A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 9

by William Blair Neatby

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IX
The Epoch of Exclusivism—The Supremacy of Darby

The ruin of Brethrenism was complete. Ought that to be a subject of regret to us?

The question is not so simple as the partisans on either side might think. In the early days of the movement there were men who, while standing aloof from it on principle, could yet profoundly feel its fascination. In the year 1840 Dorman received a letter from a clergyman who had attended, apparently by his invitation, a meeting of the Brethren. From this letter Dorman published extracts, without indicating the hiatuses; and I have to follow his text.

“I have for some months known a little of you; but it was not till yesterday, at your, I would say our Pentecostal festival (for a feast it was to my inmost soul), that I duly appreciated the character of the Brethren who did me so much honour, happiness, and service, by inviting me to attend it, that I know not how to express my gratitude to you and them. My not approving of all things amongst you, does not at all obstruct the current of my Christian love for you and many others whom I need not name. But why do I write to you? It is to say, and that with real affection—Alas! that so beautiful a theory cannot long subsist; it is too unworldly and sainted for our polluted atmosphere. It will do—it has done much good; but it will fall (Acts xx. 30). ‘Of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things to draw away disciples after them.’ Woe, woe unto them through whom it shall fall! Mine shall not be the hand to detach even a pin from so goodly a tent; rather, like my namesake of Arimathea, I would honour it when others abandon it. May my soul be with yours!—Yours in our common Lord,

“Joseph White Niblock.”⁠

Dorman, writing in 1849, accepts this letter as “almost prophetic of the course which things have taken”. He was all unconscious that Niblock might have thought the prophecy much more strikingly fulfilled in Darby’s conduct than in Newton’s. Nor does he see that he is by no means entitled to accept the glowing phrases as an unqualified tribute to Brethrenism. What are we to think of the ecclesiastical position in which the atmosphere is so rarefied that a true Christian cannot long walk in it, unless he be endowed with an extraordinary spirituality? Such was not at the beginning the provision of the Lord for His flock. Is it too much to say that, for the luxury of breathing such an ethereal atmosphere, the leaders of the Brethren had neglected divine safeguards that our palpable infirmities have always called for, and had denounced the service of common sense as unworthy of the House of God? Dorman’s own words seem to justify the conclusion. “In this letter,” he adds, “Dr. Niblock has truly, though perhaps unconsciously stated what ought ever to have been the ‘theory,’ as he calls it, of the brethren’s position;—a position too heavenly to be maintained by earthly minds; a position based upon heavenly principles, and making its appeal continually to faith: depending for its subsistence every hour upon the exercise of the living power of Christ.” This is magnificent, but it is not the Church of Christ; and no one has seen this more clearly than Dorman himself saw it at a later day. As an ecclesiastical experiment Brethrenism must fall unregretted; but let us spare no effort to preserve the elements of spiritual strength and beauty that it unquestionably enshrined.

The treasure may pass to other keeping, but the shrine was not merely desecrated, but rifled. To the subsequent Darbyism, indeed, the movement owes its most startling features, and a consequent increase of dubious notoriety; but, not less, a hopeless obscuration of its true lustre. Whereas the genuine inspiration of those early years was attested by a remarkable outburst of sublime song, the period following the rupture was singularly barren of great hymns. The strife of petty differences of standpoint, and even of mere personal emulation, silenced genuine song, whatever power and brilliancy of other kinds might sometimes be displayed.^[1] Yet we shall err if we suffer ourselves to regard even the first twenty years of Brethrenism as a true golden age. Old men who remember those days mar see them in such a light, but the evils that have ruined the whole system were at work in it even from the first. Groves’ historical letter to Darby is a witness cf this, and much confirmatory evidence is available, even if it were possible to regard the scandals of 1845 end the following years as anything but the fruit springirg from seed long sown. It was said, as early as 1841, that “an overweening conceit of their own extraordinary spirituality and purity is one of the marked characteristics of the Brethren”.^[2] Perhaps it would have been salutary if their early success had been less rapid and startling.

