A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 1

by William Blair Neatby

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I
The Beginnings of Brethrenism—the Dublin Movement

Twelve years ago Dr. Alexander, the present Primate of Ireland, described the warfare of his own church in the following remarkable terms: “The hill up which our little host must march is steep, and the hail beats in our faces. We hear the steady tramp of the serried ranks of Rome round us; the shout of the marauders of Plymouth rises, as they, ever and anon, cut off a few stragglers. We draw close, and grip our muskets harder.”^[1] Who and what then are these “marauding” Christians that have the honour to be, by so august an authority, in some sense coordinated with the dominant ecclesiastical power of the country in respect of the apprehension with which the Church of Ireland regards them? It is the aim of the present work to furnish an adequate answer to this question.

But aside entirely from the part that they play in current controversies, the Plymouth Brethren have very strong claims on the notice of the student of contemporary church history. Developing side by side with the three great ecclesiastical movements of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Brethrenism was linked with them all—with the Evangelical, with the High Church, and, strange as it may seem, even to some extent with the Broad Church—by important affinities; and yet it retained unimpaired the intense individuality impressed on it almost from the first by one powerful genius; and it challenges attention now as furnishing a fourth independent conception of the Church—a conception which, comparatively narrow as the extent of its acceptance may be, does nevertheless, by the immense force of its intensive influence, deserve consideration side by side with its more famous competitors.

It is no doubt correct to speak of the Brethren as a small sect, in a relative sense; but this, so far from diminishing the importance of their history, greatly enhances it. The quotation that stands at the beginning of this chapter is in itself a witness that there has been something about Brethrenism that effectually distinguishes it from the multitude of the small sects. Mr. Croskery’s inference^[2] that it will be short-lived because Sandemanism, Walkerism and Kellyism^[3] sank soon after their rise is a most precarious argument, if indeed it does not stand already refuted. It is no doubt just possible that the movement is now destined to a comparatively speedy extinction, but the whole course of its history, or even the hastiest calculation of its past and present influence, must suffice to show the worthlessness of the analogy on which Mr. Croskery relied. To apply a very simple test, which of all the smaller sects of Christendom has enrolled amongst its enthusiastic adherents such a company (to limit ourselves to men that are gone) as John Nelson Darby and Francis William Newman, George Muller and Anthony Norris Groves, Benjamin Wills Newton and Samuel Prideaux Tregelles?

In yet another respect special interest attaches to the story of the Brethren. On their narrow stage there are few of the tendencies of universal church history that have not been illustrated, and not many of its movements that have not been reenacted in little. The Brethren sought to effect a fresh start without authority, precedent, or guidance beyond the letter of Holy Scripture. For them, essentially, the garnered experience of eighteen Christian centuries was as though it were not. Such an experiment in the hands of eminent men could scarcely fail to yield a considerable harvest of interest and instruction; and it has actually shed, if I mistake not, a flood of light on many of the obscurities and incredibilities of the history of the Church.

The origins of Brethrenism are not perhaps particularly obscure; at all events, the materials for elucidating them are fairly copious. But the subject has been perplexed by the efforts of prejudiced controversialists. On the one hand, there has been a very natural tendency on the part of the adherents of the movement to invest its first days with the glories of a heroic age, and to magnify the heroes by assigning to individual light and energy a far greater and more decisive part than the ascertained facts at all warrant us in doing. This has even been pushed to the length of claiming the honours of at least a virtual foundership for Darby. On the other hand, by an equally natural reaction, it has been stated far too broadly and absolutely that Brethrenism was formed by the slow aggregation of a large number of little meetings which, quite independently of each other, had lighted almost simultaneously on the same principles of Christian communion and worship. That there is a good deal of truth in this view is sufficiently proved, even if there were no other evidence, by the exceedingly unsuspicious testimony of several of Darby’s personal adherents; but it is easy to allow it undue weight in discounting the value of individual initiative.

It is evident that, whatever the number of such little meetings may have been in the years between 1825 and 1832, only three of them—those of Dublin, Plymouth and Bristol—figure in the later history of the Brethren, and that no others can safely be presumed to have contained any power of propagation, or even any element of permanence. Now it will become clear as we proceed that the movement, whether at Plymouth or at Bristol, was not only considerably later than the movement in Dublin, but is to be more or less directly affiliated to it. Dublin must therefore be regarded as the place whence proceeded the great impulse without which Brethrenism, as a definite ecclesiastical system, would, for anything we can see, never have been.

