A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 13
Life among the Brethren
It is the crux of ecclesiastical classification to know to what category to assign Darbyism. Is it Protestant? In point of doctrine, yes, emphatically and intensely. But in many respects it is simply a phase of High Church Christianity. Within the strictly ecclesiastical sphere, I have already attempted to show this; and confirmatory evidence of the most cogent character will accrue from a study of the manners and habits of the sect. Not that it is possible to separate sharply between the ecclesiastical and the social where the Brethren are concerned. The two elements blend as the monastic and the military blended in the Knights Templars.
Yet even in this respect Darbyism still defies classification. It remains either a High Church graft on Evangelicalism, or an Evangelical graft on High Churchism, as the observer may please. As, in the ecclesiastical sphere, the Plymouth Brethren were High Churchmen without ritual, so, in the social, they were recluses without slighting family life, and without a thought of merit. It will be convenient to illustrate at this juncture both these points.[1]
Their contempt for ritualistic worship was perfect; indeed, it is open to their opponents to say that it was carried to affectation. Every circumstance that, to an ordinary mind, would have constituted ineligibility in a meeting-room, was apparently an attraction to them. An upper room reached by a narrow staircase, or a loft above a mews, afforded a meeting-place thoroughly to their taste. It would seem to have been generally a matter of necessity if they erected an iron room; and if a wealthy brother built them a plain but comfortable chapel, the company assembling there might find itself chaffed about “going to heaven in silver slippers”. Their communion service often consisted of earthenware plates and undisguised wine bottles (sometimes with the labels unremoved); but decanters were by no means forbidden, and I have even known a very decent pewter service. In such a case as this, however, some local circumstance would probably explain the exceptional splendour. The communion table was generally of common deal, and most meeting-rooms extemporised a pulpit, when the occasion demanded one, by placing a large sloping desk of the same material on one end of the table.
Possibly there was a sort of ritualism in much of this—a rather unnecessary aping of the primitive under wholly altered circumstances. But who shall say that even an exaggerated protest on behalf of evangelical simplicity is unneeded by the Church at large? And it is certain that any one who has once drunk deeply into the spirit of Darbyism, whatever his gain or loss in other respects, must remain for ever independent of the whole paraphernalia of alleged “aids” to worship.
Turning to the social sphere, and comparing Darbyism with the common standards of Protestant practice, we find it Protestant in respect of the loyalty and tenacity with which it cherishes the life of the family; but in its attitude towards national life we must seek all its affinities in the more strongly marked phases of High Church Christianity. High Churchism ceaselessly tends to regard the Church and civil society as competing spheres of interest, and thus to erect an imperium in imperio, and to prefer of course the claims of the spiritual imperium to those of the secular. In an extreme form, such as Romanism, it enjoins at times war upon the institutions of civil society; in a much milder form, like Brethrenism, it proclaims a respectful and perfectly submissive neutrality towards them.
I am of course aware that the Brethren would have claimed to stand with the first in vindicating the spirituality of the secular; and their claim is good up to a certain point—but no further. To do the common things of life as under the lordship of Christ, and as so many acts of service to Him, was certainly the ideal of the Brethren, as it was of the Jansenists and of other excellent men whose High Churchism is not doubtful. But the Brethren, like the Jansenists, placed Christian perfection, and indeed Christian duty, in as total a seclusion as possible from the common pursuits of men, even in the case of pursuits that are lawful, and indeed necessary. To the Protestant this view suggests a dualistic theory, and seems hard to reconcile with the Divine origin and authority of civil government—in which, nevertheless, the Brethren very heartily believed. They believed, too, that the existing secular order—the administration of government, of justice, and so forth—was just as much divinely ordained as the Church itself. Christians ought, they said, to be very thankful for it, and to yield it a perfectly passive support; but they should remember that in its administration Christians, as a heavenly people, possessing a heavenly calling and citizenship, could not lawfully share.
The theory of course could not be thoroughly carried out. Some few municipal offices may be imposed on a citizen without his consent, and he may be compelled to serve on a jury. In these cases the Brethren held it not lawful to resist the civil power, from which it may be inferred that they considered only the voluntary discharge of civil functions to be sinful. It is a pity that the views of the early Quakers as to the lawfulness of oaths were not equally accommodating. Still, so far as the law left them a bare choice, they avoided all the offices upon which society depends for its maintenance. They filled no civil or municipal office, if they could help it; they never sat in Parliament, and if by some rare self-assertion one of them voted at an election, he was regarded with the most intense disapproval.
