conducting missions at various provincial centres. When in town he ministered regularly in his own chapel. The good accomplished at most of his centres seems to have been extensive and solid, as many still living are eager to testify. His preaching, though theological, was so thoroughly popular that he could hold the attention of any audience throughout a sermon of extraordinary length. With plenty of facility, he was absolutely simple and true to nature. Far beyond any Plymouth Brother I ever met, he played at will (if indeed it were not rather quite without design) on the emotions of his audience. Cynical hearers have wept with the rest. It was a good example of a rare thing—the eloquence of genuine pathos.

The two friends produced jointly, for the benefit of the less instructed class in their community, a monthly magazine entitled Things New and Old. It was a carefully and intelligently edited periodical, and ran a long and prosperous course.^[14] Thus Exclusivism, as if to show that not even the followers of Darby could wholly save themselves from the influence of their environment, began to gather converts from without, and to care for their instruction when they were gathered.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, a similar work was being successfully prosecuted by a very different man. Charles Stanley, a Rotherham manufacturer, was an evangelist of considerable native ability, who owed little to culture. But a graphic description, or an apt and homely illustration, lost nothing in his lips by the broad Yorkshire dialect in which it often slipped out. As a preacher he was uncertain, but on his day he wielded an indubitable power. The following story I received from one who was well acquainted with the circumstances. Stanley was travelling in a Humber boat. He rose and preached to the passengers, and prolonged his discourse past many stages. In after years there was scarcely a village on that route where people might not be found who professed to have been converted to God by that discourse. This would seem to indicate a happy stability in the influence that the evangelist exercised; but it is only right to state on the other hand that he sometimes showed little sobriety in estimating the results of his missions.

Note.—The quotation from Darby’s Synopsis on p. 252 is taken verbatim from Dorman’s Close of Twenty-eight Years. In the third edition of the Synopsis it appears with somewhat different punctuation, and with the following addition after “is here”: “if we take it in its full effect on the cross”.

1. I.e., apparently, a position in condemnation of Bethesda, particularly in respect of the Letter of the Ten.
2. Whatever the effect of this letter upon Harris, he at any rate did not abandon the Brethren. But he could not walk in Bellett’s path. He ministered amongst the Open Brethren, occupying an almost unique position of esteem and confidence, until his death in 1877.
3. In this chapter I do not reopen the question of what Mr. Newton had taught, but simply speak of him from the point of view that the disputants of 1865-6 occupied towards him.
4. Captain Wellesley afterwards left the Open party and joined the Darbyites; but by that time Dorman was aloof from both.
5. The following were the nine: Dr. Cronin, Sir Edward Denny, Major McCarthy, Messrs. Wigram, Kelly, Butler Stoney, George Owen, C. McAdam, Andrew Miller. There are one or two of these that were scarcely “leaders”.
6. Dorman now begins to do Newton rather belated justice. “In justice I am bound to say, that amidst all the apparent confusion and contradictions of his statements about the position and experiences of the Lord Jesus in connexion with Israel, his care to guard against imputing to Christ the presence or possibility of actual sin, is a plain proof that, however wrong his doctrines, it was no part of his intention to defame Christ.” This was really (and would be still) a remarkable discovery for an Exclusive Brother.
7. There is here a footnote (added, I conclude, in the Edition of 1867), obscurely worded, but not altering the sense of the text, so far as I can judge.
8. Hall (Grief upon Grief, p. 20) quotes Darby’s former denunciation of Newton. “It is the pure unmingled heresy of wrath on Christ which was not vicarious.”
9. See chap. xiv.
10. The nine leaders who “countersigned” Darby’s new teaching.
11. Specimens are given in H. Groves’ Darbyism.
12. I find that Darby himself was the writer. Coll. Writ., Evangelic, vol. ii.
13. Letters to Harris, p. 13 of Letter v.
14. Prosperity must on no account be understood in a financial sense. Even the poorer Brethren seldom reckoned to make much by their books, which were often published at a ridiculously low price. In the present case, there was no need to raise any financial question.