But even if we limit ourselves for the moment to Dublin, we are still confronted by conflicting claims. Three names at least have been put forward in answer to the question, who was the founder, ostensible or virtual, of the new school. These are the names of A. N. Groves, J. G. Bellett and J. N. Darby. In addition to these, the name of Edward Cronin ought to have found some supporters, as his claim is at any rate much better than Darby’s. To present a sketch of the development of the new ideas in the mind of each of these leaders in turn will perhaps be the simplest way of clearing up the point.

Anthony Norris Groves was born in the early part of the year 1795, at Newton, Hampshire. He acquired in London an excellent training as a dentist, and was able to support himself by his profession when he was only nineteen. From Plymouth, where he first practised, he soon removed to Exeter and became exceedingly prosperous. From the age of twenty he determined to be a missionary, but the opposition of his wife, whom he married in 1816, kept the project for a long time in abeyance. It was revived about the year 1825 with her full concurrence. Not long before this they had decided to devote their whole property to God, in the sense, apparently, that they should live on a minimum, save nothing, and give away the balance of an annual income of about £1,500. Groves published in this year a tract entitled Christian Devotedness, in which it would seem he taught this line of conduct as a plain evangelical duty. This tract engaged the warm sympathy of Dr. Morrison, the eminent pioneer of Protestant missions in China, and exercised a momentous influence on the celebrated Dr. Duff of Calcutta.

A visit from Edward Bickersteth, of the Church Missionary Society, in July, 1825, finally determined Groves to abandon his profession and qualify as an ordained missionary.^[4] With this end in view he entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a fellow-commoner, probably in 1825.^[5]

Groves never resided in Dublin, but availed himself of the privilege that Trinity College, unlike the old English universities, allowed, of merely coming up for examination term by term. On these visits, he consorted, apparently from the first, with certain Christians who met together to promote their mutual edification by the study of Scripture and by prayer. Professor Stokes treats these little gatherings as some of “the drawing-room meetings for prayer and study of the Scriptures, which even still take the place of lighter amusements in a somewhat extensive circle in the Irish metropolis, and which were then quite the rage with all serious minds”. Whether this identification is wholly correct, or whether, as Groves’ Memoir states, the friends he found in Dublin were men who already, “with him, desired to see more devotedness to Christ and union among all the people of God,” and were in the habit of meeting more or less definitely “to promote these objects,”—it seems clear that Groves soon led his own company to take a very significant step in advance. The circumstance is related in his Memoir on the authority of his friend, Miss Bessy Paget, a lady afterwards well known among the early Brethren. She had accompanied Groves to Dublin in the spring of 1827.^[6] At one of the social meetings for edification, apparently before the company had dispersed, J. G. Bellett made this statement to her: “Groves has just been telling me, that it appeared to him from Scripture, that believers, meeting together as disciples of Christ, were free to break bread together, as their Lord had admonished them; and that, in as far as the practice of the apostles could be a guide, every Lord’s Day should be set apart for thus remembering the Lord’s death, and obeying his parting command”. “This suggestion of Mr. Groves,” continues his biographer, “was immediately carried out by himself and his friends in Dublin.”

The extraordinary part of it all is that at this time Groves described himself as a “high churchman”. It must of course be borne in mind that the term was used then with a very different meaning from that with which we are now familiar; still, Groves himself illustrates it by saying that he was “so high a churchman” that he “never went to a dissenting place of worship, nor intimately knew a dissenter, except Bessy and Charlotte [Paget]”. His views had no doubt been undergoing a process of modification in Dublin. “From my first going to Dublin,” he writes, “many of my deep-rooted prejudices gave way. I saw those strongly marked distinctions that exist in England little regarded; the prevalence of the common enemy, Popery, joined all hands together.” Still he returned from the momentous visit in question with a rigidity of churchmanship strangely at variance with the revolutionary mood in which we should have expected to find him.

“On my return with our dearest B., she proposed to me to take charge, on Sundays, of her little flock at Poltimore. I cannot, perhaps, convey to you the repugnance I had; first, because I really disapproved on principle; and, secondly, because I saw that it would stand in the way of my procuring ordination; yet it worked on my mind till I could not but go; and I went. … Yet I only allowed this going to Poltimore as a particular exception, in consequence of the notorious inadequacy of the clergyman there. I had never yet gone near a dissenting place of worship.”

In the summer of 1827^[7] Groves’ connexion with Trinity College was broken off. His narrative of the circumstances is very important for the light that it throws on the working of his mind at this period.

