A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 5

by William Blair Neatby

Layout 2

 

V
The Expansion of Brethrenism—Darby in Vaud—Müller at Stuttgart

Widely different is the spectacle that Darby’s work in the Canton de Vaud presents, and of vastly greater consequence in the development of Brethrenism. Darby was nothing if not an ecclesiastic, and all his operations subserved ecclesiastical ends. His work in Switzerland began in the earlier months of 1838, and his very appearance was the signal for an initial success, a permanent meeting being formed in Vevey within the first half of the year.^[1] It was some two years later, however, before he got a footing in the far larger and more important town of Lausanne. His arrival there, in March, 1840, inaugurated a most extraordinary movement, of which the influence spread with startling rapidity over the whole of the Canton and far beyond it, yet without sacrificing to the rapidity of its growth any element of solidity and permanence.

Such a result is no common tribute to the skill and determination of the man who ventured on so great an enterprise single-handed. That he met with favouring circumstances is unquestionable; but that was owing to no mere freak of propitious fortune. Darby had a keen eye to favouring circumstances. Where they promised him a footing he struck in promptly; he gained no footing that he did not make good; and he won no victory that he did not convert into a stepping-stone to another. “De succès en succès” is the description left of his campaign by a determined and formidable opponent.

Information is ample and authoritative. On the one hand, the writer just quoted has left a full account of it in a large pamphlet, entitled Les Frères de Plymouth et John Darby. His position as Professor in the State Church’s Theological College at Lausanne, and his great eminence as a theologian, lend special value and interest to his polemic. Perhaps no theologian of an equally wide reputation has devoted so much attention to any episode in the history of the Brethren. I refer to J.J. Herzog, the editor of the Real-encyclopadie. Herzog writes, as I have said, from the standpoint, of an avowed and determined enemy of Darbyism. He is never indeed intentionally unfair, and at times he pays tributes to Darby that he might defensibly have withheld; but his work is still the work of a partisan, and of a partisan smarting under painful blows and heavy losses. It is therefore fortunate that we have in abundance from Darby’s own pen the means of putting ourselves at the point of view of the other side. Darby carried on his campaign largely by aid of tracts, some expository and some controversial. These are brought together in an English form in his Collected Writings.

Darby came to Lausanne in response to an invitation he had received in the previous autumn from an influential member of the Free Church, who had taken alarm at the rapid spread of Wesleyan Methodism amongst the Dissenters. The intervening months were spent, at least in part, at the important centres of Neuchâtel and Geneva. That he had already earned a very high reputation in Switzerland is amply witnessed by Herzog, who also allows, with a candour that does him credit, that the reputation was in great part well deserved.

“Such is the man who towards the end of March, 1840, appeared at Lausanne in the midst of the almost broken up dissenting Church. He came, preceded by the double reputation of an able pastor and of a teacher profoundly acquainted with the Bible. People spoke in glowing terms of the devotion of a man who, from love for Christ and for souls, had renounced almost the whole of his fine fortune;^[2] and who displayed in his whole conduct a simplicity and a frugality that recalled the primitive times of the Church. It was also said in his favour that, sacrificing the delights of family life, he spent his life in journeying from place to place to gain souls for the kingdom of God.

“Notwithstanding that Mr. Darby seeks less to convert souls than to unite under his direction souls already converted, we gladly acknowledge that he deserved to a great extent the compliments that were paid him. There certainly is to be found in him a combination of fine and great qualities. His conversion, we have no reason whatever to doubt, was real and sincere. He is capable of much devotion to the Lord’s cause, and he has given striking proofs of it. He is a man of indefatigable activity, and at the same time of great originality and independence of mind. If he had taken a different turn, he might have rendered eminent services to the Church.

“Moreover we must distinguish in him, up to a certain point, the teacher, the head of a movement, and the simple Christian. Christian charity requires us to make such a distinction. Essentially our charge against him is that these three characters are not found in perfect harmony in him. From the point of view of his general Christian character he deserves the most honourable witness. His sermons, as well as his pastoral activity, in so far as they relate to what really belongs to the Christian life, are also worthy of great praise; Mr. Darby can edify very well when he wishes; he excels in treating certain thrilling truths of the Gospel; and both by this means and by his pastoral care he has done many people good, and has been, under God, the means of the conversion of some. But when in his teaching he broaches ecclesiastical questions, when he appears as head of a party, and when he endeavours to unite under his banner souls already converted, then he decidedly falls below his own level.^[3] Our criticism relates almost exclusively to his ecclesiastical system, and to his position and his proceedings as director of a particular society.”