There is very little pure theory anywhere, and it is probable that the Brethren were largely influenced by what they saw, or thought they saw, of Christians almost secularised by absorption in political aims. Granting, as we surely must, that this is a real danger, it may be doubted if the Brethren took the best measures to heal the disorder. Total abstinence is not the universal panacea. It may be the best cure for drunkenness, but surely not for gluttony. But to the Brethren their course was clear, as being derived from the essence of the Christian calling; and therefore, in the true spirit of the earliest and most genuine disciples of monachism, they fled into the desert to establish a huge cenobitic fraternity, to pass their days in holy contemplation, and to await the Second Advent.
A very little reflexion suffices to show how complete an innovation such principles in the midst of Protestantism involved. The Quakers, to whom in mode of worship, simplicity of dress, and general unworldliness, the Brethren bore a strong resemblance, seized on the first opportunity of playing their part in political life, and have played it to this day strenuously, to the unquestionable profit of the nation. The same may be said of numerous representatives of all the dissenting bodies, and certainly not less of the Evangelical Church party, to which the Brethren have always been in the habit of considering themselves the most nearly akin. It is strange indeed to think what companions the Brethren threw over in choosing their social part. Sir John Eliot, dying in the Tower for liberties on which the cherished liberties of the Brethren were surely founded, manifesting a spirit as devout as their own in a conversation as edifying, was, according to them, the victim of a gigantic, pitiable delusion in supposing that he could serve God in the Parliamentary activities of his life, or the slow martyrdom of his death. They would have allowed that if his desire to serve God was genuine it would not fail of a gracious recognition from Him; but the political exertions that seem to others to have been evidently blessed by God for the preservation and extension of the Gospel, the Brethren believe to have been under His ban.
Again, the heroic Parliamentary struggle of the “Clapham sect”—of William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay and their friends—which resulted in the suppression of the slave trade, and ultimately of slavery itself beneath the British flag, was, according to the Brethren, an unholy work. They would have pronounced it “morally excellent,” for they were in full sympathy with its objects, but they thought it work that God had reserved for unclean hands; it was not for heavenly citizens to pass righteous laws for earth. This is all the more striking, because the inner and private life of the Clapham sect was extremely like that of the Brethren. There was the same social austerity, tempered by the same domestic geniality, the same abstention from most of the public amusements, the same discountenance of novel-reading, the same genuine love of literary culture.[2]
Nor was it merely the employment of political agencies that the Brethren condemned. They held that it was not lawful for Christians to unite in the most strictly non-political efforts to promote popular liberties, the emancipation of slaves, the suppression of drunkenness. These things were as the dead burying their dead; it was for the Christian to preach the Gospel. Philanthropy generally was under their ban. It aimed, as they held, at “making the world better,” and this apparently innocent object was their special bugbear. Of course no body of humane men could carry out such principles consistently; but the Brethren at least avoided countenancing anything that could be called a philanthropic movement. I have heard as good a man[3] as ever adorned their ranks distinguish between one of their leaders and a well-known philanthropist bearing the same name, but belonging (if I remember rightly) to the Society of Friends, in the following extraordinary terms: “Oh, no! not that Mr. X., quite another; a very spiritually-minded man—not at all a philanthropist”. If it were pointed out to them that if all Christians had been of their mind the great bulk of the most terrible wrongs would have remained unredressed, the great bulk of temporal misery unalleviated, they replied that with consequences they had nothing to do; it was merely theirs to obey. Of the real existence of a mandate requiring their peculiar line of conduct they simply had not the shadow of a doubt.
The Brethren nevertheless inferred from the example of St. Paul that a Christian has the right to insist on the privileges allowed him by the political order under which he lives. They appear to have held that the apostolic example entitled them to claim their political privileges and to shirk their political duties; or, to put it otherwise, that the possession of a citizenship in heaven precludes the possession of a citizenship on earth, in respect only of the responsibilities of the earthly citizenship, and not of its advantages.
The same spirit of seclusion determined the views of the Brethren as to the callings that a Christian might lawfully practise. The various trades, except under peculiar circumstances, were admissible; but of the professions, those of doctor and dentist stood almost alone as perfectly lawful. The bar and the services were absolutely banned, and barristers and military and naval officers generally abandoned their careers if they joined the Brethren. Brethren might be solicitors if they confined themselves to conveyancing; some ventured to plead in courts, but they were considered “unspiritual”. The Brethren were not without a professional ministry, but it was exercised under conditions that were liable to be insupportable to a self-respecting man, unless he were buoyed up by no common vigour of faith. Consequently the position of the cultivated youth of Darbyism was not altogether an enviable one. Unless their bent was scientific, a professional career was scarcely possible. On the other hand, the number of doctors amongst them was remarkable.