“Mr. T., of Calcutta, asked me, ‘Why are you wasting your time, in going through college, if you intend going to the East?’ My reply was, that if I returned disabled, I should be able to minister in England; and here the matter ended. As we walked home, Mary [Mrs. Groves] said, ‘Don’t you think there is great force in Mr. T.’s question?’ I said, ‘I thought there was, but not so great as to prevent my going that time’. … On Sunday morning, about three o’clock, we were awoke by the noise of something falling. … On proceeding into the dining-room, I found the candles lit, as they had been left the preceding evening, and my little drawers broken open, all my papers scattered about the room, and my money gone. As I was returning upstairs, I met dearest M. in the hall, and said, ‘Well, my love, the thieves have been here, and taken all the money’. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘you won’t go to Dublin.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘that I won’t’—and we spent one of the happiest Sundays I ever recollect, in thinking on the Lord’s goodness, in so caring for us as to stop our way up, when He does not wish us to go. Some thought it right; others thought it foolish; it mattered not to us, we had not a doubt it was of the Lord.”

His mind was evidently moving rapidly in its new direction. Little time elapsed before he had definitely renounced all thought of ordination in the Church of England. His friend, Mr. Hake, asked him if he did not “hold war to be unlawful”. The answer was affirmative. “He then further asked,” says Groves, “how I could subscribe that article which declares, ‘It is lawful for Christian men to take up arms at the command of the civil magistrate’. It had till that moment never occurred to me. I read it; and replied, ‘I never would sign it’; and thus ended my connexion with the Church of England, as one about to be ordained in her communion.”

His churchmanship died slowly. “I was still,” he tells us, “so far attached to the Church of England, that I went to London, to arrange my going out as a layman, for the Church Missionary Society; but as they would not allow me to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, when no other minister was near, it came to nothing. My mind was then in great straits; for I saw not yet my liberty of ministry to be from Christ alone, and felt some ordination to be necessary, but hated the thought of being made a sectarian. But, one day the thought was brought to my mind, that ordination of any kind to preach the gospel is no requirement of Scripture. To me it was the removal of a mountain. I told dearest M. my discovery and my joy;^[8] she received it as a very little thing—indeed she had received the truth in such power, that she seemed only to desire to know the mind of God, that she might fulfil it. … From that moment, I have myself never had a doubt of my own liberty in Christ to minister the word; and in my last visit to Dublin I mentioned my views to dear Mr. Bellett and others.”

Bellett has left on record, as may be seen below, the extraordinary sensation that the communication of Groves’ discovery occasioned him. To us, whether we think Groves right or wrong, his new point of view has become so familiar that we have difficulty in entering ever so little into the feelings of those to whom it came as a flash of supernatural illumination. This immense disparity between our feelings and theirs is, in great part, a measure of the influence that Plymouth Brethrenism has exercised.

The friend over whom Groves had twice cast so powerful a spell was much the most important figure in the Dublin movement, so far at least as residents there were concerned. We proceed to trace briefly his story.

John Gifford Bellett was born in Dublin on the 19th of July, 1795, and was thus a few months younger than Groves. He was educated at the Grammar School, Exeter, where Sir William Follett, the brilliant lawyer, Attorney-General under Sir Robert Peel’s second administration, was his schoolfellow and friend. At school he gave promise of no small scholarship, and in the early part of his career at Trinity College, Dublin, he carried off the classical prize from all his contemporaries. After this he did little. “It is likely,” according to his brother, the Rev. George Bellett, “that the strong religious feelings which he afterwards, through God’s mercy, so deeply imbibed, may not only have made him indifferent to honours of this sort, but have caused him to look upon them as unlawful.”

When Bellett was about two and twenty a clergyman of the name of Kearney was appointed to the parish in which the country house of the Bellett family was situated, and the young men, to their father’s intense displeasure, came deeply under their new pastor’s influence. George Bellett describes Kearney as “thoroughly unworldly—not a tinge of the world seemed to soil him, nor a desire for the honour which cometh from men to affect him”. It is easy enough to recognise such an influence throughout the whole of John Bellett’s career.

John subsequently studied law in London, where he was deeply impressed by Henry Martyn’s Life, and where also he found his Christian sympathies widened by intercourse with a devout Congregational minister, West of Chigwell. Returning to Dublin about 1822, he was called to the bar, but he does not seem to have practised much, if at all. Probably he was under no necessity in the matter, and his attention was becoming thoroughly preoccupied with religious interests.