It would be difficult to overpraise the sagacity that enabled Herzog to form such an estimate of Darby. Darby’s career was still in an early stage. By far the larger half of his public life, and by far the more sensational, was yet to come. With the information that later years and a closer acquaintance afford, we can see, if I mistake not, that both the light and the shade in Herzog’s picture require to be intensified; but in its broad outlines, the picture remains still a most authentic and impressive portrait. If Herzog was sometimes vehement, or even angry, in his denunciations, he at least had not suffered anger to blind his eyes.

Darby’s success in his primary mission was rapid and complete. Methodism vanished before him. His polemic against the Wesleyan views of perfection is unstintedly praised by Herzog, who also does justice to the wisdom with which Darby, avoiding a merely negative and destructive policy, occupied the minds of his hearers with a totally different set of ideas, which he invested with a powerful fascination. It is right, however, to add that Herzog had to take very just exception to Darby’s uncharitable, not to say outrageous, imputation on Wesleyanism that it hardly contained any real Christians, and that it set aside, in its doctrine and its discipline, “all that is most precious in the truths of salvation”. Herzog is surely warranted in saying that such assertions “betray the party man”. Indeed they far exceed the licence to which extreme Calvinists may be said to have a sort of prescriptive title when dealing with Arminians, and Darby’s was not an extreme Calvinism.

These blemishes did not hinder the success of Darby’s mission. In the spring of 1841, Henri Olivier renounced the Methodism of which he had been “the most ardent champion,” and “united his flock to Darby’s”. Nor was this Darby’s first triumph. On the 11th of January, 1841, he writes from Lausanne of three ministers of the State Church that had resigned their office,^[4] and of a meeting at Vevey “to break bread,” held on a Monday, at which Nationalists and Dissenters united. “Very happy,” is Darby’s terse comment. “It is a beginning.”

It was in fact the beginning of a great deal. Following English precedent, Darby made the study of prophecy the pivot of his work; and his delineations of millennial glory dazzled the minds of his hearers. There existed in Vaud a certain religious malaise, of which the growth of Methodism in an otherwise uncongenial soil had been a symptom. The Free Church had yielded less satisfaction than its promoters had hoped, and the minds of its adherents were prepared to hail the charms with which the certain future—doubtless it was said, the near future—was invested in Darby’s prophetic dissertations. He was never “weary,” Herzog tells us, “of urging on his hearers this decisive word: ‘Prophecy tends to snatch us from the present evil age; that is its principal effect’.”

Darby was in some sense the guest of the Dissenters, but he let it be known from the outset that he would make no difference between them and the “Nationalists”. The result was that his meetings were largely attended by the members of both Churches, and he pursued a policy that may be variously characterised according to the point of view taken. He would doubtless have said that he spoke the word, as his hearers were able to bear it.

“Persons who had for a long time followed his lectures affirmed that he preached nothing but the truths of salvation, and never allowed himself a word that was hostile to the existing Church. He delivered the discourses of which we have just spoken, equally on Sundays and on other days, either in the place

of the former speakers or by turns with them. … People said that no one had ever preached in a manner so thrilling, so edifying, so clear and so consistent, the free grace of God in Christ for the salvation of sinners. That, they said, was the characteristic merit of Darby’s preaching. We are of the same opinion, without approving of the extravagant eulogising of Mr. Darby. … Indeed it would be hard to understand how discourses that shone by no kind of literary or rhetorical merit, and that were addressed to so religious an audience as Mr. Darby’s, could have made such a sensation if they had not borne the stamp of a truly evangelical impress.”

Great as the revolution in Lausanne was, it seems to have been almost silently effected, by dint partly of the mere popularity of Darby’s ministry, partly of changes that he gradually introduced on his own authority. The old effective watchword, Union of the Children of God, was rallying men rapidly to the standard of Darbyism.

“All this was preparing for the ecclesiastical revolution projected by our able doctor; or rather, it was not perceived that the revolution was already partly accomplished. Darby had in effect placed himself of his own accord at the head of the congregation, and had taken to exercising pastoral functions, without so much as dreaming of justifying his assumption of the office of an ecclesiastic by his ordination to the ministry in the Church of England. The ministers whom the congregation had had till then were virtually deposed. It is true that they still at times occupied the pulpit, but the office that the congregation had conferred on them had come to an end, and they saw themselves forced to divide its functions not only with Darby, but even with laymen.

“Mr. Darby administered the Lord’s Supper every Sunday after the ordinary service,^[5] without troubling about the disciplinary rules of the dissenting congregation. ‘He is extremely broad,’ many members of the National Church who had joined him said in his praise; ‘he administers the Lord’s Supper to all without distinction who attend his meetings, and he does not even insist in the least that they should leave the National Church.’”

