A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 2

by William Blair Neatby

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II
Causes and Conditions

Bellett, in his account of the origins, mentions several other little companies meeting in ignorance of one another’s existence, and all more or less on the lines of the Brethren. He had reason to believe that before there was any “table” in Francis Hutchinson’s house, there was one in J. Mahon’s, “somewhere in the town of Ennis, by means of one of his family, if not by himself”. It was also his belief that the movement existed in the same independence in England.

“Having occasion to visit Somersetshire in 1831 or 1832, I being at Sir Edward Denny’s,^[1] he asked me to give him an idea of the principles of the Brethren. We were sitting round the fire, and the daughter of a clergyman was present. As I stated our thoughts, she said they had been her’s for the last twelve months, and that she had no idea that any one had them but herself. So also, being at — shortly afterwards, a dear brother, now with the Lord, told me that he, his wife and his wife’s mother were meeting in the simplicity of the Brethren’s ways for some time before he even heard of such people. This brother and the lady mentioned at Sir Edward Denny’s as soon as occasion allowed were in full communion with us, and she continues so to this day in the County Down.”

All this is, of course, perfectly true, and it is doubtless typical of much more of the same kind; but it is far less miraculous than it appeared to Bellett. A strong and widely-spread revulsion against some of the dominant ecclesiastical principles of that day certainly existed; and many who shared in it were feeling their way more or less vaguely towards a common solution of the difficulty. Nor were there lacking special circumstances in Ireland that tended to turn the minds of the malcontents in one given direction.

The state of things against which Brethrenism was an embodied revolt is described by Professor Stokes in the article to which reference has been already frequently made. He tells us that Darby, after the failure of his protest against the Charge and the Petition, “looked around … for some body which might answer his aspirations after a spiritual communion based on New Testament and religious principles, and not on mere political expediency, and soon found it in a society, or rather an unorganised collection of societies, which had been for many years growing and developing, and which under his guidance was destined to take final shape in the sect now called the Plymouth Brethren,”—of which sect Professor Stokes assigns the original formation to Groves and Bellett. “Now to understand,” he proceeds, “the principal religious movements of the present age, the Broad Church and the Oxford movements, as well as the great disintegrating movement of Plymouth Brethrenism, we must realise the prominent religious features of the days of the Regency and of the reign of George IV.”

In this connexion Professor Stokes lays great stress on the Walkerite movement; and to this the more amiable Kellyite movement ought surely to be added. Walker was a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and chaplain of the Bethesda Chapel. He was a Calvinist of an extreme, not to say a rabid type, and came to find his position in the communion of the Established Church untenable. In 1804 he seceded and formed a sect that “rejected ordination and an appointed ministry, practised close communion, refusing to admit any, save his own followers, to the Holy Communion, and taught that he could not even pray or sing with any others, as the prayers of the wicked—under which amiable category he classed his opponents—were an abomination to the Lord”.

The description of Walker’s singularities sounds as if it might be unintentionally exaggerated, as the singularities of the Brethren have often been. But if the story I have been told (on excellent authority, as I suppose) about the Walkerites is correct, there will be little à priori ground for calling Professor Stokes’ account in question. A friend, extremely well acquainted with Irish affairs, related that a conference was held between the Walkerites and the Kellyites to discuss terms on which a union between the two communions might be effected. The negotiations were broken off by the absolute refusal of Kelly and his friends to entertain a term of fellowship on which the other side peremptorily insisted. The article of belief to which the Kellyites declined to commit themselves was “that John Wesley is in hell”.

Much closer, I should imagine, were the affinities subsisting between the Kellyites and the original Brethren. The Kellyites were the followers of Thomas Kelly, the well-known hymn writer, and one of the most devoted of evangelists. Like the Walkerites, they rejected ordination and did not restrict the ministry to a special class. Ministry in the congregation was not absolutely thrown open, but was exercised by various speakers, according to a prearranged plan, though I cannot positively assert that there was no opening allowed for extempore exercise. Baptism on profession of faith was, I believe, the custom of the sect, as it was also of almost all the early Brethren.^[2]

Brethrenism cannot in any proper sense be affiliated to either of these movements; indeed, there is not a word in the narratives of any of the early Brethren to indicate that they consciously received any influence from them. But that such movements existed is proof of the wide diffusion of the ideas that went to form Brethrenism, and to which Brethrenism in its turn was destined to give a far more durable embodiment, and a far more extensive influence. On all hands, probably, the prevailing Erastianism was quickening in fervent spirits the aspiration after a pure communion. In not a few cases, also, the jealous isolation of the different sects and their intense preoccupation with denominational interests were kindling an aspiration no less ardent after a genuine catholicity.

