A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 3

by William Blair Neatby

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III
The Expansion of Brethrenism—the Movement in England

However debateable the honours of the foundership of Brethrenism may be, no question can be raised in regard to personal preeminence when once we pass on to the period of expansion and consolidation. One figure stands out unmistakeably; at times it fills the canvas. Brethrenism was destined to exercise a world-wide influence; to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with in every corner of Christendom; to give rise to a most voluminous literature; and to establish, we may surely say, a strong prima facie claim to be heard at the bar of history for a long time to come. These destinies lay in the hand of one man. He had helpers of mark; and there were independent workers among the Brethren—Müller, Groves, Tregelles, and others—who achieved great results in other lines of activity. But the maker of Brethrenism as a system, its guiding and energising spirit throughout, was John Nelson Darby. In the grandeur of his conceptions, in the irresistible vehemence of his will, in his consummate strategical instinct, in his genius for administration, and most of all in his immense personal ascendency, he stands unrivalled amongst the Brethren. His energy was stupendous. He was working for Brethrenism before he was thirty, and when he was eighty he was working as hard as ever; nor had he been known to relax his efforts—efforts put forth up to the full measure of his great strength, and often beyond it—during the whole of the intervening time.

In later days, Darby exercised his ascendency over men who, though very far in many cases from personal insignificance, were for the most part little known outside their own sect. It is therefore the more important to remember that, at the very beginning of his career, he brought into almost servile subjection the mind of one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century. This was Francis William Newman, the younger brother by four or five years of the more celebrated (not, I think, the abler) J. H. Newman, the Cardinal. The younger Newman was a man of prodigious versatility. He took a double first at Oxford, became Fellow of Balliol, and was afterwards Professor of Latin at University College, London, and finally Professor of Political Economy at Oxford; and his writings cover an even wider range than these achievements might have led us to expect. Fifty years ago he was a recognised leader of a phase of strongly theistic free thought, and it was chiefly his books that gave rise to that brilliant polemic, Henry Rogers’ Eclipse of Faith. It is in the work that traces the evolution of free thought in his mind that his description of Darby, under the designation of “the Irish clergyman,” occurs. The passage is a remarkably interesting piece of autobiography, and Newman shall be left to tell his own story.

“My second period is characterised, partly by the great ascendency exercised over me by one powerful mind and still more powerful will, partly by the vehement effort which throughout its duration urged me to long after the establishment of Christian Fellowship in a purely Biblical Church as the first great want of Christendom and of the world. …

“After taking my degree I became Fellow of Balliol College; and the next year I accepted an invitation to Ireland, and there became private tutor for fifteen months in the house of one now deceased, whose name I would gladly mention for honour and affection—but I withhold my pen.^[1]

“ … A young relative of his,—a most remarkable man,— … rapidly gained an immense sway over me. I shall henceforth call him ‘the Irish Clergyman’. His ‘bodily presence’ was indeed ‘weak’! A fallen cheek, a bloodshot eye, … a seldom shaven beard, a shabby suit of clothes and a generally neglected person, drew at first pity, with wonder to see such a figure in a drawing- room. It was currently reported that a person in Limerick offered him a halfpenny, mistaking him for a beggar; and if not true, the story was yet well invented. This young man had taken high honours in Dublin University and had studied for the bar, where, under the auspices of his eminent kinsman, he had excellent prospects; but his conscience would not allow him to take a brief, lest he should be selling his talents to defeat justice. With keen, logical powers, he had warm sympathies, solid judgment of character, thoughtful tenderness and total self-abandonment. He before long took Holy Orders, and became an indefatigable curate in the mountains of Wicklow. Every evening he sallied forth to teach in the cabins, and roving far and wide over mountain and amid bogs, was seldom home before midnight. By such exertions his strength was undermined. … His whole frame might have vied in emaciation with a monk of La Trappe.

“Such a phenomenon intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked on him as a genuine ‘saint’ of the ancient breed. The stamp of heaven seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence. That a dozen such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment was ere long my conviction. … He had practically given up all reading except that of the Bible; and no small part of his movement towards me soon took the form of dissuasion from all other voluntary study.