From this time our attention will be mainly focussed upon Darbyism; partly from the necessity of the case, since the Open Brethren—as those that refused to abide by Darby’s decree came generally to be called^[3]—are in the proverbially happy condition of scarcely having a history; partly because Darbyism has been by far the most powerful and typical phase of the whole movement, and Open Brethrenism is best dealt with as a species of modified Darbyism.

The distinctive feature of Darbyism was of course the discipline it executed against the Open Brethren; and this now calls for a full explanation.

Darby’s circular contained everything in germ; but it was only little by little—and even then by dint of unremitting exertions—that the discipline of the circular could be fully enforced. For example, Deck was in England for several years after the circular was issued. He then fled to New Zealand, to escape, it is said, from the controversy. To New Zealand, however, the controversy followed him, if it had not perhaps preceded him; and before long the discipline against Bethesda was executed in literally the ends of the earth.

It is not difficult to see how the system of the Open Brethren would work. As between one local church and another, their polity was simply that of the Congregational churches. Church A might disown church B without church C being compelled to disown either. This plan was to Darby the merest confusion. Every “meeting” to him was as much one with every other as it was one with itself.

In the whole history of Christendom no man has ever entertained so extravagant a conception of sacramental union. If Compton Street Chapel admitted Newton to communion it became itself even as Newton. If Captain Woodfall took the communion at Compton Street, he became as Compton Street, and therefore as Newton. If Bethesda Chapel had even excommunicated Captain Woodfall, but had refused to excommunicate one of its own members that had taken the communion with Captain Woodfall somewhere on the Continent, it would have become in the same completeness identified with Newton. If the Bath meeting, rejecting such a member of Bethesda, had admitted one of the other members to communion, it would have been in Newton’s position also; and so would the meeting at Hereford, if it had resolved to refuse everybody from Bethesda but to admit from Bath. To the remotest stage the penalty was exacted. Every one that took the sacrament at a defaulting meeting was excluded from fellowship. This is the meaning of the term “exclusive” as applied to Darby’s following, and it is worth while to add that the term means nothing else whatever.

The Exclusives believed that they found Scriptural authority for their course in the injunction contained in 2 John 10, ii: “If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine [the doctrine of Christ], receive him not into your house, neither give him greeting; for he that giveth him greeting is partaker of his evil deeds”. The allegation was that Newton had denied the doctrine of the Person of Christ; that those who associated with him partook of his evil deeds, and were therefore (according to this curious argument) in exactly the same condemnation with himself; that those who refused him without refusing all his associates were consequently no better than if they received him himself, and therefore no better than he; and so on ad infinitum no matter how incalculably the distance from the original heresy went lengthening out.

It would seem that Darby thought that the conditions of Christian fellowship were to be investigated by methods appropriate to the exact sciences; but even from this point of view some of the links in the chain were weak enough. First of all, it was necessary to show that St. John’s injunction had anything to do with ecclesiastical procedure; and this being impossible Darby’s case broke down irreparably at the very first stage. But this, though enough, is by no means all. A further demonstration was needed that Newton had taught, and still persisted in teaching, a doctrine that denied the Apostolic “doctrine of Christ”; and this also was out of the question, for Newton’s errors were not concerned with the Person of Christ, but with certain relations in which He stood.^[4] And again, even if this difficulty could have been surmounted, it was further needful to prove that all who became partakers in Newton’s evil deeds were to be considered equal partners, so as to ultimately compromise people who had never heard either of Newton or of his heresies;^[5] and yet again that, assuming this to be the true interpretation of the passage, all whose exegetical dulness hindered them from seeing it to be so were to be judged as fully partaking in doctrines to which they never gave any quarter in the person of anybody who held them. The fact is that if there was sin in the Open Brethren it was nothing whatever but the old leaven of Congregationalism, and in no sense at all that “indifference to Christ” with which they were so freely charged by their adversaries.

