A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 4
The Expansion of Brethrenism—Groves in the East
The establishment of Brethrenism abroad is primarily due to the zeal of the men who bore the largest share in founding or in consolidating it at home. We must needs limit our attention here to the most important or most characteristic episodes; and, from this point of view, precedence must be assigned to Groves’ work in India, Darby’s in the Canton de Vaud, and Müller’s in Germany.
We follow the chronological order; but Groves’ work, though in some respects the most interesting of the three, had less effect than the others in the formation of churches on the new model. The explanation must be sought chiefly in the personal character of the missioner. If Groves had said, “I am not so anxious to form a party as to infuse principles,” he would have said with transparent truth what many a sect-maker has said with more or less unconscious disingenuousness. To have a ring of churches looking up to him as their founder does not seem to have had any attraction for him; else he might surely have had it. Nor is it possible even to imagine him trying to undermine the influence of a pastor with his flock. Whatever difficulties his disintegrating principles may have created in India we always find him, whether in conference or in controversy, dealing with the clergy first of all, and in all things aboveboard. Comparing his conduct, even when we think it ill-judged and unfortunate, with what Brethrenism has too often exhibited, who can refrain from crying, O si sic omnes!
The mission to Bagdad, though almost barren of registrable results, is one of the most interesting episodes in the whole of our story. A year after Groves left England a party of seven started to join him. It consisted of Cronin (who had just become a widower), his mother and sister, Parnell, Newman, Hamilton (an Irish Brother), and Cronin’s infant daughter. The party was detained for fifteen months at Aleppo. There Parnell married Miss Cronin, and lost her almost immediately by death. Hamilton returned to England, and scarcely had the little company at last succeeded in reaching Bagdad, in the early summer of 1832, when Mrs. Cronin also died.
It is an interesting fact that Wigram was only prevented at the last moment from joining this missionary band. That we thus get a list of almost all the names of men who had taken a leading part in the movement before 1830 is a striking proof, not only of the fervour of the zeal of the first Brethren, and of their readiness to stake everything on principles of action that may now appear to us rather visionary, but also of their superiority to any ambition to found a new sect. To follow Groves to Bagdad, on a mission that must be deemed singularly unpromising, was the prevailing passion in Dublin. If the little group there that furnished most of the makers of Brethrenism had the weakness of Quixotism, at least they had its strength and nobleness.
The zeal of the party was tried by heavy and protracted sorrow. When they reached Bagdad at last it was to enter a house of mourning. In March, 1831, the plague had broken out, and within two months more than half the population of the city had perished. The danger seemed to be passing away, leaving the missionary party untouched, when Mrs. Groves sickened, and within a week was dead. She was as saintly as her husband, and the story of her illness and death, as preserved in his journals, is one of the most affecting in the annals of missions. Illness visited every member of the family in turn. In August the baby died, and Groves would have been left with no European company except that of his two boys, had it not been for John Kitto, whom he had befriended many years before, and had finally brought with him to the East. This afflicted young man (he was stone-deaf) afterwards, with great help from his long Eastern experience, attained to eminence in the department of Biblical literature. He has left on record, in many an enthusiastic passage, the gratitude and reverence he felt towards his benefactor. “In the whole world,” he wrote at a later day, “so far as I know it, there is not one man whose character I venerate so highly.” It was some relief to his feelings to have the opportunity to act as tutor to the two boys.
The plague was followed by civil war, and Bagdad was besieged. The suffocating heat compelled Groves and his family to pass the night on the roof, notwithstanding that it was occasionally swept by the bullets of the besiegers.
Groves, though almost overwhelmed, held on his way, and his spirits revived when the friends from Aleppo joined him. A young Armenian, Serkies Davids, who had been bereaved of his last relative through the plague, Groves took into his own house and treated like a son. He became a convert,—the one indubitable convert of the mission,—and a thoroughly satisfactory one. But the work among the Mahometans remained unproductive; the very opportunities of preaching seemed to be withdrawn; and this doubtless disposed Groves to entertain the thought of a mission tour in India. Thither he set out in May, 1833. Contrary to his original intention, he never returned to Bagdad. Cronin and Parnell, with Groves’ sons, did not quit Bagdad for a considerable time after this. Newman had left for England with Kitto, partly to enlist additional missionaries, in September, 1832. But his brief, enthusiastic career among the Brethren was nearly over. He passed to Arianism, and then to Deism. Of his appreciation of the leader of the mission he has left the record in a single epithet—“the noble-hearted Groves”.