“In fact I had myself more and more concentrated my religious reading on this one book; still, I could not help feeling the value of a cultivated mind. Against this, my new eccentric friend, ( himself having enjoyed no mean advantages of cultivation,) directed his keenest attacks. I remember once saying to him, in defence of worldly station,—‘To desire to be rich is unchristian and absurd; but if I were the father of children, I should wish to be rich enough to secure them a good education’. He replied: ‘If I had children, I would as soon see them break stones on the road, as do anything else, if only I could secure to them the Gospel and the grace of God’. I was unable to say Amen, but I admired his unflinching consistency. … For the first time in my life I saw a man earnestly turning into reality the principles which others confessed with their lips only. That the words of the New Testament contained the highest truth accessible to man,—truth not to be taken from nor added to,—all (as I thought) confessed: never before had I seen a man so resolved that no word of it should be a dead letter to him. I once said: ‘But do you really think that no part of the New Testament may have been temporary in its object? for instance, what should we have lost, if St. Paul had never written the verse, “The cloak which I left at Troas bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments”?’ He answered with the greatest promptitude: ‘I should certainly have lost something; for that is exactly the verse which alone saved me from selling my little library. No! every word, depend upon it, is from the Spirit, and is for eternal service.’”

In after years Darby’s library was not little, and possibly he modified his more extreme views, though he certainly never permitted himself the mere luxury of culture. It is reported that he said, “I read nothing but bad books and the Bible”; and the story, as Newman would say, if it is not true, is startlingly well invented.

“In spite of the strong revulsion which I felt against some of the peculiarities of this remarkable man, I for the first time in my life found myself under the dominion of a superior. When I remember, how even those bowed down before him, who had been to him in the place of parents,—accomplished and experienced minds,—I cease to wonder in the retrospect, that he riveted me in such a bondage. Henceforth I began to ask: What will he say to this and that? In his reply I always expected to find a higher portion of God’s Spirit than in any I could frame for myself. In order to learn Divine truth, it became to me a surer process to consult him, than to search for myself and wait upon God : and gradually, (as I afterwards discerned,) my religious thought had merged in the mere process of developing fearlessly into results all his principles, without any deeper examining of my foundations. Indeed, but for a few weaknesses which warned me that he might err, I could have accepted him as an apostle commissioned to reveal the mind of God.”

The following paragraph completes the picture, and gives us at the same time Newman’s impressions of his friend’s later course, at a time when an impassable gulf had opened between them. The words were written about 1850.

“In his after-course (which I may not indicate) this gentleman has everywhere displayed a wonderful power of bending other minds to his own. … Over the general results of his action I have long deeply mourned, as blunting his natural tenderness and sacrificing his wisdom to the Letter, dwarfing men’s understandings, contracting their hearts, crushing their moral sensibilities, and setting those at variance who ought to love: yet oh! how specious was it in the beginning! he only wanted men ‘to submit their understanding to God,’ that is, to the Bible, that is, to his interpretation! From seeing his action and influence I have learnt, that if it be dangerous to a young man (as it assuredly is) to have no superior mind to which he may look up with confiding reverence, it may be even more dangerous to think that he has found such a mind: for he who is most logically consistent, though to a one-sided theory, and most ready to sacrifice “self to that theory seems to ardent youth the most assuredly trustworthy guide. Such was Ignatius Loyola in his day.”

The picture is life-like, unless it be for one particular. It is hard to believe that “weak” can ever have been an apt epithet for Darby’s bodily presence. Emaciation and neglect could not so have affected the strong, well-formed, rugged features, of a high and characteristically English type, full of courage and inflexible resolve. In old age his habit was still rather spare, and owing perhaps to some peculiarity of figure he gave many people the impression that he was short; yet, as a matter of fact, he was decidedly over the middle height, and of a massive frame. Though he was always abstemious to a degree, and unremitting in his exertions, he probably exercised more prudence after the breakdown to which Newman alludes.