The following is an interesting account of the dénouement. It must of course be remembered that it is written by an adversary.

“When he judged people’s minds sufficiently prepared, Mr. Darby proceeded to the realisation, strictly speaking, of his plan. The idea was to explode in fragments organised Dissent as it had previously existed; thus to draw to himself the best energies of the revival in the National Church, and to group them without any kind of ecclesiastical organisation, in congregations absolutely free, that would have no centre but himself. By the suppression of every form of organisation his system gave all the more play to the ascendency of his powerful individuality.”

Darby followed up his triumph. He established at his house “a sort of little academy, where certain disciples, maintained for the most part at his own expense and that of his English and Vaudois friends, were initiated by him in his way of understanding Scripture”. Provision was thus made to replace him during his frequent absences from Lausanne; and in the supply of the pulpit the ordained ministers, to the horror of Professor Herzog’s ecclesiastical soul, obtained no preference. Herzog, however, had his revenge by hitting off neatly one of the characteristic little affectations of Darbyism. “To forward the ecclesiastical levelling,” as he tells us, “they actually took away the little table on a platform that had served the former preachers as pulpit; and one day when one of the latter had taken it into his head to replace the innocent bit of furniture^[6]—‘What’s the good of that chimney-piece?’ cried an ardent disciple of Darby’s, as he entered the hall; and the table disappeared for good and all.”

If the Brothers who took the lead in Darby’s absence were asked how they set to work to keep things in order, they replied, “Very simply; we meet together and discuss what is to be done”. Herzog’s not unnatural comment is that the declaration “was tantamount to an avowal that they fell back, in virtue of the very nature of things, on a first step in ecclesiastical organisation”. All the advantage they had, to his mind, was that the gifts manifested by various brethren “were not regularly recognised, and [that] arbitrariness presided over the whole arrangement”.

During the five years that followed Darby’s arrival in Lausanne, his principles spread far and wide in French Switzerland, and obtained some successes in Berne and Bâle. In the South of France they spread over a considerable district, of which Montpellier was the most important town, though Ardèche is said to have been the scene of their greatest success in those days. The way in which Darby kept in touch with all the ramifications of the work, without for a moment relaxing his hold on his continental metropolis, is admirable. Nor can it be accounted for by any want of strenuous opposition. Two of the best known dissenting ministers of Vaud took the field against him in a series of pamphlets, to which he replied one by one.

Auguste Rochat, pastor of the Free Church at Rolle, a small town about sixteen miles from Lausanne, has not only received the most honourable testimony from Herzog, but is also frequently referred to with high regard by Darby himself. “But for Rochat we should be masters of the country,” were the words in which Darby acknowledged an influence that could to some extent qualify even his own. Rochat’s first tract against Brethrenism appeared not later than 1841. He followed it up the next year by A Thread to help the Simple to find their Way.

Francois Olivier, a brother of the ex-champion of Methodism, was a man of unquestioned ability. If his personal influence was less than Rochat’s, he had the advantage of being resident at Lausanne, and of having attended Darby’s ministry there with great interest. Not feeling, however, wholly satisfied with the course things were taking, Olivier began in the winter of 1842-3 to hold meetings independently of Darby. Yet he was so far from wishing to precipitate a rupture that he fixed an hour for his meetings at which they would not clash with Darby’s, and abstained, until the end of 1844, from administering the communion. Olivier published his first pamphlet, An Essay on the Kingdom of God, in 1843; and his second in the same year, or in the following.

Darby’s replies to Rochat are favourable specimens of his controversial manner. He does not indeed always write in perfect taste, but he refers to Rochat with respect, and even with cordiality. “I know no person,” he says, “at least so it seems to me, who desires more faithfully to fill it [‘the relation of a pastor to the sheep of God’s flock ’] than he whose pamphlet has given rise to these pages.” In the reply to Olivier the tone is far less pleasant; there is more readiness to insinuate unworthy motives, and the self-sufficiency amounts sometimes to arrogance. The difference may be accounted for, partly by the fact that Olivier was a rival on the spot, partly per- haps by a tendency to severity in Olivier himself—though indeed he seems to have treated Darby with consideration. It must also be remembered that the controversy with Olivier was the later, and the stress of conflict appears to have told on Darby’s temper. Some excuse may well be made for a man sustaining single-handed, year after year, such a large and complicated undertaking. His influence, according to Herzog, declined from the time of a conference of the Dissenters of Lausanne, held in September, 1842, to examine his doctrine of the apostasy of the dispensation. With great difficulty Darby was persuaded to attend, and he went only to protest against the meeting as not having “the approval of God”. The following account, if it must be accepted with some reservation as being the statement of an opponent, is at least not wanting in verisimilitude.

