from the workings of your own soul, as by the spirit of those who have been nurtured up from the beginning in the system, they are taught to feel the only tolerable one; that not having been led like you, and some of those earliest connected with you, through deep experimental suffering and sorrow, they are little acquainted with the real truth that may exist amidst inconceivable darkness: there will be little pity and little sympathy with such, and your union daily becoming one of doctrine and opinion more than life or love, your government will become—unseen, perhaps, and unexpressed, yet—one wherein, overwhelmingly, is felt the authority of men; 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 Glassites: your Shibboleth may be different, but it will be as real.
“It has been asserted, as I found from your dear brother W—— and others, 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 on 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. I ever understood our principle of communion to be the possession of the common life or common blood of the family of God (for the life is in the blood); 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 and simple truth so much, as standing forth witnesses against all that they judge error, has lowered them in my apprehension from heaven to earth in their position of witnesses.****
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.”[1]
Would to God the solemn warning given had been effectual, in leading Mr. Darby and his party to retrace their steps at that early part of their career, and we should not now have to mourn over a brother on the awful pinnacle on which he now stands, helped on by those who, acting with him, have placed him there, a beacon to the Church at large; nor should we have had to mourn over many of the Lord’s disciples led away by the, enemy unto a following of man rather than of God.
The trial in all matters connected with the Church, as in every thing in, which co-operation and fellowship is concerned, commences with the increase of numbers. Many throughout the country had been led to adopt the
- ↑ See Mr. Groves’s Memoir, p. 529.