These two aspirations were the foundations of Brethrenism. The true idea of the Church was to be expressed. A circle was to be drawn just wide enough to include “all the children of God,” and to exclude all who did not come under that category. Of the two the aspiration after catholicity took the lead. Union was the Brethren’s avowed object. Purity was an older ideal, and still remained the professed aim of the Independent Churches. The root of both is to be sought in the strictly primary postulate that the true children of God can for all practical purposes be discriminate from the mass of nominal profession. This position, which may perhaps be called the common ground of extreme Evangelicalism, is taken for granted by all the writers of the Brethren, and their polemics ordinarily contemplate only those who acknowledge it.

This twofold position was negatively expressed in their favourite dictum that the Church of England was too broad in its basis, and the dissenting churches too narrow. The charge is too vague to be of much consequence. Indeed by shifting their point of view slightly they might have found that the Church was too narrow and Dissent too broad. The point of the saying is merely rhetorical. What is actually expressed is, on the one hand, the Brethren’s abhorrence of national Christianity, with its assumption (as the Brethren understood it) that every Englishman is a Christian; and, on the other, their recoil from the practical assertion of distinctive denominational tenets at the expense of the cultivation of common Christian sympathies. It was, at the first, far less a theory than a sentiment that lay at the root of the new separatism.

Consequently, Brethrenism from the beginning exhibits a certain confusion on the side of theory, and from this confusion it has never altogether worked itself free. Cronin’s narrative^[3] affords an excellent example of this. It can hardly have been the case that the Independents would only have welcomed him to the Lord’s Table if he had definitely accepted their denominational position; doubtless they would have granted him “occasional communion,” even if he had joined the Episcopalians. It was presumably felt that a local church having full knowledge of its members was able to guarantee that they were living a life that did not discredit their Christian profession. This is so reasonable and so little at variance, it would seem, with the duty of extending the privileges of the Holy Communion to Christians generally, that Cronin’s difficulty is unintelligible to most people at the present day. He was scarcely, however, a man to act in a merely factious spirit, and probably there was a very real sectarianism in existence against which he was setting up his standard, however much he might blunder in his manifesto. Whatever the special faults of the Church of to-day may be, it has certainly acquired a wider outlook; and we may have difficulty in picturing to ourselves the narrowed sympathies that were such an offence seventy or eighty years ago to men in whose minds the more expansive instincts of the Christian life were beginning to stir. It is at least clear that Cronin understood all his associates at Fitzwilliam Square and at Aungier Street to share his views. “Special membership,” he writes, “as it is called among Dissenters, was the primary and most offensive condition of things to all our minds, so that our first assembling was really marked as a small company of evangelical malcontents.”

Cronin’s was in no sense a leading mind, but we may turn to Darby himself without mending matters. In 1828, when, as already related, he issued the first document of the new movement, Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ, he failed as signally as Cronin to raise any definite issue. The tract is an appeal to Christian feeling against the divisions of the Church. As such it is far from contemptible. The tone is fervent and lofty, and though the style is not good, there are passages of no little dignity and beauty. The characteristic faults of the author’s later polemical writings are scarcely, if at all, to be found. He is not censorious or Pharisaical ; he writes in no spirit of detachment from the Church he condemns, and when he speaks of the virtues with which the denominations were adorned he appears to bear his witness with cordiality. But we look in vain either for any thorough analysis of the evil complained of, or for an intelligible suggestion of any possible remedy.

In discussing the evil Darby assumes that the denomination (as, for example, Congregationalism) is the only possible ecclesiastical unit. Now this is a point of view that all the Independent Churches would have disowned. To them the unit was the local church. Yet, if Darby had known or remembered this, it is at least a question whether he could so easily have taken for granted that every existing Church stood condemned by his dictum, that “no meeting, which is not framed to embrace all the children of God in the full basis of the kingdom of the Son, can find the fulness of blessing, because it does not contemplate it—because its faith does not embrace it” (p. 38). He might also have been saved from the smart, but intrinsically poor antithesis—“The bond of communion is not the unity of the people of God, but really (in point of fact) their differences” (p. 33).

