A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 16
A General Review of the Movement
“Puseyism a carcase, Plymouthism a ghost,” was the epigram of Dr. John Duncan. The abjuration of “system” was the special boast of the Brethren, and it has proved their ruin. Lost in mystic contemplations, they dreamed of reproducing on earth such a spontaneous harmony of pure spiritual movement as filled the serene sphere of their vision. The matured results of the experiment are now before us, rendering criticism surely superfluous.
If they had the weakness of mysticism, they had its strength. They did not master the truths of salvation in a logical concatenation; they saw them. Inference was nothing; immediate perception everything. Newton, like many others, said that the Church was seated in heavenly places “representatively”. This, to the genuine Darbyite, was the most frigid of glosses, the most nugatory of legal fictions. The saints were seated “spiritually” in heaven; and so far from the spiritual being akin to the unreal or fictitious, it was the one thing absolutely and intensely real. Where logical Puritan divinity was anxious to explain, Darby only cared to feel. That which can be explained is an insignificant segment from the circle of truth.
This determined the character of the entire school. In systematic divinity they were weak, and their history shows the perilous character of the weakness. But the Bible, in a wonderful way, was a living book to them. It is said that “a closer and more intimate knowledge of the Bible itself as a living book and not as a mere repertory of proof texts, is one of the marks of our time”.[1] It is certainly one of the marks of Brethrenism. A professional man, brought up in an atmosphere of fervent Evangelicalism, and deeply interested in Christian work, once expressed to me his opinion that the episode of the Woman of Samaria would be found in St. Luke. No earnest Darbyite could have perpetrated such a blunder; and he would have avoided it, not merely from the habit of turning to the incident in St. John, but from a profound (even if not always an articulate) sense of its intensely Johannine character.
The system was the reflexion of the mind of its great prophet. Method and logical coherence are no features of Darby’s divinity. Coherence up to a certain point, of course, cannot be lacking where there is genuine insight; but Darby was too impatient to systematise, or even indeed to verify. In his expository writings, he often drops a half-hint that sets in strong light a passage that great commentators have left obscure. Sometimes he seems to explain with the ease and directness of one that had been in the secret of the author. This illumination has exercised a great (in some respects a dangerous) fascination, blinding many to the real confusion in which his mind often moved. To analyse his position is often to refute it. His central principles of the ruin of the Church and of the expression of its unity are cases in point. They will not endure the light of unambiguous language.
Yet Darby was truly great. The late Andrew Jukes is acknowledged as “a true and original mystic,” but there is little doubt that Darby was the fount of his mystic inspiration. For several years Jukes, as a young man, was in Darby’s communion, and tracts that he wrote in those days show that Darbyism was infused into the whole substance of his thought. Another mystic, Mrs. Frances Bevan, found in Darbyism that which met her wants and detached her from the Church of England, notwithstanding the strength of the ties that bound her to it. Turning (perhaps from the disappointments of Brethrenism) to the study of the German mystics, she produced from their writings, in a series of fascinating volumes, a catena of quotations in which the Darbyite is startled by the clearness and intensity of the echo of tones that have become familiar to his ear in such different surroundings.
Darby’s mind is perhaps most simply and efficiently studied through his hymns; and the hymns require study; cursory perusal avails little. I am even reluctant to give extracts, for Darby’s hymns must be studied as a whole. But has the effect of the Incarnation often been more nobly conceived than in the following stanza?
“God and Father, we adore Thee
For the Christ, Thine image bright,
In whom all Thy holy nature
Dawned on our once hopeless night.”[2]
And if Darby could lay the foundation, he could also place the top-stone. How many hymns on heaven have reached the height of the concluding stanza of his “Rest of the saints above”?
“God and the Lamb shall there
The light and temple be,
And radiant hosts for ever share
The unveiled mystery..”
It was Mrs. Bevan that wrote,
“Christ, the Son of God, hath sent me
Through the midnight lands;
Mine the mighty ordination
Of the pierced Hands.”
This is the perfect expression of Brethrenism on its strongest side. The soul has to do with Christ through no human or superhuman mediation. In direct communion with Him the commission must be received, the work executed, the account rendered. Of course, along with this went the rejection of all “the mediate expression of Christ’s authority,” of even the simplest form of constituted government,—with the inevitable result of slipping under the irresponsible yoke of any who combined the power and the will to impose it. “If thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth … saith the Lord.”
The weak side of Brethrenism is exemplified in the foreign mission work of the Open party. To the devotedness of this service I have already sought to do justice. It is now due to truth to say that the work has been hampered by the fear of “human order”. By the force of the nature of things, a sort of committee has grown up. Three men—all of them justly held in high esteem—“commend” missionaries, receive funds for them, and maintain a correspondence with them. But the missionaries are not answerable to the committee, nor is the committee responsible for the missionaries. Yet it is perfectly inevitable that the existence of the committee should afford some ground of confidence to most of the missionaries, who nevertheless are presumed to go forth “wholly trusting in the Lord”. Now, it can be no breach of charity to say that such “trust in the Lord” as is nominally expected has not been a qualification of one missionary in a hundred anywhere. How many men could leave their native land without acquainting any one in the world with their destination, without a single friend in the country for which they were bound, without a penny towards their first expenses on landing, and yet feel no fear? The danger is great that under this half system people will suppose they are “trusting the Lord” in some peculiar sense, and will value themselves on their superiority to others who advance no such claim,—while at bottom their confidence is essentially the same as that of their brethren who go out avowedly under the authority of a society.