His ties to the Church of England were, for a man of his peculiarly fervent family affections, many and strong. Both his brothers were in Anglican orders; and his only sister was married to a clergyman. Nevertheless, he was gradually moving towards a very different standpoint. I can find no definite landmark in the journey earlier than Groves’ suggestion as to the observance of the Lord’s Supper in 1827. The first reference to Darby occurs in a letter dated January 31, 1827. Bellett was afterwards wont to say, “If I deserve any credit it is that I early discerned what there was in John Darby”. Indeed, Bellett was probably the great link between Darby and the Dublin movement in its earliest days.

The study of unfulfilled prophecy was a prominent feature of the movement from the first; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that it was one of the main foundations of the whole system. Bellett had his interest in the subject greatly enlarged during a visit to London in the beginning of 1828, of which he communicated the results to Darby, only to find that Darby’s “mind and soul had travelled rapidly” in the same direction. As Darby still remained in his Wicklow curacy, Bellett found his chief Dublin friend in Francis Hutchinson, with whom he visited some of the Dissenting chapels. They preferred however the ministry of the Established Church, and still “held on” to it “loosely”.

Then, towards the close of 1828, Groves paid his last visit to Dublin before his departure for Bagdad, and for the second time made a suggestion that marked an epoch in his friend’s life. Bellett has given the following account of the incident.

“Walking one day with him, as we were passing down Lower Pembroke Street, he said to me: ‘This I doubt not is the mind of God concerning us—we should come together in all simplicity as disciples, not waiting on any pulpit or ministry, but trusting that the Lord would edify us together by ministering as He pleased and saw good from the midst of ourselves’. At the moment he spoke these words, I was assured my soul had got the right idea; and that moment I remember as if it were but yesterday, and could point you out the place. It was the birthday of my mind, dear J—, may I so speak, as a brother” (i.e., obviously, as a Plymouth Brother).

We proceed to trace to the same point the progress of the mind of that extraordinary man who, more than all his associates put together, stamped the whole movement with his personal impress, and to whom is due almost all the interest with which it has been invested, whether for the general public or for the philosophical enquirer.

John Nelson Darby was born in November, 1800. He was therefore a few weeks younger than Macaulay, and about three months older than Cardinal Newman. London was his birthplace, and “he was thus by accident of English birth, but otherwise was thoroughly Irish”. He came “of a highly honourable family”. His father was John Darby of Markley, Sussex, and of Leap Castle, King’s County, Ireland. From Westminster School, where he received his early education, he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, which is thus as much the academic parent of Plymouth Brethrenism, as Oxford of the Evangelical revival a hundred years earlier. He entered at Dublin “as a fellow-commoner at the age of fifteen, and graduated there as Classical Gold Medallist, when little more than eighteen years old [he was in fact nearer nineteen], in the summer of 1819”. Though called, like Bellett, to the Irish bar, he soon abandoned the profession, and accepted ordination to a Wicklow curacy. Archbishop Magee ordained him deacon in 1825, and priest in 1826.^[9]

Darby passed through the experience of a very High Churchman. He relates that he at one time earnestly disowned the name of Protestant. “I looked for the Church. … I too, governed by a morbid imagination, thought much of Rome, and its professed sanctity, and catholicity, and antiquity.” Elsewhere he says, “I know the system [Puseyism]. I knew it and walked in it years before Dr. Newman, as I learn from his book, thought on the subject; and when Dr. Pusey was not heard of. I fasted in Lent so as to be weak in body at the end of it; ate no meat on week-days—nothing till evening on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, then a little bread, or nothing; observed strictly the weekly fasts too. I went to my clergyman always if I wished to take the Sacrament, that he might judge of the matter. I held apostolic succession fully, and the channels of grace to be there only. I held thus Luther and Calvin and their followers to be outside. I was not their judge, but I left them to the uncovenanted mercies of God. I searched with earnest diligence into the evidences of apostolic succession in England, and just saved their validity for myself and my conscience. The union of Church and State I held to be Babylonish, that the Church ought to govern itself, and that she was in bondage, but was the Church.”^[10]

I doubt if Darby took orders in this state of mind. It is clear from his correspondence^[11] that he passed through some great crisis of belief in 1825, and it is a plausible conjecture that a remarkable accession of spiritual light, as he deemed, led him to seek ordination. However that may be, Bellett considered him still “a very exact Churchman”; and in his first tract he takes his stand at the point where extreme Evangelicalism and extreme High Churchmanship join hands in the intensity of their common anti-Erastianism. This point remained throughout his life the pivot of Darby’s ecclesiastical position.

The circumstances in which this paper appeared have been often described. The following account is taken from Professor Stokes’ article.