After this, it will not excite surprise that it never occurs to Darby to grapple with the great primary obstacle to that outward expression of the inward unity of God’s family on which his heart was set. There are, and always have been, two competing views as to what the visible Church ought to be; and both are widely held amongst those whose vital religion (and whose place therefore in such an external communion as he desired to see) Darby would have heartily acknowledged. There are Christians who hold that the vital profession of Christianity can be distinguished from the merely nominal with so much certainty that the distinction can be made the basis of the communion of the Church on earth. There are those who hold the exact opposite, and believe that every effort to form a “pure” communion only results in a “mixed” one encumbered with the extra drawback, that to the unavoidable inclusion of the spurious is added the perfectly avoidable exclusion of the genuine. To exhort the faithful to seek an external unity before they have agreed as to what the external unity ought to be is now generally regarded as futile. Yet Darby affirms (p. 36) that “it is not a formal union off the outward professing bodies that is desirable; indeed, it is surprising that reflecting Protestants should desire it. … It would be a counterpart to Romish unity; we should have the life of the Church and the power of the word lost, and the unity of spiritual life utterly excluded.” But Darby might have recollected that many Christians hold that if the very scheme he denounces is ruled out, external unity is a chimerical project; and his ipse dixit would carry no weight with them.

Mr. Miller represents the tract as having produced startling results, but of this I cannot find any contemporary evidence. If it was so Darby’s appeal must have been strong in the reality of the sectarianism he reproved, and many devout hearts may have turned hopefully to a group of excellent men who believed they saw their way to a happier condition. In our own day the tract would not receive much attention; the question of which it treats has made too great an advance in the interval. Later Brethrenism leans for support much more upon “the liberty of the Spirit in the assembly”. On this, at the first, the Brethren had nothing to say. It is true that for some years after this, Darby’s tracts are chiefly concerned with lay-ministry; but the subject is not viewed in connexion with the order of worship.

At a later time Darby spoke of this tract as if it had signalised his secession from the Church of England, but his attitude for several years after appeared somewhat vacillating to his friends.^[4] Groves, whose mind moved faster, was delighted at this time with Darby, and was in hearty sympathy with the tract, if we can judge from the fact that he makes a sort of rough quotation from it in a letter he wrote in December, 1828.^[5] Darby had written (p. 47), “So far as men pride themselves on being Established, Presbyterian, Baptist, Independent, or anything else, they are antichristian”. As might be expected, the sentiment appears in Groves’ letter in a softened form. “My full persuasion is, that, inasmuch as any one glories either in being of the Church of England, Scotland, Baptist, Independent, Wesleyan, etc., his glory is his shame, and that it is antichristian” (Memoir, p. 49).

Those who have recognised that Brethrenism followed at the first a genuine spiritual impulse in its revolt against a Church crippled by party spirit and deadened by secularity, have perhaps felt surprise that its authors should not have found solace and satisfaction in the circle where the ardour kindled by the revival of the eighteenth century still glowed. But two things must be borne in mind. In the first place, though there was undoubtedly some earnest evangelical ministry within the Irish Establishment, the most fervent elements of the revival in Ireland would seem to have been largely absorbed by Walkerism; and from Walkerism the Brethren were repelled by its intense sectarianism.^[6] Moreover, the later evangelical school, with all its merits, signally failed to answer to the aspirations that were so widely drawing men into the Plymouth movement. In the earlier revival, the line of demarcation between Church and Dissent was certainly liable to become extremely indistinct. John Wesley ended his days in the practice of presbyterial ordination. Lady Huntingdon died founding a nonconforming body. Daniel Rowlands spent his last twenty-seven years as a dissenting minister; and if Grimshaw of Haworth had been deprived, as he fully expected to be, he would have become a Wesleyan local preacher. Most of the clerical leaders of the revival had certainly no objection on principle to preaching in the licensed meeting-houses of Dissenters. But these facts mislead us if we do not keep in mind the great change that came over evangelicalism as it obtained a more assured, even if still but a narrow, footing within the Church of England. John Newton is the connecting link between the earlier school and the later; and he, without in the least sharing Romaine’s intense repugnance to nonconformity, was nevertheless considered by dissenting friends to confine himself within the limits of too consistent a churchmanship; and in this particular his biographer, Richard Cecil, evidently approved his line of conduct. Nor was Simeon’s, attitude very different. Indeed Mr. Stock correctly speaks of “the party beginning to be known as Evangelical, comprising the men who, realising the privilege of their membership in the Church, were willing to bear some disadvantages and restrictions from which those outside were free”.^[7] Whether these excellent men were right or wrong in accepting such “restrictions,” their attitude was profoundly unsatisfactory to those who were beginning to think that the testimony par excellence for their time was the unity of all true Christians, and that everything that tended even to qualify the expression of that unity was to be spurned as the work of the Enemy.