The reader has now the means of forming some adequate idea of the equipment with which “this Goliath of Dissent,” as the biographer of the last Archbishop of Tuam called him,^[2] addressed himself to a task of extraordinary difficulty. But reference should be made to another peculiarity that must have had a great deal to do with making or marring his influence. He carried his neglect of appearances into his written and spoken composition; and that to such an extent that the style of his writings to the reader of to-day seems half ludicrous, half disgusting. This peculiarity is almost necessarily fatal to abiding influence; but there may well be something singularly impressive in it at the time. All misgiving as to the teacher’s sincerity—even as to his absorbing earnestness of aim—disappears before it. Darby’s own account of the matter was that he could have equalled the rhetorical flights of great masters, but that he never thought it worth while. Some much more thorough-going admirers of Darby than the present writer have regarded this statement as a proof that the great man was not always superior to a little innocent vanity; but indeed it is hard to read Darby’s better works without fancying that a noble eloquence was really at his command, if only he had chosen to cultivate it. Bad as the style is, it is the badness of an almost incredible carelessness rather than of defective power.

Was it affectation? Probably such a term is too harsh to use in the case of a man of striking general simplicity of character; but the negligence as to all externals, of which this is only the culminating instance, was perhaps adopted (if not deliberately, yet at least instinctively) as the fitting external form for the inward spirit of his life’s mission.

Limerick was the scene of Darby’s earliest efforts outside Dublin in behalf of the new cause. It was “after July, 1830,” as he says in a note apparently appended to Bellett’s narrative,^[3] that Darby first found his way to Oxford. Wigram, who was then at Queen’s College, may have been the means of bringing him over. “Breaking of bread” had already begun. “About the year 1831 [it should be 1830] I went to Oxford,” writes Darby, “where many doors were open, and where I found Mr. Wigram and Mr. Jarratt. Subsequently in calling on Mr. F. Newman I met Mr. Newton, who asked me to go down to Plymouth, which I did. On arriving, I found in the house Captain Hall who was already preaching in the villages. We had reading meetings, and ere long^[4] began to break bread. Though Mr. Wigram began the work in London he was a great deal at Plymouth.”

Such were the fair beginnings of several friendships destined to end sooner or later in misery and scandal. For the present, in the common glow of the new enthusiasm, all hearts blended, and latent rivalries were held in profound abeyance. Even the two brilliant and imperious ecclesiastics, whose duel à l’outrance fifteen years later shattered the new community and scandalised Christendom, were cooperating with perfect harmony in laying the foundations of the vigorous and aggressive church that was to give its name ere long to the whole movement.

There is really no mystery about the term “Plymouth” Brethren. The Plymouth meeting was the first in England to be recognised as a meeting of Brethren. It had before long a membership of over a thousand, and it attracted the ministry of all the English leaders. Newton was there, whenever his Fellowship at Exeter College did not detain him in Oxford. Hall was resident there for a time. Wigram and Darby worked there frequently. The result was that “Plymouth Brethren” became an almost inevitable designation for the new sect in England. In Ireland, on the contrary, they were known as Darbyites, until the usage of the “predominant partner” at last prevailed.

Darby’s letter introduces three men who afterwards played considerable parts in the story of Brethrenism. George Vicesimus Wigram, the twentieth child of Sir Robert Wigram, merchant and shipowner, of London and Wexford, was born in 1805. He came of a clever family, one of his brothers being fifth wrangler and vice-chancellor, and another sixth wrangler and Bishop of Rochester. For a short time he held a commission in the army. In 1824 a remarkable spiritual ecstasy left a deep and abiding impression on his life. This probably led to his abandoning the army, and entering at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1826, with the intention of taking orders—an intention never fulfilled. Wigram’s fortune was considerable, and he spent it freely on the worthiest objects. It is to his enterprise and munificence that the Church at large owes the Englishman’s Greek and Hebrew Concordances. In some respects the part he subsequently played in the history of the Brethren is unfortunate; and it is therefore the more incumbent on us to keep in mind from the first the strenuous, costly, and most disinterested labours by which Christians in general have so greatly profited. He remained for close upon fifty years Darby’s most unwavering supporter.

A very different man was Percy Francis Hall, and singularly independent was the course he pursued throughout. He had attained the rank of Commander in the navy, but (apparently about the time of which we are speaking) he resigned his commission for conscience’ sake, though he could ill afford the loss of his pay. In a tract entitled Discipleship he defended this course. The courage, the conscientiousness, and the devotion of the writer command respect; but some of his views certainly illustrate the extravagant side of Brethrenism. War is nationally authorised murder; and the magistracy is an unfit office for a Christian man.