“The Archbishop [Magee] delivered a charge, and the clergy published a declaration addressed to Parliament denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, and claiming special favour and protection for themselves on avowedly Erastian principles. They based their demands simply on the ground that Romanism was opposed to the State, while their own system was allied with, if not even subservient to, it. Darby’s mind revolted against such a miserably low, unspiritual view of the Church. He drew up, therefore, and circulated privately a very vigorous protest against the action of the clergy, a sufficiently courageous step for a young curate of two years’ standing. … It is a very interesting document when read in the light of subsequent events, and explains the intensely Erastian tone in the Church of that day, of which the early Tractarian writers so bitterly complained, and against which they so persistently struggled. Darby’s protest was unavailing. The Establishment was everything to Churchmen of that time, the Church of God was nothing regarded, and Darby’s soul was vexed thereat.”

Magee followed up the Charge and the Petition to Parliament by imposing the oaths of allegiance and supremacy on all converts from Romanism within his diocese. “It is,” said Darby in his remonstrance, “on the part of the Clergy a natural consequence of the Charge and Petition; for if they propose themselves as candidates for the favour of the civil government, in order to obtain its protection, and then seek for its aid in the character in which they have proposed themselves, it is at once their interest, and I must add, their obligation to support its interests in their ministry, and bind others to the same system: but how will this consist with their duty to Christ, and the souls which He has purchased with His own blood, and gathering them for Him?”

The words that immediately follow show how far Darby had advanced beyond his earlier High Churchmanship.

“Further the admission [of Roman Catholic converts] is ‘into the true Catholic Church, established in these realms’. This ends in the same thing; for, instead of bringing them to graft them into the vine, the liberty and security of Christ, to pledge their souls to that which (if the civil Sovereign should choose wrong) would be Popery, and is in fact a denial of union with Christ being the vital principle and bond of the true Church, that general assembly and Church of the first born whose names are written in heaven, which is the true Church. … Here is true catholicity, and to affirm it of anything else is Popery, however modified.”

By Darby’s showing, these measures of his diocesan very effectually sacrificed the spiritual power of the Church of Ireland to its civil security. “I may mention,” Darby writes thirty-eight years later, “that just at that time the Roman Catholics were becoming Protestants at the rate of 600 or 800 a week. The Archbishop (Magee) imposed, within the limits of his jurisdiction, the oaths of allegiance and supremacy; and the work everywhere instantly ceased.”

The following paragraph from Darby’s pamphlet may be quoted as being perhaps at once the most striking and the most representative of the position he took up against the great bulk of the Irish clergy.

“I quote one passage [from the Charge]: ‘The Sovereign cannot prescribe in favour of a system, that maintains a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government.’ There is a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government; the spiritual supremacy of Christ, of which the clergy are ministers—not an earthly dominion, but the very contrary. But when our Lord was brought before Pilate and charged with being a King, He did not affirm the harmlessness of His religion, by stating its amalgamation of interests with the State, or that it was merely ‘another aspect of the same body,’ but unqualifiedly assented to the position, ‘witnessed a good confession,’ that it was a kingdom, but not of this world.”

The tone of the pamphlet is becoming—firm in its opposition, but neither disrespectful nor unsympathetic. Darby relates that Daly, subsequently Bishop of Cashel, said to him, “You ought to become a Dissenter”. Daly was a most pronounced Evangelical, and the remark may be taken as a gauge of the Erastianism of the Established Church of that day.

It has been stated that Darby resigned his curacy in this year; but Bellett distinctly says that “he continued in his mountain curacy” after these events, and implies that the continuance was of some duration. The resignation may safely be assigned to 1828, and probably to the latter half of the year. But Bellett fully recognises that his friend’s churchmanship had received a shock from which it did not recover.^[12]

With the movement in Dublin Darby was already in touch, partly by his own visits to Dublin, and partly by Bellett’s to Wicklow. It may be gathered from Mr. Andrew Miller’s narrative, which was principally based on statements that Darby made to its author, that the first occasion on which Darby observed the Lord’s Supper at one of the informal meetings for mutual edification was in the winter of 1827-8; but the idea conveyed by that narrative, that this particular meeting became a permanent ecclesiastical institution, and a nucleus round which Brethrenism at large gradually gathered, could scarcely be more erroneous. It is evident that Bellett and Hutchinson “held on loosely” to the Established Church through the greater part of 1828, even if it is safe to assume that this state of things was brought to a close by Groves’ remark at the end of that year. Immediately following his account of the extraordinary impression that that remark made on him, Bellett introduces Edward Cronin abruptly, and proceeds: “In a private room we had the Lord’s Supper with, I believe, three others, while I was still going to Sanford Chapel, and John Darby was still in the County Wicklow as a clergyman”^[13]