It will be observed that I lay no stress on liberty of ministry or on the abjuration of all formally recognised church government I abstain advisedly. These customs, though rightly regarded now as constituting the essence of Brethrenism, had no place in the original scheme. Darby would seem to have persuaded himself that it had been otherwise, but this is only another instance of the abnormal force of prejudice in that remarkable mind. The testimony of his most devoted adherents is explicit and circumstantial. When the meeting that afterwards removed to Aungier Street began in Hutchinson’s house in November, 1829, Hutchinson (as Bellett distinctly states) “prescribed a certain line of things, as the service of prayer, singing and teaching, that should be found amongst us on each day”.

The same writer records that at the Aungier Street room “the settled order of worship which we had in Fitzwilliam Square, gave place gradually. Teaching and exhorting were first made common duties and services, while prayer was restricted under the care of two or three, who were regarded as elders. But gradually all this yielded. In a little time, no appointed or recognised eldership was understood to be in the midst of us, and all service was of a free character, the presence of God through the Spirit being more simply believed and used.” (The italics in this and the next quotation are my own.) Cronin bears similar testimony. “We felt free up to this time [evidently 1830], and long afterwards,^[8] to make arrangements among ourselves as to who should distribute the bread, and to take other ministries in the assembly.” Cronin goes on to explain that the Brethren came out gradually into the light, and thus concedes the allegation of those who in 1845 and the following years appealed to primitive Brethrenism in opposition to Darbyism.

In view of this consensus of testimony, the statement that either absolutely open ministry, or the rejection of all ostensible government, existed in the earliest phases of the movement must be pronounced either disingenuous or ignorant. Not that either can be regarded as an alien graft on the original stock. On the contrary, both were its natural, perhaps its inevitable, outcome. Groves’ celebrated observation to Bellett in 1828 more than foreshadows the state of things in which these customs were conspicuous, at least so far as liberty of ministry is concerned. The rejection of government was more strictly Darby’s work, as we shall yet have occasion to observe.

Groves’ spiritual history perhaps best illustrates the general state of mind out of which Brethrenism arose. From first to last in his departures from traditional procedure, Groves seems to have been actuated by a conviction that there was a dearth in the Church of a living energy of faith in God. He was far indeed from being such a spiritual egotist as to assume that he could himself supply the lack of it; but he resolved that he would at least act on the principles that its presence would naturally produce. In this spirit, he renounced in the first place all thought of providing for his children; he would give his money to God, and God would care for them. He followed this up by abandoning a lucrative profession without reluctance or misgiving; and when his wife received a legacy of £10,000 or £12,000, he apparently sank it all in the Bagdad mission, and afterwards prosecuted missionary work for many years without the support of a committee at home, and often without visible means of maintenance of any kind. In a similar way he felt himself led, rejecting all human mediation, to derive his right to minister directly from God; and it was by an obvious extension of the same principle that he concluded that it was God’s mind that he and his friends should assemble, were it even in the absence of all adequate provision for edification, in the confidence that God could minister by whomsoever he I pleased.

So far as Groves’ personal course is concerned, any Christian may feel free to allow that it might have been determined by a special operation of the Holy Ghost. In the providence of God, a dormant Church has perhaps not seldom been awakened by measures adapted to the emergency of the moment, and suited to a peculiar energy of faith on the part of the reformer who has adopted them. Whether Groves were right in proposing analogous methods in the worship of the Church, where many persons are involved, and where the average of faith hardly ever rises very high, may well be questioned, even if he had only designed to suggest a passing phase of Christian testimony. Nor would it necessarily be captious to say that Groves might have displayed a more enlightened faith if he had been able to recognise the hand of God, not more in His extraordinary operations, than in the working of those social elements which have no original connexion with the depravity of fallen man—in cooperation and subordination, in the economy of an ordered division of labour, in a variety of prudential arrangements, whether in the inward working of the Church or in its external operations. But it is not open to any one (be it observed in passing) to deny that the simplicity of Groves’ faith, the depth of his humility, the energy and purity of his zeal, the fervour and comprehensiveness of his charity, have rarely been equalled in the Church of God.