“Especially he [Darby] obstinately refused to take part in the discussions; but they pressed him, putting it to him as an obligation of Christian charity to declare himself on matters of such importance. In the end, as if weary of contention, he submitted to the desired conference, but only to astonish his very partisans by the rashness of his assertions, often contradictory; by the vagueness of his expressions, and by his wretched stratagem of jumping off from one subject to another. The discussion quickly lost all regularity, and degenerated into a regular uproar which put an end to the meeting. But however bewildering this strange scene might be, people left it profoundly impressed with the haughty, imperious, peremptory, ungovernable^[7] spirit that Darby had displayed. The thoughts of his heart had come to light, and this discovery of a blemish in the character of a man surrounded until then with so profound a veneration fully opened the eyes of some even amongst his admirers.”

Darby’s pamphlets, against Rochat and Olivier alike, are bewildering to the reader. He says almost nothing explicitly, and we are left to catch glimpses of his meaning as we proceed. Strategically, he may have been quite in the right in adopting a tone of high-sounding vagueness. He had on his side a mass of chaotic pulses, and it was not precise definition that would have given them sympathetic utterance. His strength lay, now as ever, in the reality of the abuses he attacked. Herzog’s view of the ordained ministry is such as most English Evangelicals would now consider over-strained in a Presbyterian church; while even those who are still at the older point of view would at least admit that Darby in his antagonism to it was occupying a perfectly intelligible position. And when, in replying to Rochat, he complained that “there are so many flocks” (evidently amongst the Dissenters) “habitually deprived of partaking of the Lord’s Supper through the want of consecrated pastors,” it is probable that he carried with him the hearts and consciences of hundreds of the Christian people in Vaud. Moreover, in proposing a remedy, there was no need for him to take all the risks of explicitness. Omne ignotum pro magnifico—the habit of expecting everything from an untried, but much belauded course—was a principle that would not fail to complete his success for him ; and Darby was the last man to increase his vulnerability by lengthening unnecessarily his lines of defence.

Both his prudence and his vagueness are illustrated in his central doctrine of the “ruin of the Church”. The vague phrase fell in with the discontent that prevailed amongst men who had separated from the State Church, and had made apparently but a disappointing experiment in Nonconformity. Darby did not offer to define his meaning, nor does it seem to have occurred to any one to request him to do so; but the battle raged all the more fiercely for being fought in the dark. It is not until we have advanced a dozen pages into Darby’s second reply to Rochat, that it is possible to collect in what sense the term “Church” is used in his great formula, and what it was therefore that he affirmed to be ruined. Then he accepts his adversary’s definition as conveying his own thought throughout: “The Church on earth, at each successive period, is thus the aggregate of the elect who are then manifested”. In reply to Olivier, Darby admits that he had “sometimes, perhaps, because every one does it, called the Church, that which is not really the Church,” and claims that in doing so he “was much better understood”. I should rather have said that he had made himself quite unintelligible. But it is satisfactory to reach relatively firm ground at last, and to understand that it was of the Church as the company of the elect that Darby predicated the ruin. Whether this was right or wrong, it was at least startling, and it is no wonder that so strenuous and pertinacious a contention arose over it.

Of course a good deal still depends on the definition of the term “ruin”. No Protestant can dispute that the Church viewed as a single visible organisation^[8] has collapsed; and even a very high Anglican, regarding the Church as conterminous with Episcopal communion, can scarcely ignore the fact that deep lines of cleavage are driven through and through it by mutual excommunications and anathemas. It does not follow, however, that Darby could speak with propriety of the ruin of the Church on the ground of the breaches in its outward frame, unless he considered that the outward frame was of the essence of the Church. If on the other hand he did so consider it, he was bound to explain in what sense he understood the Saviour’s promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against the church He would build.

So far as Darby’s thought can be regarded as definite, there is no doubt that he did treat the outward frame as essential. He made all the characteristic testimony of the Church (and even, it would seem, of Christianity) to depend on the preservation of an external unity. Darby could scarcely even grasp the familiar conception of a transcendental Christian unity rising supreme above all organised expression, and above all organised contradiction. To the end of his days he had no more sympathy with such a view than when he was what might be called a Puseyite before the time. In like manner, his disgust at the distinction between the visible Church and the invisible is so great that he sometimes argues against it in a manner wholly inexplicable, unless he thought “any stick good enough to beat a dog with”. “Believers have sought,” he says, in the first of his series of Swiss tracts, “to shelter themselves under the distinction between a visible and an invisible church. But I read in Scripture—‘Ye are the light of the world’. Of what use is an invisible light? … To say that the true Church has been reduced to the condition of being invisible is at once to decide the question, and to affirm that the Church has entirely lost its original and essential standing.^[9] … If it has become invisible it has ceased to answer the purpose for which it was formed.” Did Darby think that an invisible lamp can never afford light? The absurdity of the argument would not signify, if it could be attributed to pure inadvertence; but it is only a sample of the confusion that attends Darby’s whole treatment of the subject.