“For what is a Christian magistrate to do when a broken-hearted man pleads for his wife and starving family, acknowledges the sinfulness of his heart, … and prays for pardon? Will he say, ‘No, you are guilty, and I am not the minister of mercy, but of law; you must go to the hulk, or the jail, or it may be to death?’ Would Jesus have done so? Will He do so now? Is this grace? and is such a person a servant of the Lord Jesus in the act? is he doing all things for His glory, glorifying his Lord in his body and spirit, which are His?”^[5]

A younger man than either of these, but one who quickly took a place of influence second only to Darby’s, was Benjamin Wills Newton. This distinguished theologian was born on the 12th of December, 1807, of a Quaker stock, and attained the age of nearly ninety-two. He was less than twenty-three when Darby arrived in Oxford. It has been constantly stated that he was in Holy Orders, but this was not the case. When he met Darby he had already relinquished on conscientious grounds all thought of ordination, and was thus prepared to adopt the new views on ministry and Church order. From this time until his secession from Brethrenism in 1847, he exercised his ministry steadily at Plymouth, except that for a few years, during which he held his Fellowship, Oxford claimed a certain portion of his time.

In 1832 the Brethren of Plymouth obtained a valuable recruit. J. L. Harris, perpetual curate of Plymstock, forsook the Church of England to unite himself with them. This excellent man, who married a daughter of Legh Richmond, was born about the year 1793. His presence greatly strengthened the infant community, whose first organ, The Christian Witness, was started under his editorship in 1834.

It seems then clear that Brethrenism in Plymouth had not an origin wholly independent of the movement in Dublin. A stronger case might be made out for the independence of the next centre at which we have to trace the origins. I refer to Bristol, where a powerful and peculiar phase of the movement, destined to a singularly stormy sequel, demands careful consideration.

The new principles were introduced at Bristol by one who may well be called the most illustrious man ever associated with the Brethren. The story of George Müller (1805-1898) is too well known through his own narrative to require to be told again in detail. He was of Prussian birth, and after a youth of precocious wickedness became the subject of a profound spiritual change. Desiring to devote himself to mission work among the Jews, he came as a very young man to London for training. But his mind was independently moving in the common direction of the early Brethren, and connexion with an organised society soon became impossible to him. Groves’ early pamphlet on Christian Devotedness fell into his hands, and influenced him powerfully. In 1830 Müller accepted a call to the pastorate of a church at Teignmouth, at a stipend of £55 a year; and it was here that the principles soon to be known as those of “the Brethren” began to take definite shape in his mind.

He became extremely suspicious of “human direction” in “the things of God”. His reading was almost confined to the letter of the Bible itself, and bore fruit, as he believed, in several measures that he took at this time. These were (1) his own baptism by immersion; (2) his adoption of weekly communion, and (to a certain extent) of open ministry; (3) his abandonment of pew rents and a stated salary; and (4) his relinquishment of all attempt to save money. His adoption of Baptist principles threatened to be rather a serious matter for him, as £50 of his salary was at stake. He confesses that, “at least for a few minutes,” he found this a temptation (Narrative, p. 68).

It was in the summer of 1830 that he began to adopt a measure of open ministry. “At certain meetings any of the brethren had an opportunity to exhort or teach the rest, if they considered that they had anything to say which might be beneficial to the hearers.” It was not “until several years after” that Müller fully adopted the principles that are now considered distinctive of Brethrenism. These he enumerates as follows: “That the disciples of Jesus should meet together, on the first day of the week, for the breaking of bread, and that that should be their principal meeting, and that those, whether one or several, who are truly gifted by the Holy Spirit for service, be it for exhortation, or teaching, or rule, etc., are responsible to the Lord for the exercise of their gifts”.

Though he implies that his Brethrenism at Teignmouth was only rudimentary, it must be remembered that there was then no Brethrenism that was anything else. For better or for worse, he was not less advanced than others who were moving in the same direction.

The influence of Groves may perhaps be traced in the following statement:—

“About the same time also my wife and I had grace given to us, to take the Lord’s commandment, ‘Sell that ye have and give alms,’ Luke xii. 33, literally, and to carry it out. Our staff and support in this matter were Matt. vi. 19—34, John xiv. 13, 14. We leaned on the arm of the Lord Jesus. It is now more than fourteen years since we set out in this way, and we do not in the least regret the step we then took.”