Zeal for the truth, it is to be feared, had a great deal less to do with maintaining the graver charges against the Open Brethren than the exigencies of Darby’s ecclesiastical scheme. The Exclusive Brethren continued after the rupture with the Open section to grant what would generally be termed “occasional communion” to those whom, in the true High Church spirit, they designated as “members of the sects”. Had they done so to members of the Open meetings, it would have been impossible to maintain the distinction between the parties; for the Open Brethren, unlike “the sects,” conducted their worship exactly like the Parbyites, and to go to and fro between Open and Exclusive meetings would have been so simple and natural as to become an everyday occurrence. Therefore if Darby intended to preserve to himself the vineyard that he had reclaimed from the wastes of Neutrality at so much sacrifice to his reputation—and, let us hope, to his best affections—he was bound to find a pretext for treating the Open Brethren on quite a different footing from that on which members of “the sects” were accepted.

If this seem to be a harsh judgment of Darby, let the scheme he devised be dispassionately considered, and let us see whether a better construction can reasonably be put on his conduct. He laid down that the Open Brethren incurred a corporate responsibility in respect of any disorders that any of their local communities tolerated, “because they took the ground of the One Body”; whereas “the sects,” not taking this ground, could not be corporately dealt with in ecclesiastical matters. Now this was directly in the face of the ceaseless charge against Open Brethren that they had disowned the “principle of the One Body,” and had acted on “independent” (i.e., congregational) principles. If, on the contrary, all churches, no matter what their conduct is, are to be treated according to their claims, do any denominations disclaim the ground of the One Body? It is an extraordinary thing indeed to find a High Anglican of former days like Darby acting on such a supposition. I do not suggest that he adopted safeguards for his sect in deliberate defiance of the truth of the case, since he was doubtless, like all men who are supreme adepts in the art of exciting prejudice, himself the victim of strong prejudices.

The role of the ecclesiastic has often had a very injurious moral effect upon the men that have sustained it, and certainly the history of the rampant ecclesiasticism that was now introduced is singularly uninviting. A gross carelessness as to the truth of the case, and an almost cynical disregard of the rights of the accused, have been the central principles on which the persecution of the church at Bethesda has rested. In June, 1849, Dr. Cronin wrote to Norris Groves, forbidding him the house, on the ground that Groves had made himself “a partaker of other men’s sins, and become obnoxious to the prohibition of John ii. 10 [sic]”. “This letter of rejection,” Groves writes, “concludes an unbroken intimacy and friendship of twenty-five years.” It is the sadder for the remembrance of the long fellowship in sacred toil, in loneliness, in bereavement, in hope deferred, during their devoted exile in the East. Cronin was a warm-hearted man and a fervent Christian, and he must be credited with acting from a sincere conviction, and at some cost to his own feelings. His act was only an early case of a species of persecution that is still running its baneful course. No sooner is the cry of “unfaithfulness to Christ” raised, than a multitude of good people are ready, almost without enquiry, to take it up and to inflict upon themselves and their friends all manner of suffering in the hope of approving themselves clear in the matter. The history of the execution of Darby’s discipline against Bethesda is an illustration, stretching over fifty years, of the old but as yet unmastered principle that the spirit of panic is the spirit of cruelty.

In 1864, only two years before his fraternal note to the dying Craik, Darby wrote to a Brother in Sheffield, “The evil at Bethesda is the most unprincipled admission of blasphemers against Christ, the coldest contempt for Him I ever came across”. Now this statement was not merely an incalculable exaggeration; it was absolutely false, root and branch, and an excellent instance of smoke without fire. And Darby would have known it to be false, if some sign of a relenting towards Bethesda on the part of certain of his followers had not roused him to frenzy. But statements of this kind were taken on trust by persons who only knew that Darby had been the most potent force in their spiritual development, and saw him in the ordinary course of his life a humane and excellent man; and the results were deplorable. Sometimes, indeed, the cry was met with a calm self-possession before which it fell powerless. Standing in a group of Brethren in Dublin, in 1852, Darby charged them with “acquiescence in unfaithfulness to Christ”. “Dear brother,” replied good Captain Owen, “if you speak of unfaithfulness to Christ, I plead guilty to that every day.” The reply neatly exposed both the vagueness and the possible Pharisaism of the charge.