The clue to the confusion is to be found in his early High Churchmanship. A slightly different turn in his spiritual experiences when he was five and twenty might have led him to forestall Newman and Pusey, and have made him the terrible leader of a “Catholic reaction”. He took instead a Biblical and evangelical direction, but his mind never recovered from its early warp. Though the earlier period of his career as a Plymouth Brother varied essentially from the later, he retained during them both the same vague conception of the Church—a conception formed by a curious blending of Puseyite with ultra-evangelical elements. Accustomed to an unquestioning submission to a presumed Catholic Church, constituted by episcopal succession, he found his spiritual sympathies outgrowing his theory. He felt that the outward had failed to maintain a correspondence with the inward, and he therefore deemed it but a ruin. But Dissent mended nothing. It was an attempt—generally a well-meant attempt—to repair what was irreparable. The substitution of a Presbyterian for an Episcopalian administration, the revision of sacramental conceptions, the abjuration (in some cases) of all connexion with the State, might be improvements as far as they went, but never touched the root of the matter. They could not restore the glory of the Church, for they could not restore its unity, nor gather together the scattered children of God. The only thing to do was to own at once the ruin, and the impotence to remedy it; and in Darby’s view, this was his great and distinctive witness.

To put it briefly, the great duty of all Christians is to recognise the ruin of the Church. This being duly recognised, there are two obvious courses that are in fact equally pernicious. The first is to acquiesce in the ruin; this is the sin of Christians that remain in nationalism, or in any other kind of avowedly “mixed” communion. The second is to attempt to re-build; this is the sin of Dissenters, or at least of those amongst them who seek a “pure” communion. These alternatives are the Scylla and Charybdis of Christendom, and between them Darby offered to trace the “dim and perilous way”.

His new plan was bound in the nature of things to start as a modified Congregationalism, for Congregationalism is the only possible tertium quid; yet “independency” was regarded as a capital fault, and the federation of the new meetings must needs follow. On the whole it is not to be wondered at that Darby was freely reproached with inconsistency. In condemning every existing conception, he had in fact excluded all the possible alternatives. There was nothing essentially new for him to try. On the other hand, he would not use the real differentia of his system (that is, liberty of ministry in conjunction with the observance of the communion) as his watchword, because he was determined to base himself on nothing less than a true view of the Church. Indeed it is remarkable that, in giving practical directions as to what “the children of God have to do in the present circumstances of the Church,”^[10] he actually says nothing about liberty of ministry—so resolved is he that it shall not constitute his foundation. Under these circumstances it is not strange that he often took refuge in very vague generalities.

His followers were not likely to be fastidious about the amount of logical coherence in his scheme. Hoping much from a new effort after unity and simplicity made under such brilliant auspices and associated with so powerful a ministry,—and feeling above all things the immense fascination of the man who called upon them to follow him fearlessly along the way on which alone Heaven’s favour rested,—they committed themselves to his guidance with a contagious enthusiasm. Herzog raises the cry that has been raised ever since in every land, that Darbyism robbed the pastors of the élite of their flocks; and, though the expression is too general, there is a great deal of truth in it. The fact suffices to show that there had been in Vaud a much greater need of a powerful spiritual impulse than Herzog would allow; and also that Darby, at least to a considerable extent, supplied the want.

This is perhaps only the more evident from the fact that there were conspicuous flaws in the way in which the early meetings of the Brethren were conducted. Olivier, who had watched the experiment for a long time at Lausanne, charged the worship with vagueness and uncertainty; complained of “frequent, prolonged, freezing pauses”; of a “want of Christian dignity in the attitude” of the worshippers, and “especially in the observance of the Lord’s Supper”; of a lack of teaching, owing in part to a scruple about preparing beforehand—a scruple that gave rise, in Olivier’s opinion, to “discourses deficient in compass, offending either by a defect in ripeness and fulness, or by a constant and extremely wearisome recurrence of favourite ideas”. He considered (as many perfectly friendly observers have done since) that the meetings of the Brethren, in order to be profitable, generally required the presence of some persons of commanding superiority. Darby, in reply, did not deny these blemishes; indeed he seems to allow that there was truth in the allegations. But he refused to attach much weight to them, and the refusal may be justified. Flaws are pardonable in a new experiment. Of course the great question stood over,—Would the flaws prove permanent?