The reference just made to the existence of a kind of professional ministry among the Brethren suggests one of the most curious topics connected with their institutions. For a minister of the Gospel to receive a salary, or even to derive an income from any specified sources, was abomination to them. The minister of the Gospel, they allowed, was undoubtedly entitled to live by the Gospel; indeed, it was only by an act of indulgence to the Church that many did not do so; but the minister must “trust the Lord simply for his support”. This principle was embraced by the Brethren with characteristic absence of misgiving. It was accepted as Divine, and hard things were apt to be said of the salaried ministers of other denominations.
It is interesting to glance at the practical working of this principle. In the first place, it was impossible not to see that the institution based upon it was not a genuine thing at all. According to the theory, every Brother set apart for the Gospel, unless he had private means, advanced an implicit claim to trust the Lord in a peculiar sense for his daily support. Yet it would indeed be hard to believe that more than a very small minority of them actually did it. Some were practically supported by one or two opulent “brothers”; others manifestly depended on their acceptability with a certain section of the community, with which it was of course commonly said that they were more loth to fall out than was quite consistent with their independence; some even were considered to have become onhangers and parasites, inflicting long visits on benevolent patrons who were too good-natured to refuse them hospitality, but who were wont to retail anecdotes very little complimentary to their unwelcome guests. The result was that “living by faith,” as it was called, became a by-word even amongst many perfectly orthodox Brethren. Tales were familiarly told and laughed over of men who, having failed in everything else, had taken to “faith,” and had succeeded in it so well as eventually to retire upon it. Such tales were of course mere satire, but they indicate the low repute into which the institution had fallen even within the sect of which it forms so prominent a feature.
This is the more remarkable because of the exceedingly high character of many of this ministerial band—men who lacked no recommendation, and who in respect of the great prerequisite of faith were not unworthy to stand by the side of the illustrious head of their school, George Müller. There were several such, of whom the most flippant observer would never have spoken without reverence. The scandals, however, were the inevitable outcome of the system. To require of every man who devotes himself exclusively to the ministry that he should possess a considerable measure of George Müller’s faith can only produce one result. Highly suitable men, who deal too strictly with their consciences to pretend to a faith that they do not possess, will be excluded. On the other hand, a great amount of spurious faith is bound to be manufactured, and light-minded or feebly enthusiastic men will press in on the strength of it.
It made matters worse that in the nature of things there could be no call to the ministry except the inward personal call of the aspirant.[4] The community was thus liable to find itself saddled with the support of a preacher whose call not a single member of it believed in. A case in point came under my own notice. A young mechanic, of no great gifts as a preacher, called upon a friend of mine, widely known for his liberal support of ministering brothers, to tell him that he (the mechanic) was convinced that he ought to give up his trade and addict himself to the ministry of the Gospel. My friend intimated that he was himself far from sharing his visitor’s conviction. But, as might be expected, the inward prompting was acted upon, and my friend, notwithstanding his disapproval of the whole proceeding, was accustomed to send money to the self-appointed minister, on the plea, “We can’t let the poor man starve”. Yet I presume that the young man flattered himself that he lived “in simple dependence on the Lord for daily support”.
Another great evil attending the institution was that the coarser-minded members of the community could not see, even in the case of men of approved qualifications, that “faith-brethren” lived by anything but charity. They therefore felt free to criticise every item of expenditure within the preacher’s family, as if he had not as truly earned his pittance as they their own probably far ampler livelihood. It may be imagined in how degrading a position men who had made large social sacrifices to unite themselves with the Brethren might occasionally find themselves placed.
It is surely uncandid to deny that every scheme ever yet devised for ministerial support is encumbered with more or less serious disadvantages; but it is necessary to record the verdict of experience that deliverance from them is not to be sought along the lines of the well-meant, but eminently ill-conceived, procedure of the Plymouth Brethren.
It will be remembered, of course, that the great bulk of the ministry amongst the Brethren was discharged by men who had no need of any remuneration for their services. This is, indeed, in some points of view, the great outstanding feature of the movement, and must never for a moment be lost sight of when we are considering the institutions of Brethrenism.
Thus secluded from the world, it was of necessity that Darbyism should form a world of its own; and the movement being one of no common power and energy, it formed a remarkably complete one. Indeed, there is nothing more amazing among the phenomena of Brethrenism than its absolute self-sufficingness. It bounded the vision of all its genuine adherents ; it comprised within itself all their interests. In the doings of other Christians they seldom evinced more than a languid and transitory interest. Spurgeon and his triumphs were hardly ever alluded to, unless it were to relate how interested he had at one time been in Brethrenism. The great tide of the modern missionary movement rolled by, and left them almost untouched. If a youth amongst them were fired with a zeal to evangelise the heathen of China, his friends would lament that he could not rather occupy himself with the study of Darby’s Synopsis. As for the doings of the great world, it may suffice to say that it was considered more or less a mark of lack of spirituality to read the newspaper.