Darby had however, in 1828, published what passes with good right for “the Brethren’s first pamphlet,” under the title of Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ. It was not indeed the manifesto, as Mr. Miller supposed, of a “young community,” for no community as yet existed. It was the expression of a tendency which, though rapidly coming to a head, was as yet a tendency only; and this is just as clear from internal as from external evidence. The tract contains some forcible passages, and attacks the existing order with a good deal of power; but it is strikingly lacking in definiteness of suggestion, and is plainly either the writing of a man who does not yet see his own way clearly, or of one who deliberately prefers to keep his counsel.

Something more will be said of this tract later on, but it is necessary in the meantime to bring up to date the story of the man by whose means a strong Nonconformist element was infused into the new movement.

Edward Cronin was, I understand, slightly Darby’s junior. Professor Stokes states that he was a convert from Roman Catholicism. When he came as a medical student from the South of Ireland to Dublin for his health (about the year 1826, it is said), he belonged to the Independents, and was received to occasional communion by various dissenting churches. “This liberty was continued,” he tells us, “till it was found that I became resident in Dublin. I was then informed that I could no longer be allowed to break bread with any of them without special membership with some of them. That was the starting point with me. With the strong impression on my soul, though with little intelligence about it, that the Church of God was one, and that all that believed were members of that one body, I firmly refused special membership.”

Dr. Cronin’s narrative proceeds as follows:

“This left me in separation from their table for several months, and then, feeling unable to attend their meetings from the growing opposition to one-man ministry, I was left exposed to the charge of irreligion and antinomianism.

“… To avoid the appearance of evil, I spent many a Lord’s Day morning under a tree or a haystack during the time of their service.

“My name having been publicly denounced from one of their pulpits (the Rev. E. Cooper’s), Edward Wilson, assistant secretary to the Bible Society in Sackville Street, where he resided, was constrained to protest against this step, which led ultimately to his leaving also.

“Thus separated, we two met for breaking bread and prayer in one of his rooms, until his departure for England.”

The little meeting was transferred to Cronin’s house in Lower Pembroke Street. Apparently before Wilson’s departure, the two dissidents had been joined by Cronin’s cousins, the two Misses Drury, who seceded from the same chapel. A fifth member of the little band was Timms, a bookseller in Grafton Street. Cronin seems to intimate a considerable expansion in his company before it came into touch with the circle in which Groves, Bellett, and Darby were leading spirits.

“It there [i.e., at Lower Pembroke Street] became noised abroad, and one another became affected by the same truth, which really was the oneness of the Body and the presence of the Holy Spirit, also seen by us very clearly. Here Francis Hutchinson joined us, and as we were becoming numerous, offered us the use of his large room in Fitzwilliam Square.” (Italics my own.)

This was apparently in November, 1829.

Cronin furnishes a curious account of the attitude of his seniors.

“At this time dear J.G. Bellett and J.N. Darby were more or less affected by the general state of things in the religious world, but were unprepared to come out into entire separation. They looked suspiciously at our movements, feeling still able to attend and minister^[14] in the Church of England, as well as to come occasionally to our little assembly.”

This representation is largely borne out by Bellett’s own language, as will shortly appear. It involves indeed no disparagement of Darby or Bellett, even from the point of view of the Brethren. It is quite as much the part of the simpler intellect as of the bolder spirit to move rapidly in times of change. But Darby seems always to have grudged Cronin his undoubted priority. Indeed, Darby never shone in any kind of relation of rivalry; and this accounts for his rather ungenerous reference to Cronin’s claims. “Five of us,” he writes, “met at Fitzwilliam Square—Bellett, Cronin, Hutchinson, the present Master Brooke, who was frightened away by Hutchinson, and myself. As Hutchinson had disputations, I proposed meeting next Sunday. We did, at H.’s house. Brooke did not come. I have read since that Cronin had already met with Wilson and some others, but they had broken up—of that I know nothing. I afterwards went down and worked at Limerick.” Information being very accessible, Darby’s contented ignorance about the beginnings of a movement that restored, as he thought, so vast a sweep of apostolic testimony to the heritage of the Church is not a little surprising. According to Cronin, as we have seen, his meeting never broke up at all. The spirit of this note of Darby’s sheds a good deal of light on the strangely perverted accounts of the beginnings of Brethrenism that afterwards circulated amongst his particular section of the movement.