In the early months of 1845 the Pays de Vaud was convulsed by a revolution brought about by Jesuit intrigue. The fury of a section of the populace was let loose against the Plymouth Brethren. Darby’s life was in great jeopardy, and he wisely resolved to leave the country. He was not the man to quail in the face of peril; but his presence in Vaud could be of no use, and was probably a principal source of danger to his followers. Commotions continued, however, for some time after his departure.

Such was Darby’s famous campaign in Vaud. Herzog thought the movement would run a short course, so far as Switzerland was concerned. He miscalculated. French Switzerland has ever since remained the stronghold of Brethrenism abroad, and Darby’s personal authority there was maintained till his death, more than forty years after his work began in Lausanne.

Darby’s conduct has been severely criticised. But it is not quite so easy as some have imagined to determine the rights of the matter. Brethrenism in 1840 was far from appearing the total failure that it appears at the present day. It had obtained a rapid and even a startling success, and its supporters were not without excuse if they almost imagined that the problem of Christian reunion had found its solution at last, and that their principal mission, therefore, lay among “the awakened in the churches”; and account must be taken of this before we set Darby down as a vulgar ecclesiastical revolutionist.

This, however, does not settle the question of the uprightness of his tactics. If he came to Lausanne with the intention of utilising the opportunity for the propagation of his peculiar ecclesiastical principles, he was bound to give the friends who had invited him distinct warning of the fact; nor is it easy to suppose that he came without such intention. On the other hand, Herzog, much as he blames Darby for his conduct, scarcely goes the length of imputing to him deliberate treachery.

Perhaps, again, Darby underrated the attachment of a large party among the Dissenters to the old forms of their worship. Herzog expressly states that there was in Vaud an extensive predisposition to Darbyism. “People had already begun to regard the Church as destroyed, and its relations with the State as incompatible with the very idea of the Church; to regard the ordination of ministers as a mere matter of human expediency that had no connexion whatever with a divine ordination.” After the revival, special meetings for edification had been instituted, at which there was perfect liberty for any one to take part; and Herzog, while admitting that these meetings had really been useful, considered that a quite undue importance had been attached to them. He rightly deems these tendencies to be much akin to Plymouthism, and it is therefore at least conceivable that Darby was misled by the similarity. Possibly, too, carried away by the evidence of the astonishing influence he was wielding, Darby believed that there would be no destruction of churches, but that the entire dissenting body would embrace his principles, and continue in union, though on what he most sincerely believed to be a far freer, happier, and more edifying basis. His own enjoyment of his meetings was so intense that all he could think of good men who did not like them was that they were under “the curse pronounced upon him who leans upon an arm of flesh,” namely, that “he shall not see when good cometh”^[11] At all events, Darby was animated, even to the apprehension of his adversaries, by an unwearying, disinterested and self-sacrificing enthusiasm; and this may at least avail to distinguish him in the present instance from the common troublers of churches with whom some would wish to identify him.

At the same time, we must deplore that Darby should have lost the opportunity of strengthening the hands of the men who, in the middle of last century, were effecting such a gallant stand in Switzerland on behalf of the evangelical principles that he most truly loved. Only the lack of a tolerable theological perspective prevented Darby from becoming the welcome and powerful ally of the Rochats and Oliviers of Vaud, and of the more famous, and not less devout, Merles and Gaussens of Geneva. As it was, he waged against them all, in pamphlet after pamphlet, a warfare that left an incurable feud behind it. Happily we may believe that his followers, however self-limited, have really exercised a genuine influence for good on the Continent by maintaining a high standard (as I believe) of devoutness and evangelical simplicity. I understand that their meetings in Switzerland and the adjacent parts of France, twenty or thirty years ago, were very numerous, well attended, and in many cases fervent and spiritual.

A brief account must be added of the formation of the first Brethren’s meeting in Germany. The story is short and simple, and it owes its interest chiefly to the fact that the successful apostle of Brethrenism in this instance was George Müller.

In May, 1843, Müller received a letter from a lady at Stuttgart to whom he had recently been serviceable when she was on a visit to Bristol. During the visit she had adopted Müller’s religious opinions, and on her return to Stuttgart she went to the Baptist Church, was baptised and received into membership. Her letter was accompanied by one from a leading member of her church, “a solicitor or barrister to the Upper Tribunal of the kingdom of Wirtemberg”. He “wished to have upon Scriptural grounds” Müller’s “views about open communion”.