Before Müller had come to Teignmouth, Groves’ tract on Christian Devotedness had given a real impulse to his mind; and his wife, whom he married on October 7, 1830, was Groves’ sister. Evidently therefore Groves’ influence counted for a good deal in the development of Müller’s Brethrenism.

It was at Teignmouth that Müller first met the excellent man who was to be his friend and fellow-labourer through thirty-six years of unbroken harmony—a young Scotchman of the name of Henry Craik. In Craik’s case the influence of Groves was direct and decisive. From 1826 to 1828, he was tutor in Groves’ family; so that, as he observed long after to the younger Groves, “it was not at St. Andrews, it was not at Plymouth, it was at Exeter that the Lord taught me those lessons of dependence on Himself and of Catholic fellowship, which I have sought to carry out”.

In 1832 Müller and Craik removed to Bristol, and there for some eight years exercised their joint ministry at two chapels, severally known as Bethesda and Gideon. At Gideon the privileges of full membership were open to all Christians, no distinction being made on grounds connected with baptism; but at Bethesda full membership was restricted to Baptists, though the Communion was open. This continued till the summer of 1837, when it was decided to adopt the principle of open membership. Fourteen persons of strong Baptist views seceded, the majority of whom, however, ultimately returned. The alteration was made in consequence of a growing conviction that “there is no scriptural distinction between being in fellowship with individuals and breaking bread with them”. On the other hand, the alternative of close communion was rejected by Müller under the influence of Mr. Robert C. Chapman, of Barnstaple, the present patriarch of the Open Brethren, who has now reached the age of very nearly a hundred, amidst universal respect and goodwill. Up to that time Muller’s mind had been “for years” “more or less exercised” on the subject of open communion. Thenceforth he never wavered in his conviction “that we ought to receive all whom Christ has received, irrespective of the measure of grace or knowledge which they may have attained unto”.

In 1840 Gideon Chapel was abandoned. The reasons that Müller assigns for this step show that the principles of Brethrenism were by this time very fully developed at Bethesda.

“We have reason to believe that several of our dear brethren, who have been in the habit of assembling there [at Gideon] for worship, do not see with us in reference to the great leading principles on which we professedly meet. Ever since the removal of any restraint upon the exercise of whatever gift the Spirit may bestow, in connexion with the practice of weekly communion^[6] at Gideon, there has been dissatisfaction on the part of some. … By yielding up to them the use of the chapel we take away all just cause of complaint. …

“But in addition to those already mentioned, there are a third class of difficulties connected with retaining Gideon. The present character of the meeting for the breaking of bread there, is very far from fully exhibiting the principles on which we meet together. Unbelievers sitting among the saints, hinders our appearing to meet for the breaking of bread, and renders it necessary that a disturbing pause should intervene between the act of breaking bread and the other part of the meeting.^[6] … To request all who are not in fellowship with us (except those belonging to the families of the saints) to sit by themselves, as is the case at Bethesda, would, we fear, produce increased dissatisfaction.”

The great importance of these extracts lies in the controversies that raged in later years round the ecclesiastical status of Bethesda. It has been called a Baptist congregation associated with the Brethren, or a Baptist church “with peculiarities”. But this is to misconceive the whole character of early Brethrenism. Many conceptions that in later days became distinctive of the system had still to make their way. If the Bethesda Brethren gave their leaders the title of elder—a custom not totally unknown among the Open Brethren of to-day-the practice of Darby himself in the first years of the movement kept them in countenance;^[7] and the eldership, as it existed among them, was essentially connected with the conceptions of the Brethren, and radically distinct from those of the Baptists.

Truth to tell, Bethesda seems to have been rather too closely linked with the Brethren for its comfort. To go back to the preceding year, we find that in February, 1839, Müller and Craik left Bristol for a couple of weeks’ retirement, in order to give themselves to study and prayer in regard to certain burning questions that were threatening the peace of their flocks. The root of the trouble is not indicated, but the topics under consideration are at least suggestive. They included the eldership, its authority and its functions, and a variety of “questions relative to the Lord’s Supper”. “Before brother Craik and I,” writes Müller, “left Bristol for the consideration of the above points, things wore a gloomy appearance. A separation in the Church seemed to be unavoidable. But God had mercy, and pitied us. He was pleased to give us not merely increased light, but shewed us also how to act, and gave us a measure of wisdom, grace, and spiritual courage for acting. The clouds were dispelled, and peace was restored in the Church.”