For better or for worse, it gradually became the law of Brethrenism to disown all regularly constituted authority, all orderly arrangement, and all prudential provision even for emergencies that are bound to arise. How far a now somewhat prolonged experience yields a verdict favourable to such a procedure will perhaps appear in the course of this history.

Very closely linked with what might be called the “haphazardism” of the Brethren is their attitude towards the question of unfulfilled prophecy. Brethrenism may even be held to derive its very existence in part from the new prophetic studies to which the unsettlement of men’s minds, consequent on the long agony of the Napoleonic wars, gave rise. Prophetic meetings were established in 1827 at Aldbury Park, Surrey, the seat of the well-known Henry Drummond. At these meetings Edward Irving took part, and to Aldbury Irvingism traces its rise. Lady Powerscourt attended these conferences, and “was so delighted with them that she established a similar series of meetings at Powerscourt House near Bray, in the County Wicklow, which for several years were presided over by the rector of the parish, the late Bishop Daly of Cashel. These meetings lasted till 1833, when the bishop was obliged to retire on account of the extreme anti-Church views which were openly avowed.”

If Professor Stokes, whose pen furnishes this account of the Powerscourt meetings, intends to convey that they ceased from the year 1833, he is certainly wrong. Stoney^[9] has left us a graphic account of one of these conferences that he attended as late as September, 1838.

“Mr. John Synge was in the chair. He called on each to speak in turn on a given subject. Mr. Darby spoke last, and often for hours, touching on all that had been previously said. Mr. Wigram sat next him. Captain Hall, Mr. George Curzon, Sir Alexander Campbell, Mr. Bellett, Mr. Thomas Mansell, Mr. Mahon, Mr. Edward Synge were there. There were clergymen present, and Irvingites.”

Side by side with this description it is worth while to place Bellett’s, for Bellett was no believer in a golden age of Brethrenism, and had a keen sense of the short-comings of the system at its best.

“Much at the same time dear Lady Powerscourt had begun some prophetic meetings. … It was there I first knew George Wigram, Percy Hall, and others. The meetings were truly precious to the soul, and night after night did I retire to my room at Powerscourt House in a deep sense of how little a one I was in Christ, in the presence of so much grace and devotedness around me through the day.”

In all this preoccupation with the study of unfulfilled prophecy, the Brethren never in any single instance fell into the snare of “fixing dates”. They strongly opposed all the ill-starred attempts of the kind that many of their fellow-students have made. But they firmly believed in proximity of the Second Advent, and this belief coloured all their spiritual life, and was profoundly influential on their outward conduct.

In private, it made them for many years markedly ascetic; and it was probably by far the most potent of the influences that withdrew them from all connexion with public life, and that even led them to regard participation in politics as an act of treason against the heavenly calling of the Church. The late Professor Newman’s account of his intercourse with Darby illustrates both tendencies. He writes as follows:—^[10]

“My study of the New Testament at this time had made it impossible for me to overlook that the apostles held it to be a duty of all disciples to expect a near and sudden destruction of the earth by fire, and constantly to be expecting the return of the Lord from heaven. …

“The importance of this doctrine is, that it totally forbids all working for earthly objects distant in time; and here the Irish clergyman [Darby] threw into the same scale the entire weight of his character. For instance, if a youth had a natural aptitude for mathematics, and he asked, ought he to give himself to the study, in hope that he might diffuse a serviceable knowledge of it, or possibly even enlarge the boundaries of the science? my friend would have replied, that such a purpose was very proper, if entertained by a worldly man. Let the dead bury their dead; and let the world study the things of the world. … But such studies cannot be eagerly followed by the Christian, except when he yields to unbelief. In fact, what would it avail even to become a second La Place after thirty years’ study, if in five and thirty years the Lord descended from heaven, snatched up all His saints to meet him, and burned to ashes all the works of the earth? …

“However the hold which the apostolic belief then took of me, subjected my conscience to the exhortations of the Irish clergyman, whenever he inculcated that the highest Christian must necessarily decline the pursuit of science, knowledge, art, history,—except so far as any of these things might be made useful tools for immediate spiritual results.”