Müller, who was as far as possible from sharing Darby’s predilection for ambiguous verbiage, has left one of his plain and business-like statements to explain his motives in undertaking the mission to Stuttgart. “I knew not of one single body of believers who were gathered on Scriptural principles. In all the States of Germany, with scarcely any exception, the believers are connected with the State Churches, and the very few believers of whom I had heard that they were separated I knew to be close Baptists, who, generally, by their most exclusive separatist views, only confirmed believers in remaining in the Establishment.”

He left Bristol with Mrs. Müller and a German lady, whose story illustrates the principles of these strict Baptists. She and another convert to Baptist views had applied to the little church at Stuttgart to be admitted to baptism. But this was refused them unless they would “promise never to take the Lord’s Supper any more with unbaptised believers or with those who belonged to any State Church” . They declined to enter into such an engagement, and actually undertook the journey of 800 miles to Bristol to be baptised by Müller.

The party reached Stuttgart on the 19th of August. Müller was received by the Baptists with open arms. He was asked to expound at all their usual meetings, and also at extra meetings specially arranged for all the other nights in the week. It is at least clear that he did not obtain a footing among them by false or even ambiguous pretences. Nevertheless difficulties speedily arose. A prolonged discussion as to whether Müller should be allowed to take the Lord’s Supper with them produced so deep a division of opinion that one of the stricter party declared that there must be a separation. “I then,” says Müller, “entreated the brethren not to think of a separation. I represented to them what a scandal it would be to the ungodly, and what a stumbling-block also to the believers who are yet in the State Church.”

Division however was inevitable. One or two of the elders having determined to reject him, a meeting “for the breaking of bread” was started in his private room the same evening. Seventeen persons were present; “of these seventeen, twelve were belonging to this little Baptist church, two Swiss brethren who have learned the way of truth more perfectly through our brother John Darby, one English sister, my wife and I”. Of the separation Müller says, “The matter would be, however, more painful, did I not see it of great importance that the disciples who hold the truth should be separate from those who hold such fearful errors as: The forgiveness of sins received through baptism; baptism a covenant between us and God; regeneration through baptism, and no regeneration without it; the actual death of the old man through baptism, it being drowned, so that only the body and the new nature are alive.” It is evident that these views were not generally held before Müller’s arrival, but that they were taught by the principal elders and accepted by the extreme party that had refused Müller the communion.

Müller attributes the unhappy state of the Baptist church at Stuttgart to the want of the settled practice of liberty of ministry, and with more plausibility to the “undue stress” that had been laid on “believers’ baptism” and “separation from State churches”.

“Baptism and separation from the State Church had at last become almost everything to these dear brethren. ‘We are the Church. Truth is only to be found among us. All others are in error and in Babylon.’ These were the phrases used again and again by our brother ― … This spiritual pride had led from one error to another.

“Another thing on account of which the Church at Stuttgart is a warning is this: When these dear brethren left the State Church of the Kingdom of Wirtemberg, on account of which they had many trials, they did not meet together in dependence upon the Holy Spirit, but they took some Baptist church … for a model. … Brother — becomes their teaching elder, and … he alone speaks at all the meetings (with few exceptions). Now, as his own mind laid such an undue stress upon baptism, and as there was no free working of the Holy Spirit, so that any other brother might have brought out at their meetings what the Lord might have laid upon his heart, what could there have been expected otherwise than that after a time the whole noble little band of disciples, who had taken so trying a stand as to be separated from the State Church, should become unsound in the faith. May God grant unto us to be profited by it, dear believing reader, so that in our own church position we do our utmost to give to the Holy Spirit free and unhindered opportunity to work by whom He will!”

This is surely thorough-going Brethrenism; but when Müller was surrounded by the little company that clave to him after his rejection by the Baptist elders, he judged it needful to proceed cautiously in the application of the principle. Yet his account makes it only more and more plain that at that date he held views of ministry scarcely distinguishable from the “impulsive” theory against which Groves waged ineffectual warfare.

