William Blair Neatby

“ It is surprising that the inauguration of a movement for which its promoters had been content to lose much and suffer much should have been so lacking in the freshness of delight that generally attends the days of first love ”

“ Cronin’s was in no sense a leading mind, but we may turn to Darby himself without mending matters. In 1828, when, as already related, he issued the first document of the new movement, Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ, he failed as signally as Cronin to raise any definite issue. The tract is an appeal to Christian feeling against the divisions of the Church. As such it is far from contemptible. The tone is fervent and lofty, and though the style is not good, there are passages of no little dignity and beauty. ”

“ This is so reasonable and so little at variance, it would seem, with the duty of extending the privileges of the Holy Communion to Christians generally, that Cronin’s difficulty is unintelligible to most people at the present day. He was scarcely, however, a man to act in a merely factious spirit, and probably there was a very real sectarianism in existence against which he was setting up his standard, however much he might blunder in his manifesto. Whatever the special faults of the Church of to-day may be, it has certainly acquired a wider outlook ”

“ In the first place, though there was undoubtedly some earnest evangelical ministry within the Irish Establishment, the most fervent elements of the revival in Ireland would seem to have been largely absorbed by Walkerism; and from Walkerism the Brethren were repelled by its intense sectarianism. [6] Moreover, the later evangelical school, with all its merits, signally failed to answer to the aspirations that were so widely drawing men into the Plymouth movement. In the earlier revival, the line of demarcation between Church and Dissent was certainly liable to become extremely indistinct. ”

“ The meetings were truly precious to the soul, and night after night did I retire to my room at Powerscourt House in a deep sense of how little a one I was in Christ, in the presence of so much grace and devotedness around me through the day.”
In all this preoccupation with the study of unfulfilled prophecy, the Brethren never in any single instance fell into the snare of “fixing dates”. They strongly opposed all the ill-starred attempts of the kind that many of their fellow-students have made. ”

“ This twofold position was negatively expressed in their favourite dictum that the Church of England was too broad in its basis, and the dissenting churches too narrow. The charge is too vague to be of much consequence. Indeed by shifting their point of view slightly they might have found that the Church was too narrow and Dissent too broad. The point of the saying is merely rhetorical. What is actually expressed is, on the one hand, the Brethren’s abhorrence of national Christianity, with its assumption (as the Brethren understood it) that every Englishman is a Christian ”

“ For better or for worse, it gradually became the law of Brethrenism to disown all regularly constituted authority, all orderly arrangement, and all prudential provision even for emergencies that are bound to arise. ”

“ But such studies cannot be eagerly followed by the Christian, except when he yields to unbelief. In fact, what would it avail even to become a second La Place after thirty years’ study, if in five and thirty years the Lord descended from heaven, snatched up all His saints to meet him, and burned to ashes all the works of the earth? ”

“ He might also have been saved from the smart, but intrinsically poor antithesis—“The bond of communion is not the unity of the people of God, but really (in point of fact) their differences” (p. 33) .
After this, it will not excite surprise that it never occurs to Darby to grapple with the great primary obstacle to that outward expression of the inward unity of God’s family on which his heart was set. There are, and always have been, two competing views as to what the visible Church ought to be ”

“ So far as the earliest of all are concerned, the answer must be unfavourable. This rests upon the unsuspicious testimony of men who were makers of the sect. Speaking of the time when he and his friends first occupied the room in Aungier Street, Bellett writes: “It was poor material we had. ... There was but little spiritual energy, and much that was poor treasure for a living temple; but we held together in the Lord’s mercy and care, I believe advancing in the knowledge of His mind.” And even the far more sanguine Cronin confirms the report. ”

“ At a later time Darby spoke of this tract as if it had signalised his secession from the Church of England, but his attitude for several years after appeared somewhat vacillating to his friends. [4] Groves, whose mind moved faster, was delighted at this time with Darby, and was in hearty sympathy with the tract, if we can judge from the fact that he makes a sort of rough quotation from it in a letter he wrote in December, 1828. [5] Darby had written (p. 47) , “So far as men pride themselves on being Established, Presbyterian, Baptist, Independent, or anything else, they are antichristian”. ”

“ It would be a counterpart to Romish unity; we should have the life of the Church and the power of the word lost, and the unity of spiritual life utterly excluded.” But Darby might have recollected that many Christians hold that if the very scheme he denounces is ruled out, external unity is a chimerical project ”