On the other hand, whatever amount of faith missionaries are bound to exercise, the Church at home is certainly bound to see that they are duly maintained. Now this it cannot do, on any considerable scale, without a thoroughly organised system. If the Brethren disbelieve this, dare they say that their own missions disprove it? The assumption of Brethrenism is that God will work a standing miracle to accomplish that which He has in reality entrusted to the operation of those principles of organisation, subordination, and mutual responsibility with which the very existence of human society is bound up. The refusal to recognise this can only result in needless friction, heartburning, and dissipation of energy.
Account must be taken of two palpable facts. God has not seen fit to qualify every useful missionary to prosecute his work in direct responsibility to Christ, apart from all mediate human authority; and He has not seen fit to qualify every missionary to trust Him for maintenance, positively apart from all mediate human channels of supply. The Brethren of course simply cannot, in the very nature of things, act on the contrary supposition; but in trying to do so as far as they can, they may certainly succeed in introducing a great deal of unnecessary confusion and weakness into their work.
But, indeed, a failure to reckon with the “facts of life” is a very deep-seated disease of Brethrenism. It underlies that narrow and sectarian spirit which (notwithstanding many honourable exceptions, chiefly among the Open party) has on the whole been a feature of the movement. No ray of light from the inductive method has shone upon the mind of Brethrenism as a system. Its doctors have been hopeless medievalists, constructing their theories in absolute independence of the facts of the world around them. If facts afterwards contradict the theory, so much the worse for the facts.
This is the incurable vice of High Church systems. For example, baptism regenerates ; that the baptised have often nothing of the regeneration about them except the name is unfortunate, but it does not touch the theory. Similarly, the Exclusives have styled the Open Brethren a “leprous” community; that the Open Brethren have been much more useful in aggressive evangelisation, and have been at least as holy in their lives, is curious, but it is held only to illustrate God’s sovereignty—as if God had no care either to mark His approval of what is good or His disapproval of what is bad. Many Open Brethren fall into the same error when they hurl sweeping accusations against the position of all Christians that are not Plymouth Brethren, while they yet must see that many companies of such Christians are at least as favoured as themselves with tokens of God’s approval.
I am far from denying that God may bestow a measure of His blessing where there is a great deal of error and confusion. If he did not I fear there would be no blessing at all for the Church on earth. But I deny that His favours are so indiscriminately bestowed as to constitute no criterion whatever of His approval.
In view of the history of Brethrenism, it is a remarkable thing that it still exerts no mean power of attraction. It is idle to seek the explanation of this outside the real excellences of the sect. The Brethren handle spiritual topics with an absolute fearlessness. There is no apologetic tone,—there is no prudent dilution of the spiritual by the secular,—in their ministry. They may sometimes speak unwisely, illiberally, ignorantly; their system of ministry almost ensures the occasional entrance of the grotesque; but they speak as if religion were the one business of life, instead of allowing secular topics to encroach even upon the narrow limits of time ostensibly devoted to spiritual things. That they often compare favourably with their neighbours in this respect constitutes a main element in their strength.
The open ministry of the Brethren, whatever may be said for it on the side of pure theory, has been a very qualified success indeed in practice. Captain Hall complained of it bitterly fifteen years before his breach with Darby; and Mackintosh, who was its enthusiastic supporter, made (as we have seen) admissions that went far towards justifying Hall’s complaints. Yet Hall allows that the system had sometimes answered well.
“I have seen in other days, and thankfully remember it, a more deep and extended manifestation of God’s chastening presence, but not for a long time; of late, in the place of the diverse, yet harmonious expressions of spiritual power, one with a psalm and hymn, another with instruction, another with prayer—alike the unquestionable utterances of true hearts, governed and filled by the same Lord—I have listened, in the town where I have lived, to little else (and at times with agony) but to long, wordy, tedious prayers, psalms and hymns out of place, and sung deplorably; false doctrines in teaching, sometimes confused and pompous, and therefore solemn to the vulgar—sometimes confounding truth and falsehood together, and almost all powerless; and alas! in the main, all alike considered good and to purpose, as long as the actors were more than one; and out and out true to this principle of liberty of ministry.”
A great deal must be allowed for individual taste. Probably the tone of the Open meeting in most places is far lower than it was in earlier days. Able and influential men abounded formerly, and are very scarce now. Brethrenism has shown itself lamentably incap- able of perpetuating a race of leaders. Its characteristic “haphazardism” (if I may be allowed such a term) comes out in this. No provision has been made for the higher studies connected with theology, and now that the contagious enthusiasm that once drew so many highly trained minds into its ranks has waned, Brethrenism is for the most part bereft of well qualified guides. Thirty-five years ago Dorman, while acknowledging the qualifications of some of the older leaders, spoke severely of their successors. “Of those that have been formed by the system, I would rather not say anything, although godliness and earnestness will always be in their measure owned by the Lord.”
To expect ends by the miraculous intervention of God, in the absence of those means that He has committed to human responsibility, has been a foible of Brethrenism from the beginning, and its noblest men have shared in it. But what I have ventured to call the “haphazardism” of the system is not wholly due to that tendency. Rather, that tendency itself is to be traced to an underlying principle that is strictly fundamental. Brethrenism is the child of the study of unfulfilled prophecy, and of the expectation of the immediate return of the Saviour. If any one had told the first Brethren that three quarters of a century might elapse and the Church be still on earth, the answer would probably have been a smile, partly of pity, partly of disapproval, wholly of incredulity. Yet so it has proved. It is impossible not to respect hopes so congenial to an ardent devotion; yet it is clear now that Brethrenism took shape under the influence of a delusion, and that that delusion was a decisive element in all its distinctive features.
- ↑ Principal Alexander Stewart, Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, i., 299 b.
- ↑ I am indebted for this fine verse to my critic in the British Weekly for January 17, 1901—“H. W. P.” The italics, in this and in the next quotation, are mine.