Socially, they were equally self-contained. They almost limited their friendships to members of their own communion, and to those whom they looked upon as possible recruits. Marriage outside their own ranks was rare, and was deemed blameworthy. Any one who withdrew from them after spending some years in their midst would be pretty sure to lose all his friends at a stroke. If a member of one of their families, as he grew up, abandoned Darbyism, the interest of his relatives in his doings became languid, except in respect of their hope of his restoration.
But within their own limits they provided all the interests that their genuine adherents required. Beyond their mutual entertainment, they desired no social pleasures; beyond the honours that their own community could bestow, they had no ambition. And it must be said that if they seemed on the one hand to narrow their friendships, on the other they widened them indefinitely. The Brethren were spread over the face of the earth, and wherever one Brother was, there was the friend of any other. To this day, a father whose son is summoned on business to Shanghai, to Brisbane, to San Francisco, ascertains the name of a leading Brother there, and a letter precedes the traveller to his destination. On his arrival, the young man will be met at the landing-stage, or on board ship, by the Brother to whom the introduction was addressed, and in all probability will be invited to make a long stay under his roof. We may link with this the interesting fact that the Brethren entirely keep their own poor, and must then admit that they have copied the primitive in a way that puts to the blush a great party that has the primitive constantly in its mouth; and that if the Plymouth Brother, even in the day of his decadence, is still a power to be reckoned with, he has earned his continuance, in the teeth of many faults that might well have been thought certain to cut his career short, by the zealous practice of some very solid virtues.
It is the same thing with their ambitions. Once the great world beyond was fairly shut out, Brethrenism really offered a carrière ouverte aux talents; and, above all, it offered a full ministerial career to capable men who were unwilling or unable to make the ministry their profession. And the great world was very thoroughly shut out by the genuine Darbyite. The world might not value his treasure; but the least insight into it was more than the world could buy from him. The contempt with which others too often looked down upon the Brethren contained a suspicious alloy of anger; but the contempt with which the Brethren too often looked down upon others was serene and perfect. They were dogmatists in the last degree of dogmatism. If they described members of other denominations whose excellence they did not question as “having very little light,” or even as “being very ignorant,” nothing insolent or offensive was usually intended. To them it was the most simple and natural statement of a palpable fact.
That Darbyism shared in the weakness inherent in all monasticism, I have made no effort to conceal. It is therefore the more incumbent upon me to state that it strikingly exemplified monastic virtues. Our generation plumes itself on the liberality that has done tardy justice to the strong side of the earlier monachism, and it would be grossly uncandid to withhold a similar tribute from Darbyism. Indeed it is a simple duty to assert that the virtues of the contemplative life—its elevated standard of personal dignity, its devoutness of tone, its refinement of feeling, its tranquil saintliness—can seldom have been more strikingly exemplified.[5] It is not merely that the Brethren have had, at all events in the days that are gone by, more than their share of saintly lives, but also that the general level of devoutness has been, after making every deduction, exceptionally high.
The intensely Biblical element that has been spoken of as underlying the ecclesiastical life of Darbyism equally underlay its social life. The minds of the Brethren were saturated with the words of Scripture; they talked of them when they sat in their houses and when they walked by the way, when they lay down and when they rose up. Conversational Bible-readings were their principal recreation, and in the older days an invitation to tea might almost be taken to imply an invitation to social Bible study. Their leaders, and to a great extent many who scarcely aspired to such a title, were thoroughly drilled in Darby’s comprehensive system of divinity, and were prepared to expound without notice any passage on which light might be desired. Consequently, the equally prudent and courteous practice was common of leaving the choice of a subject for a conversational reading to any enquirer or neophyte who might be present. The result of this system was the formation of “a church of theologians”. In the present day, knowledge has greatly decayed, without, unhappily, any corresponding decay of self-confidence; yet even now, measured by the attainments of their neighbours, the knowledge of the letter of Scripture amongst the Brethren is more than respectable.
I am confident that I do not overstate the case for the Brethren; and surely nothing could be more futile than to seek to account for a movement that has exercised an influence so deep and wide, without the frankest acknowledgment that it must have contained elements of high excellence. The problem is to explain how a system, labouring under such great and palpable drawbacks, has for seventy years been draining the churches of a not contemptible proportion of their most spiritual members; and how a system, divided and subdivided in a series of schisms equally trivial in their causes and embittered in their spirit,—a system presenting a spectacle of sometimes five or six meetings without intercommunion in one moderate-sized town,—is even to this day a force to be reckoned with among the churches. To refuse to acknowledge the virtues of Brethrenism is merely to shirk the problem, or to constitute it insoluble.