“There are two or three objects in going,” Groves wrote, “which I cannot detail, and feel it impossible to write about. One, however, very especial one, is to become united more truly in heart with all the missionary band there, and shew that, notwithstanding all differences, we are one in Christ; sympathising in their sorrows, and rejoicing in their prosperity. … My purpose is to visit as many mission stations as I can before I return, should the Lord spare me.” In many respects no man was ever better fitted for the task; but he was hampered by his attachment to views that most of the missionaries were sure to think subversive of all necessary order. The result was that he had a mixed success. He landed at Bombay in July. There he found several friends, “all of them members of the Church of England,” who were deeply concerned at the difficulties that threatened to stop the remarkable work of Rhenius in Tinnevelly. At their “earnest solicitations,” Groves determined to visit Rhenius, and endeavour to encourage him to remain at his post.
By this mission Groves ultimately incurred a good deal of odium in India, and lost many friends. He appeared to others as the enemy of the Church Missionary Society—an imputation that he felt to be very unjust. There were two sides to the question. Mr. Eugene Stock, the latest authority on the subject, has told us[1] that Rhenius’ “breach with the Church was due to Mr. Groves’s influence”; but if this statement is to be deemed correct, it must only be understood to imply that Groves’ influence made an already serious breach irreparable. In December, Groves writes of his success in “the great object” of his coming to Tinnevelly—“that of preventing my dear brother Rhenius from going to England, which would, I fear, occasion the separation, or, at least, as far as we can see, the scattering of this most affectingly interesting mission”. The Society had invited Rhenius to England to confer on the great point in dispute—the right, that is, of Rhenius to ordain catechists himself instead of obtaining the intervention of the bishop. Evidently Groves did not anticipate that such a visit would lead to an accommodation; and equally evidently he was glad to see Rhenius in an independent position; but it does not seem that he made it his special object to detach him from the Church of England. In the earlier period of the operations of the Church Missionary Society, the great scarcity of English candidates necessitated a large employment of Lutherans. The ambiguous Episco-palianism of these recruits must have been so far a weakness. On the other hand, the inelastic machinery of Anglicanism was undoubtedly regarded by Groves with considerable disfavour; and, however far he was from making it a primary object to bring his fellow Christians over to his own views on ecclesiastical questions, his influence, if a crisis arose, would necessarily be thrown into the scale of separation. He might therefore very naturally feel himself injured by such an estimate of his conduct as the adherents of the Society might equally naturally form.
The cardinal point with Groves was not so much liberty for ministry within the church (though he was certainly attached to it) as liberty for ministry outside of it. His own liberty to minister in missionary operations without human authorisation was the starting point of his nonconformist career; a similar liberty within the Christian congregations, though he had much to do with setting it up, was merely a natural extension of the same principle. Thus in India, while he certainly contemplated the formation of a church on the “Plymouth” model (though apparently not to be formed at the expense of existing churches, but by evangelistic effort), his great aim was to set free the mass of missionary power that he judged was left unutilised. He delighted to show Christians in the army, and others, apart from all ecclesiastical questions, “the liberty they had in Christ” to preach His Word; and he seems to have done this zealously, without any ulterior object.
This will explain his attitude in the matter of Rhenius. In the abstract question of the ordination of the catechists he cannot have taken much interest. But he probably thought that constant resort to the bishop would interpose delays in the prosecution of the work. He would therefore much prefer to see Rhenius acting entirely on his own responsibility. It does not appear how much further things moved in the direction of Groves’ other views. Certainly nothing like a stable church of Brethren was formed, for after the early death of Rhenius in 1838 most of the seceding Christians returned to the Church of England.[2] So far, Groves’ labours had done little for the extension of Brethrenism as an ecclesiastical system. Subsequently a very vigorous and extensive work, substantially on the lines of the Brethren, sprang up in the north of Tinnevelly, under the leadership of a disciple of his, named Aroolappen. This really remarkable Christian, who displayed from early days an energy of faith not unworthy of his teacher, is not claimed as a convert of Groves’. In a letter of condolence, indeed, that he addressed on the occasion of Groves’ death to one of the mourners, he speaks of himself as Groves’ “dear child in Christ Jesus ”; but it is probable that this spiritual relationship was adoptive. Groves seems first to have met him in Tinnevelly at the end of 1833, and their close friendship remained uninterrupted for twenty years, and was then only severed by death. The present missions of the Open Brethren, not only in Tinnevelly but also in Travancore, are, as I understand, to be affiliated to Aroolappen, and through him to Groves.