The conclusions that the pastors reached with such happy results maybe summarised as follows: (1) It is “the mind of God that in every Church there should be recognised Elders”. (2) They are appointed by the Holy Ghost, and the appointment is made known to them and to the flock by “the secret call of the Spirit, confirmed by the possession of the requisite qualifications, and by the Lord’s blessing resting upon their labours”. (3) Matters of discipline are to be reserved for final settlement in the presence of the church, and with its consent, but (4) the Elders, without the church, are to appoint “the times for meeting,” to decide, “if needful, who are qualified to teach or to exhort, whether a brother has spoken to edification, or otherwise,” and “whether what may be advanced is according to the truth or not”. (5) The Lord’s Supper should be observed weekly, in compliance not with a command of the apostles, but with their example. (6) Liberty of ministry in the fullest sense, comprising teaching and exhortation, prayer and praise, should be associated with the ordinance. (7) Preferably, every individual communicant should break off a piece of the sacramental loaf for himself, rather than that it should be broken up by one of the elders.

During all these years Darby’s influence was continually increasing. If we said that he was steadily drawing closer his toils round the infant community, the expression would not be incorrect, unless it were understood to impute to him a deliberate policy of subjugation. Unconsciously, he was surrounding the various companies of the Brethren with influences that were bound to draw them very far from their original intentions; but there is no ground to question the sincerity with which he at first entered into the designs of his friends in Dublin. Ambition came with success; the opportunity was the temptation; and Darby became the helpless captive of his own triumph. So at least I am disposed to interpret the course of events. In his evolutions, Darby ended at a point exactly opposite to that from which he started. He began, as Rees put it,^[8] with universal communion, and ended with universal excommunication. He began with the declaration that it would be presumption and impiety to attempt to build up the “ruined Church,” or to restore “the administration of the Body”; and he ended by doing both things strenuously, if there is meaning in words. But it is probable that with the gradual alteration of his standpoint came a corresponding modification in the meaning he assigned to his watchwords, with the not unprecedented result that one and the same set of formulae was applied to the sanction of two opposite courses of action.

Under Darby’s influence meetings sprang up rapidly. The first meeting in London, though not indeed planted by him, was the work of his trustiest lieutenant, G. V. Wigram; and the meeting at Rawstorne Street, Camden Town, ultimately became the nucleus of Darby’s metropolitan system of administration, which will occupy a considerable place in the sequel. Of this, the first transient indication occurs in 1838, when Wigram addressed (evidently to Darby) the following letter:—^[9]

“My dear Friend and Brother,—There is a matter exercising the minds of some of us at this present time in which you may be (and in some sense certainly are) concerned. The question I refer to is, How are meetings for communion of saints in these parts to be regulated? Would it be for the glory of the Lord and the increase of testimony to have one central meeting, the common responsibility of all within reach, and as many meetings subordinate to it as grace might vouchsafe? or to hold it to be better to allow the meetings to grow up as they may without connexion and dependent upon the energy of individuals only? … truly, provided there be in London some place where the wanderer can find rest and communion, my desire is met; though the glory of the Lord will of course be still to be cared for.

“I am, dear brother, yours in Jesus,

“G. V. W.”

“Oct. 6, 1838.”

This is particularly interesting as containing the first proposal for a federation of the little meetings of the Brethren.

But the document that more than any other sheds strong light on this early period of development is the well-known letter that Groves, weather-bound at Milford Haven on the eve of his second voyage for the East, addressed to Darby, under date March 10, 1836. Groves had landed in England about fifteen months before, and had associated freely with the Brethren in Bristol and Plymouth. The whole letter is well worth perusal for the insight it gives into the characters and views of the two men who played the largest parts in the inauguration of the movement. It will be found verbatim in the appendix to Groves’ Memoir. A few extracts must suffice here.