In Darbyism itself—in this respect probably representing the original traditions of Brethrenism—the standard of good breeding was very high. It was often remarked how refining an influence association with the Darbyites exercised upon people of an uncultured class. It is a very imperfect explanation to say that the aristocratic infusion was very strong, and gave colour to the whole, although that is true as far as it goes. It was rather a question of the well-known dignifying influence of Calvinism, developed under somewhat new conditions. The heavenly exaltation of the saints in Christ was the constant topic of the conversation of the Brethren, as it was also the sublime theme that ennobled their hymns. Christians have in general been content perhaps to treat this doctrine with a somewhat distant respect; in Darbyism it was the most simple and familiar of truths, and the centre of earthly life. Every individual Darbyite became free of a great esoteric community habituated to this sublime contemplation. Sometimes—and not seldom—it produced its proper fruit of a holy life; almost always it produced the dignified bearing of those who apprehended, with a clearness that has seldom been a common possession in the Church of Christ, that they were called to walk in the world in the conscious dignity of such a superhuman exaltation.
No doubt the salt soon lost its savour. The lofty sentiment only too readily and too frequently degenerated into a mere supercilious contempt for others. But the calm assurance of superiority, whether well or ill founded, seldom fails to ensure a corresponding bearing; and even in their decadence the Brethren have not altogether ceased to exhibit the traditional bearing of happier days.
This loftiness of tone was very happily felt in the severe decorum of many of the customs of Darbyism. A successful sermon was never, within my experience, followed by a flood of fulsome adulation. Social meetings were not degraded by flattery heaped upon the local leaders, or by the attempt to entertain the people with trivial jests. The tastes of the community and its canons of good breeding put such proceedings out of the question.
It can scarcely be necessary to say much of one particular in which the conduct of the Brethren has often been severely assailed. No one can deny that their numerous schisms have been carried through with in- credible bitterness and scurrility. In so far as this bore on their social life, a word or two may be added. A suspension of ecclesiastical relations was generally followed by a suspension of social intercourse. It was fortunate if persons closely related to each other were able in some measure to maintain the common intercourse of kinship. Men otherwise amiable and large-hearted would refuse to shake hands with old and valued friends who had differed from them on some of the numerous and intricate questions that commonly formed the basis of their divisions. Somewhat similarly, the spiritual relations of a convert to Darbyism with the Christian friends of his earlier days were usually cold and scanty. The disunion thus introduced into families has possibly contributed at least as much as anything else to the unpopularity of the movement, and it is a particular in which, more than in most others, those who wish the Brethren well find it difficult to allege much in extenuation.
As was only to be expected in a quasi-monastic fraternity, the conception of individual rights was very feeble. No premium was set on independence, and any man whose views came to vary much from the prevalent standard had to keep his own counsel, unless he were prepared to find his place too hot to hold him. The excitement of wielding the thunders of the Church made the practice of excommunication a perilous passion with many. Heresy-hunting developed an inquisitorial watchfulness. For some erroneous idea, a certain Brother in a provincial town was excommunicated. Some relatives of his who lived in a town at some distance, and whose names had not appeared in the case, were visited and interrogated by some of the judges on the chance of their faith having been tampered with. This truly papal disregard of personal rights was one of the most perilous and offensive features of the whole movement.
- ↑ The following description professes to delineate Darbyism. Society amongst the Open Brethren presents very similar features, but generally with modifications. Here, as in other spheres, the Open Brethren constitute a very heterogeneous community.
- ↑ This last was a real mark at least of a certain circle of Brethrenism as I knew it. Darby’s early principles should have led, it would seem, to a different result. He may have modified his views; but I am disposed to attribute a good deal to the broadening influence of Mr. Kelly, whose abilities made him, while he was still comparatively young, an easy second to Darby amongst the Exclusive Brethren.
- ↑ It is an interesting circumstance that he was an Open Brother.
- ↑ It is well known that no “minister” among the Brethren was ever called to a local charge, and most of them were actually itinerant to a greater or less extent.
- ↑ I painfully feel that this statement, confidently as I make it, may seem to be contradicted by much that I have already recorded, and by much that I have yet to record. But no one can make even a beginning in understanding Brethrenism who does not keep in mind that the system as it may be observed from without, and the system as it can only be seen from within, are two totally different things. The present writer knew it from within before he studied its history, and is perhaps on that account the more able to judge its virtues fairly.