It is difficult to assign the meeting Darby mentions to its proper place in connexion with Bellett’s detailed annals, as they may fairly be called; and we are not helped by Cronin’s rigid abstinence from dates. It is probable that it is to be identified with the meeting that Miller places in the winter of 1827-8; but if so, Miller was wrong as to its character, which must have been casual and informal, and not, as he supposed, the stable outcome of special deliberation and prayer.

Cronin’s story could scarcely have been broken up so as to end it with the close of 1828. It is from that point, however, that we must now resume the common history.

From his last visit to Dublin up to the time of his departure for Bagdad, in June, 1829, Groves does not seem to have been in contact with these embryonic Brethren. From a passage in one of his letters, to which further reference will be made, it may be inferred that he knew Darby’s tract on the Nature and Unity of the Church, and sympathised with it; and it is certain from his subsequent history that he had become well acquainted with Darby in Dublin, and powerfully attracted by him. Throughout 1829 the companions he left behind were gradually working out the fruitful idea that he had propounded. Bellett gives an account of their progress, of which the accuracy may be gauged by the fearlessness of the detail.

“In the summer of 1829 our family was at Kingstown, and dear Francis Hutchinson at Bray. We saw each other occasionally, and spoke of the things of the Lord. But where he went on Sunday at that time I cannot tell. I attended the Scotch Church at Kingstown, where all who were understood to be new-born were welcome. But on returning to Dublin in the November of that year, Francis Hutchinson was quite prepared for communion in the name of the Lord, with all, whoever they might be, that loved Him in sincerity, and proposed to have a room in his house in Fitzwilliam Square for that purpose. He did so, designing however so to have it, that if any were disposed to attend the services of the parish Churches, and Dissenting Chapels, they might not be hindered; and he also prescribed a certain line of things, as the services of prayer, singing and teaching, that should be found amongst us on each day.

“Edward Cronin was prepared for this fully. I joined, but I do not think with at all the same liberty and decision of mind, and several others also were ready, and just at this time, we first knew William Stokes. Thus we continued from November, 1829.”

We are at last on solid ground. The meeting thus formed was permanent, and after about six months found a public location in a hired room in Aungier Street. The causes of this important step are variously stated. Boase, apparently following Miller, attributes it to a great increase in the numbers of the Brethren, consequent on the publication of Darby’s tract; but of this Bellett and Cronin know nothing. Bellett was averse to the change; Hutchinson was reluctant; Darby was absent from Dublin; Cronin and Stokes were eager for it; but the real initiative lay with a young man of five and twenty, who was destined to play a considerable part in the history of Brethrenism. This was John Vesey Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton. “He became,” Bellett tells us, “very familiar with Edward Cronin, and in the month of May, purposing to let the Lord’s Table in the midst of us become somewhat more of a witness, he took a large room in Aungier Street, belonging to a cabinet-maker. There the meeting was transferred during that month.”

Cronin adds some graphic touches.

“We soon began to feel as humbler brethren were added to us that the house in Fitzwilliam Square was unsuited. This led us to take a large auction room in Aungier Street for our use on the Sundays, and on [? oh] the blessed seasons with my soul, with John Parnell, William Stokes and others, while removing the furniture aside, and laying the simple table with its bread and wine, on Saturday evenings—seasons of joy never to be forgotten—for surely we had the Master’s smile and sanction in the beginning of such a movement as this was! … From that to my leaving Dublin [for Bagdad] in 1830, there were continual additions of evangelical Christians, all of us with very little intelligence as to the real character of God’s movement amongst us.”

The association of Parnell with the company in Fitzwilliam Square was not the beginning of his Brethrenism. In consequence of my earlier articles in the British Weekly, a venerable Brother,^[15] widely known in the “Open” section of Brethren, addressed to me privately a valuable communication from which I transcribe the following passage:

“What I learned [as to the commencement of Brethrenism] was as follows, my authority being Lord Congleton himself, to whom I repeated the story as I had heard it, and who pronounced it substantially correct.

“About 1825, in Dublin, three friends, of whom Lord Congleton was one, closely associated during the week, but on Sundays separated by their denominations, began to feel the unscripturalness and anomaly of such a state of things, and set themselves to seek some community that would afford a common ground on which to show their oneness as children of God, though differing on matters ecclesiastical. Finding none who would receive them except under conditions which would vitiate their object, and as being under an allegiance to Christ which they did not owe to their sects, knowing no need of a consecrated place or an ordained minister, they saw it right to meet in their own room and break bread thus. Some weeks later, William Stokes, going out on Sunday morning, met Mr. Patterson, a Scripture Reader. ‘Where are you going?’ asked the latter. ‘Going!’ was Stokes’ reply; ‘why you are going one way, and I am going another!’ ‘Is it there you are?’ said Patterson; ‘then I’ll shew you what will suit you.’ He took him to where those three were meeting, joined by two sisters. The movement thus grew, for there were many of Stokes’ mind; and many elsewhere about that time, knowing apparently little of what was going on in Dublin, gathered on the same ground.”