“I wish you to feel assured that nothing has estranged my heart from you, or lowered my confidence in your being still animated by the same enlarged and generous purposes that once so won and riveted me; and though I feel you have departed from those principles by which you once hoped to have effected them, and are in principle returning to the city from whence you departed, still my soul so reposes in the truth of your heart to God that I feel it needs but a step or two more to advance and you will see all the evil of the systems from which you profess to be separated to spring up among yourselves. … You will be known more by what you witness against than what you witness for, and practically this will prove that you witness against all but yourselves as certainly as the Walkerites or the Glassites: your Shibboleth may be different, but it will be as real. It has been asserted … that I have changed my principles; all I can say is, that as far as I know what those principles were in which I gloried in first discovering them in the Word of God, I now glory in them ten times more since I have experienced their applicability to all the various and perplexing circumstances of the present state of the Church; allowing you to give every individual, and collection of individuals, the standing God gives them, without identifying yourselves with any of their evils.”

The following is specially important: —

“I ever understood our principle of communion to be the possession of the common life … of the family of God…; these were our early thoughts, and are my most matured ones. The transition your little bodies have undergone, in no longer standing forth the witnesses for the glorious, simple truth, so much as standing forth witnesses against all that they judge error, have lowered them in my apprehension from heaven to earth in their position of witnesses. … The moment the witnessing for the common life as our bond gives place to a witnessing against errors by separation of persons and preaching, (errors allowably compatible with the common life), every individual or society of individuals first comes before the mind as those who might need witnessing against, and all their conduct and principles have first to be examined and approved before they can be received; and the position which this occupying the seat of judgment will place you in will be this: the most narrow-minded and bigoted will rule, because his conscience cannot and will not give way, and therefore the more enlarged heart must yield. It is into this position, dear Darby, I feel some little flocks are fast tending, if they have not already attained it. Making light not life the measure of communion. … Was not the principle we laid down as to separation from all existing bodies at the outset this: that we felt ourselves bound to separate from all individuals and systems, so far as they required us to do what our consciences would not allow, or restrained us from doing what our consciences required, and no further? and were we not as free to join and act with any individual, or body of individuals, as they were free not to require us to do what our consciences did not allow, or prevent our doing what they did? And in this freedom did we not feel brethren should not force liberty on those who were bound, nor withhold freedom from those who were free?”

The Brethren have always been apt to measure their fidelity by the opposition and reproach that they have encountered. Groves believed that the opposition might sometimes be explained in quite a different way.

“I know it is said, (dear Lady Powerscourt told me so), that so long as any terms were kept with the Church of England, by mixing up in any measure in their ministrations when there was nothing to offend your conscience, they bore your testimony most patiently, but after your entire rejection of them, they pursued you with undeviating resentment, and this was brought to prove that the then position was wrong, and the present right. But all I see in this is, that whilst you occupy the place of only witnessing against those things which the Divine life within themselves recognised as evil, and separating from them only so far as they separated from Christ, you established them as judges of themselves, and of themselves they were condemned; and at the same time you conciliated their heavenly affections, by allowing all that really was of the Lord, and sharing in it, though the system itself in which you found these golden grains you could not away with. … There is no truth more established in my own mind than this; that to occupy position of the maximum of power, in witnessing to the consciences of others, you must stand before their unbiassed judgment as evidently wishing to allow in them more than their own consciences allow, rather than less, proving that your heart of love is more alive to find a covering for faults, than your eagle eye of light to discover them.”

An argumentum ad hominem follows. It must be remembered that Darby almost alone among the earlier Brethren remained a pedobaptist.

“Some will not have me hold communion with the Scotts, because their views are not satisfactory about the Lord’s Supper; others with you, because of your views about baptism; others with the Church of England, because of her thoughts about ministry. I receive them all and join with them. On the principle of witnessing against evil, I should reject them all. … I make use of my fellowship in the Spirit, to enjoy the common life together and witness for that, as an opportunity to set before them those little particulars into which, notwithstanding all their grace and faithfulness, their godliness and honesty, they have fallen. … I naturally unite fixedly with those in whom I see, and feel most of the life and power of God. But I am as free to visit other churches where I see much of disorder as to visit the houses of my friends, though they govern them not as I could wish.”

The closing words of the letter have a great moral beauty. They are also valuable as showing that an observer of no common shrewdness recognised in Darby a moral elevation such as many in the present day are unable to conceive that he possessed.