It is of course possible that Darby would have demurred to some particulars of this representation; but it is at all events a description of Darby’s earliest teaching as it was apprehended by a mind of remarkable acuteness.

A graphic account by the same pen of Darby’s personal asceticism will be more conveniently given in our next chapter. Such asceticism was for very long a leading feature of all Brethrenism, and, so far at least as dress was concerned, it lingered down to a period within the recollection of men who have not reached middle life; and, indeed, many traces of it are still to be found. Lord Congleton, as his biographer, Henry Groves, tells us, though in possession of an independent income of £1,200 a year, took a house in Teignmouth of which the rent was £12, furnished it with wooden chairs and a plain deal table, steel forks and pewter tea-spoons, and wholly dispensed with carpets. The deal table, “by concession to the housemaid, was afterwards stained, because of the trouble it gave in constant scouring to keep it clean”. Carpets seem to have been regarded with singular disfavour by the Brethren. The late Benjamin Wills Newton, I have been told, lived at one time in a large and handsome house in the same carpetless state. He also was a man of considerable means.

A symptom of the same general condition was a tendency to a kind of Pentecostal communism. It is related of one of the Brethren—Sir Alexander Campbell, if I mistake not—who had property in the West of England, that he insisted on his servants sitting down with him at table. One day, coming in late for dinner, he found that his servants had already made some progress with the meal. They explained that, as he was so late, they thought they had better begin without him.

Amongst the favouring conditions of the rise of Brethrenism, the distinguished social position of its earliest votaries was probably not the least important. It passed for an aristocratic movement, as Darby himself admitted in his Swiss campaign in the early forties.^[11] A very vehement assailant of the whole school, the author of Plymouth Brethrenism Unveiled and Refuted, attributes no small part of its influence to that single circumstance (p. 162). In this respect things have changed inevitably, but even yet fashionable people often find it easier to pass from the Church of England to Brethrenism than to any of the older forms of Dissent.

It is an interesting question to what extent the earliest days of Brethrenism may be looked back to as a golden age. So far as the earliest of all are concerned, the answer must be unfavourable. This rests upon the unsuspicious testimony of men who were makers of the sect. Speaking of the time when he and his friends first occupied the room in Aungier Street, Bellett writes: “It was poor material we had. … There was but little spiritual energy, and much that was poor treasure for a living temple; but we held together in the Lord’s mercy and care, I believe advancing in the knowledge of His mind.” And even the far more sanguine Cronin confirms the report. “We were also, from ignorance or indifference, careless as to conscience and godly care of one another.”

It is surprising that the inauguration of a movement for which its promoters had been content to lose much and suffer much should have been so lacking in the freshness of delight that generally attends the days of first love; nor is such weakness quite what would have been expected from the character of the men engaged. We are indebted to their candour for a very interesting fact. As the movement consolidated it began to answer far better to the expectations with which it was set on foot, and for several years it was, with whatever drawbacks, a genuine and potent spiritual force.

1. The famous hymn-writer, afterwards one of the best known of the Brethren.
2. My knowledge of Kellyism was derived from a friend who was associated with one of its local churches about the year 1840.
3. See page 19.
4. If he resigned his curacy in 1828 he might naturally come to regard that as the epoch of his severance from the Church. On the other hand, his friends were impressed by his slowness to break off all association with it.
5. It is of course just possible that both men are quoting from a common “oral tradition” of the first Brethren.
6. Groves’ letter to Darby, 1836; see Memoir, appendix H.
7. One Hundred Years of the Church Missionary Society, p. 5.
8. At least till 1834, by the testimony of the late J. B. Stoney, who also mentions that at Plymouth, even in 1838, “it used to be arranged beforehand who should break the bread and do official acts”.
9. J. Butler Stoney, who came of a good Irish family, joined the Brethren in 1834. He was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had entered with a view to taking orders. He had been powerfully attracted by the meetings at Aungier Street, and a certain address of Darby’s had a decisive influence on him.
10. F. W. Newman, Phases of Faith.
11. Herzog, Frères de Plymouth, p. 82.