“As I had known enough of painful consequences when brethren began to meet professedly in dependence upon the Holy Spirit without knowing what was meant by it, and thus meetings had become opportunities for unprofitable talking rather than for godly edifying; and as I felt myself bound to communicate to these dear brethren the experience I had gathered with reference to these very truths since June, 1830: for these reasons, I say, I thought it well to spend evening after evening with them over the passages above mentioned [Rom. xii., 3—8; Ephes. iv., 7—16; 1. Cor. xii. and xiv.; Acts xx., 7]. … We broke bread, but it was understood, and I wished it to be understood, that I was the only speaker. This I did … because they knew not yet what was meant by meeting in dependence upon the Holy Spirit. But, at last, after we had for about eight weeks or more spent two evenings a week together over those passages, and others, setting forth the same truths. … I took my place among them simply as a brother. … I do not mean at all to say that even then this matter was perfectly understood, for a few times still things like these would occur:—A brother read a portion of the word, and then would say, ‘Perhaps our brother Müller will expound to us this portion’. Or, a brother might speak a little on a subject, and then would say, ‘Perhaps our brother Müller will enter somewhat more fully into this subject’. At such times, which occurred twice or thrice, I said nothing, but acted according to the desire of those brethren, and spoke; but afterwards, when we met privately, at our Scripture reading meetings, I pointed out to the dear brethren their mistake, and reminded them that all these matters ought to be left to the ordering of the Holy Ghost, and that, if it had been truly good for them, the Lord would have not only led me to speak at that time, but also on the very subject on which they desired that I should speak to them.”

Probably open communion was the most important feature of the new start in Müller’s eyes. “There is one brother among us,” he writes, “who through dear John Darby learned the way of God more perfectly in Switzerland, and who often had spoken about it before I came, but who was neither much listened to nor received into fellowship, because he was not baptised.”

Müller’s visit lasted just over six months. At the close of that time there were twenty-five people breaking bread with him. When he left, not only these, but also “nineteen brothers and sisters of the Baptist Church” came to his lodging and bade him an affectionate farewell.

It was the small beginning of a fairly considerable movement, though the work never attained in Germany nearly the same proportions as in Switzerland. The reader has the full means before him of judging of Müller’s motives and conduct. It may suffice to draw attention to the fact that Müller sought to widen a church’s fellowship, and not (as is commonly the case with modern emissaries of Brethrenism) to narrow it. That he strove to establish the peculiar principles of Brethrenism, and that he attached a profound importance to them, is perfectly plain. The experience of days that shortly followed tended probably to moderate his opinions. At any rate, Müller’s name is not associated in most minds with so extreme a view as to ministry. The spectacle of Darbyism ere long in the ascendant undoubtedly gave pause and check to many.

1. The evidence for this date is practically conclusive. I have before me a note in which M. Cavin, a member of the Vevey meeting, notified his retirement from association with it, on account of its acceptance of “the Park Street test”. The resignation was “to be read to the assembly of the Brethren meeting together for worship on Sunday, July 8, 1883,” and its opening sentence is as follows: “I have belonged to this assembly from its origin, that is to say, for more than forty-five years”. The letter goes on to speak of the meeting in question as having “walked in peace during the whole of that time”. It is evident therefore that the date is given with care, and an elderly man’s recollections of the momentous events of his youth—and the first establishment of Brethrenism must have seemed momentous indeed to a young man who took part in it—are very seldom unreliable. Moreover, in resigning his membership, he was acting in concert with one of the best known of Swiss Brethren, the late J. B. Rossier of Vevey, who had himself joined the Brethren in 1840. Vevey, therefore is doubtless entitled to the honours, such as they are, of having had the first Brethren’s meeting (or at least the first of any importance) in Switzerland, or perhaps on the Continent.
2. Darby enjoyed under his father’s will a very comfortable annuity; but I have heard that he lost a handsome property through his father’s want of sympathy with his ecclesiastical course.
3. “Il est décidément inférieur à lui-même.”
4. Darby’s Letters, p. 54. If the reader is interested in ascertaining how badly a cultivated Englishman may write his mother-tongue, it will be worth his while to read this letter. I give a brief extract. “Then there are now the old Dissenters, partly Wesleyan, among the women, though having protested as a body against it, some saying the pastor who introduced it, but who now denounces it, is their pastor, and some not ― and in the meanwhile the principle of leaving their churches, placing the others in a dilemma how to recognise this body, meanwhile they look on.” Surely, in charity to Darby’s memory, the editors of his correspondence might have omitted this letter from the collection.
5. This expression may be the result of imperfect apprehension of what had taken place. If Darby really so much as presided at the observance of the Communion it must have been by concession to the half-enlightened condition of his disciples; and even as a concession, the proceeding would be more easily defended on the ground of its policy than of its consistency with Darby’s principles.
6. “Le pauvre meuble.”
7. “Intraitable.”
8. Some would deny that there existed such a solid and undivided organisation in apostolic days; but this I pass over, since no such question was raised on either side in the controversy that we are now considering.
9. The italics are mine.
10. Remarks on the State of the Church, Coll. Writ., vol. i ., pp. 418-425.
11. Remarks on the pamphlet of M. F. Olivier, Coll. Writ., vol. i., p. 427.