“You must not, however, dear brother, think, from anything I have said, that I shall not write freely and fully to you, relative to things in India, feeling assured in my own heart, that your enlarged and generous spirit, so richly taught of the Lord, will one day burst again those bonds which narrower minds than yours have encircled you with, and come forth again, rather anxious to advance all the living members of the living Head into the stature of men, than to be encircled by any little bodies, however numerous, that own you for their founder. I honour, love, and respect your position in the Church of God; but the deep conviction I have that your spiritual power was incalculably greater when you walked in the midst of the various congregations of the Lord’s people, manifesting forth the life and the power of the Gospel, than now, is such that I cannot but write the above as a proof of my love and confidence that your mind is above considering who these remarks come from, rather than what truth there may be in them.”

Whether we agree with Groves or with Darby, or differ from both, it will be hard to deny that this letter is marked by no ordinary combination of faithfulness, delicacy, and large-hearted wisdom. In what spirit Darby received it I have not the least idea, but its practical effect upon him would seem to have been nothing. Indeed, the letter is a sort of last utterance of a vanishing standpoint. Darby carried the day at all points. In later times such a fraternising with congregations of other denominations as Groves pleaded for has been almost as alien from the procedure of the Open Brethren (with some eminent and strongly-marked exceptions) as from that of the Exclusive party itself.

There is no doubt that even at that early date Darby carried the multitude with him. At Bristol indeed the rule of Müller and Craik safeguarded the interests of more liberal principles; and there Groves was amply satisfied. But at Plymouth, notwithstanding that Darby’s influence was seriously qualified by the local preeminence of Newton, Groves was grieved to find the narrower views already in the ascendant.^[10] When the evil spirit of sectarianism is gone out of a man he is very apt to find himself a wanderer through dry places, seeking rest and finding none; and he is fortunate indeed if he does not fulfil his course according to the parable, until his last state is worse (and perhaps incomparably worse) than his first. So at least it certainly was with the great mass of the Brethren. Groves, on the other hand, with his singularly pure, lofty and tender spirit, had no more interest in a sect than he had capacity to form one. He was essentially catholic; and he had to endure the grief—which to a man less pure from the taint of self-seeking would have been the bitter mortification—of seeing another man enter into his labours and convert them to purposes that he abhorred.^[11]

1. Professor Stokes (op. cit.) supplies the omission. Newman’s friend was the late Chief Justice Pennefather, at that time a leading Chancery barrister. He had married Darby’s eldest sister twenty years earlier. Newman came to Ireland about 1827.
2. D’Arcy Sirr, Memoir of Abp. Le Poer Trench, p. 344.
3. Miller (p. 40) quotes from a letter of Darby’s to a friend, in which the writer says “about the year 1831”. This is impossible, for he called upon Newman during this visit, and Newman sailed for Bagdad September 18, 1830. This fixes the visit for August or early September, 1830.
4. Apparently not until the next year (1831) had begun. See Tregelles’ Three Letters, p. 5.
5. Discipleship, pp. 25-26—quoted by W. Reid, Plymouth Brethrenism Unveiled, etc., p. 30 (third edition).
6. Italics my own.
7. See below, p. 108.
8. Four Letters. Letter I. Rees made the remark of the system at large, but the system was moulded by Darby.
9. Reprinted in Henry Groves’ Darbyism, p. 11.
10. Memoir, 356.
11. I allow this closing sentence to stand as it originally appeared in the British Weekly, because I consider that Groves’ priority as compared with Darby, and his actually predominant influence at the first, make the expressions substantially accurate. But I would wish it to be understood that I do not think that any man can, with strict propriety, be spoken of as the founder of Plymouthism; though it seems fair to say of Groves that he had a larger share in its foundation than any one else, if we confine our attention to the very earliest period. It is necessary to add a word of warning against the first chapter of The Brethren, Their Origin, Progress and Testimony. Its author derived his information largely from Darby, but it may be charitably hoped that he extensively misunderstood his authority. As the chapter stands, it is putting it mildly to say that it teems with errors. Refutation in detail would have been equally tedious and superfluous, and I have been content in my own narrative to let my authorities constantly appear. I make these strictures on the book in question with the profoundest veneration for its author, and simply as deeming them imperatively called for in the interests of historical truth. I am also certain that Mr. Miller would never have felt that he had an interest that could be severed from the interests of truth.