This story is as intrinsically likely as it is well authenticated. It furnishes another proof, if further proof be needed, that the ideas that went to make up Brethrenism were “in the air,” and were extensively obtaining embodiment. It does not alter my contention that the consolidating force of the movement issued from the company that finally gathered at Aungier Street; on the contrary, it obviously confirms it. Brethrenism was indeed formed out of a variety of little meetings of a more or less similar character, and these must be accepted as its ultimate elements; but Brethrenism, as we know it, is a synthesis, and the synthesis has a history; and I do not believe that its history can be truly told without locating its original force in Dublin, and in Aungier Street.

1. Verbum Crucis, p. 161.
2. Plymouth Brethrenism (1878), p. 164.
3. The party of Irish Christians following Thomas Kelly, the well-known hymn writer and evangelist. “Kellyism” is sometimes used in connexion with the later history of the Brethren in quite a different sense.
4. Memoir of A. N. Groves, pp. 12, 13, 32. Miller’s inability to fix the date (The Brethren, p. 23) is due to oversight. His suggestion of so late a date as March, 1827, throws his account of the relation of Groves with the early Brethren into confusion.
5. Professor Stokes (Contemporary Review, October, 1885, article “Darby”) says, “about 1825”. A correspondent (H. W. P.) in the British Weekly of January 17, 1901 (p. 373), objecting to the influence assigned to Groves in the foundation of Brethrenism, asserted that Groves did not enter Trinity College, Dublin, before 1827, when he was enabled to do so by “a legacy of £12,000 to his wife having set him free from a lucrative business to seek Holy Orders”. The reference is clearly to the fortune that Mrs. Groves came into at her father’s death in March of that year. If H. W. P. will undertake the task of arranging chronologically the mass of information contained in the opening chapters of the Memoir of A. N. Groves he will ascertain that Groves had closed his connexion with Trinity College as a fellow-commoner some time before his father-in-law’s death; that he carried on his professional practice for a time concurrently with his reading for his degree; and that he broke off his connexion with Trinity College entirely in the summer of 1827. The early chapters of the Memoir are certainly very badly arranged, but a careful study of them, however laborious, is indispensable to any one who undertakes to dogmatise on the connexion of Groves with the beginnings of Brethrenism.
6. Stokes assigns the incident to 1826, but this is not correct. Groves expressly states (Memoir, p. 40) that it was on his return from this visit that Miss Paget induced him to take up evangelistic work at Poltimore. In a letter to Caldecott, under date August 8, 1827 (Memoir, p. 45), he speaks of this as having happened “since I last wrote”. Now a letter to the same correspondent is published bearing date April 2, 1827 (p. 19). But in the summer of 1827 Groves failed to put in an appearance in Dublin, under circumstances that will shortly be related; and he never went there afterwards as a student. We therefore seem shut up to an Easter visit in 1827.
7. This date is clear from two circumstances taken in conjunction: his letter to Caldecott on November 12, 1827; and his statements (pp. 41-2) that the next visit after that which he missed would have been nine months later, and that he was to have taken his degree “the following Easter”.
8. The italics are mine.
9. These facts are largely given on the authority of Professor G. T. Stokes, Contemporary Review, October, 1885. This article is by far the best single authority I know for the early Irish movement as a whole, especially in its relations with Irish ecclesiastical life generally.
10. Analysis of Newman’s Apologia, Edition 1891, pp. 3, 31.
11. Letters of J. N. D., p. 252.
12. Darby’s churchmanship did not, in the judgment of such warm friends and supporters as Bellett and Cronin, terminate with the resignation of his curacy. Bellett brings it down to 1834, when, he says, Darby was “all but detached from the Church of England”. This did not imply, in those early days, that he was not also one of the Brethren.
13. The italics are mine.
14. The ministry must have been confined to Darby, as Bellett was a layman.
15. W. Collingwood, Esq. May I express a hope that Mr. Collingwood, whose association with the Brethren is now of nearly sixty years’ standing, will yet give to the public his very interesting recollections of the earlier days of the movement?