More important in itself perhaps, though less to our present purpose, was the influence that Groves seems to have exercised upon English residents over a very wide and varied field in India. In modern phraseology this would be described as a “deepening of spiritual life,” and the missioner’s qualifications for the work were acknowledged by many who were painfully apprehensive of his influence in other respects. Two remarks made to him in the summer of 1834, just before he sailed to England, are well worth quoting. “I was told,” he writes, “I was the greatest enemy the Church of England ever had in India, because no one could help loving my spirit, and thus the evil sank tenfold deeper; but indeed, I do not wish to injure, but to help her, by taking from her all her false confidences.” A few days later he records that “the chaplain is most kind in many respects: he says, ‘they cannot have too much of my spirit or too little of my judgment’”. The former remark, though not unkind, partakes of the exaggeration of controversy; the latter is perhaps not far from the truth. Norris Groves is one of the Church’s great saints; but a solid judgment was not his forte. He had a strong case against many an existing arrangement, but his opponents might be excused for thinking that the almost total abrogation of arrangement would not mend matters. Time, at any rate, has been so far on their side.
Some of the most eminent men in India were suf ficiently calm and large-minded to realise that whatever harm, from their point of view, Groves might accomplish was bound to be far outweighed by the good; and they extended to him their cordial friendship. Henry Martyn’s friend, Daniel Corrie, the veteran missionaries of Serampore, and above all, the young Scotchman who was to leave so deep a mark on Eastern missions, Alexander Duff, were chief amongst these. In later days, (for, with the exception of occasional visits to England, Groves devoted the last twenty years of his life to India), the honoured names of Fox and Noble, clergymen of the Church Missionary Society in Masulipatam, must be added to the list.
It must also be said that as time went on Groves grew to hope less and less from the movement that he had done so much to inaugurate. From the time that Darby’s principles of fellowship gained the ascendency in England, Groves considered that the downfall of the Brethren was decreed. Though he personally adhered through life to their communion, he evidently ceased to expect them “to work any deliverance in the earth”. The disease he had grappled with so hopefully at the first seemed now beyond remedy. Indeed he dreaded the new ecclesiasticism far more than the old, and his later efforts were less directed to diffusing the views of the Brethren than to saving the Brethren themselves from the principles of “impulsive ministry,” and the abjuration of fixed pastoral relations.
The best witness to the character of his work in India is Dr. Duff. Duff was bound to him by many ties. He had owed[3] “his first glow of devotedness” to Groves’ early tract; and it may well be that he owed his life to the almost parental tenderness with which his friend nursed him through a very serious illness on their voyage from Calcutta to England in 1834. But their friendship owed nothing to agreement in those tenets with which Groves’ name is almost identified to-day. It was from the standpoint of a firm adherent of the time-honoured Presbyterian forms that Duff, writing to Mrs. Groves with reference to the projected memoir of her husband, describes in the following passage the value of his deceased friend’s labours in India. It will plainly appear that if Duff thought Groves sometimes an indiscreet reformer, at least he felt that there was a good deal to reform.
“Before Mr. Groves reached Calcutta, about the middle of 1834, I had heard much of him and his uncommon devotedness to the cause of Christ. No sooner did I meet with him than I felt drawn towards him with the cords of love. He was so warm, so earnest, so wrapt up in his Master’s cause, so inflamed with zeal for the salvation of perishing souls, I regarded it as no ordi- nary privilege that he agreed to take up his abode in my house during his sojourn in Calcutta. …
“Well did I know beforehand that there were different points connected with the principles of establishments, church government, and such like, respecting which his opinions differed somewhat widely from mine; but I knew that he was a proved man of God, who had jeoparded his worldly interest, and even his life, in seeking to promote the cause of the Redeemer in the world. …
“ … If in our past friendly and brotherly discussions, Mr. Groves was naturally apt to consider me, at times, as unconsciously warped in judgment, through the prejudices of education, and the influence of ecclesiastical habits; so, on the other hand, I was apt to consider him, in his honest zeal, as a reformer of glaring and confessed abuses, as, at times, unconsciously carried away to the opposite extreme, in the suggestion of appropriate remedies. … Apart altogether from his peculiar views, or even in spite of some of them, I could not help regarding him as one of the most loving and lovable of Christian men, while the singular fervency of his spirit made it quite contagious; diffusing all around the savour of an unearthly sanctity and self-consuming devotedness. … The Lord grant that professing disciples in this luxurious age of self-pleasing and self-indulgence, may at least learn from his example the lesson which they preeminently need, and which he was honoured of God preeminently to teach, and that is, the lesson of real Scriptural self-denial, the divine lesson of taking up the cross, forsaking all, and following the Lord !”
- ↑ History of the Church Missionary Society, vol i., p. 283.
- ↑ Stock, op. cit., p. 321.
- ↑ Memoir, p. 295.