If assumption be only bold enough there is no calculating its probable success. Remarks of this kind were heard on every hand: “Do not let love for Mr. Müller and his work blind you to what is due to Christ; Christ must be first—not Christians, however dear”.^[6] If a leader were too scrupulous to throw dust in simple people’s eyes after some such fashion, he might count on losing thousands of adherents. In equal honour with the name of Captain Owen I would associate the name of Henry Young. Young put forth A Plea for the Honour of Christ. The tract was written in opposition to the censorious pretensions of the Exclusive party, and its very title involved a bold counter-claim. The following quotation is in point. “A beloved brother writes me: ‘Is it Christ or persons that engage your affections? The Spirit sacrifices all for Christ.’ My answer is, ‘I own the paramountness of Christ’s claims, but deny the opposition. … Does the Spirit sacrifice the Church to Christ? … We may presently come to sacrifice Christ in the person of His saints, … His brethren—His members—looked at collectively—His bride.’” Nor can I prevail on myself to omit this fine passage: “Truly it is grievous to see such instances as have occurred of the greatest excesses committed by the rash, the forward, and the inexperienced, in the way of invasion of the peace of gatherings, sanctioned by those who know better; and the table of the Lord, that sweet memorial of Love,—love strong as death,—turned almost everywhere by brethren into The rod of their Administration.”

But the epoch of Exclusivism really derives its whole character, and therefore its sovereign explanation, from the personality of Darby. It is scarcely possible to write the story of the Brethren without bearing hardly on them. In their narrow and obscure sphere,—in their life of almost monastic seclusion, and, in ordinary circumstances, of scarcely less than monastic quietude,—they hardly have a history beyond the history of their quarrels. Consequently, they have come before the public in a light that does them a great injustice; and this is peculiarly true of the most remarkable of them all. The time has come for presenting a picture of Mr. Darby as he appeared to those who saw him through many years from within his own community, and perhaps knew nothing, except by distant and uncertain rumours, of the fierce struggles in which he had lost so much of a man’s most precious possessions.

It must be premised that his immense influence, like the influence of other men that have exercised an extraordinary fascination, has a great deal in it that defies analysis. When by a highly expressive metaphor we call it magnetic, we do justice alike to its power and its mystery. No doubt Darby had many perfectly intelligible titles to success. His attainments were great and varied, apart from his classical and theological scholarship. He could write and speak in several modern languages, and translated the whole Bible into French and German! If his ambition had lain in such directions, and if he could have condescended to pay more regard to form, he might have entitled himself to the honours of a philosopher and a poet. But his courage, his administrative genius, and his force of will, had far more to do than all his acquirements with the ascendency he exercised—an ascendency that entitles him to no inconspicuous place amongst the born leaders of men.

Other leaders indeed have been equally absolute, but seldom in face of equal obstacles. Wesley, for instance, exercised an unchallenged autocracy over the Wesleyan Methodists of his own life-time, and avowed it with the most engaging frankness. But his followers were, on an average, men of far less striking personality than Darby’s; and his sect, up to the time of his death, was far less widely ramified. Nor was Wesley compelled to exercise the reality of absolutism while disdaining its forms. His frankly voluntary association might adopt what legislation it pleased; but on Darby’s peculiar High Church theory, all legislation for his followers had existed in the first century, and was divine and immutable. His legislation was therefore bound down to the forms of Scriptural interpretation, and he would have found it hard to produce Scriptural authority for him to imitate Wesley’s avowed absolutism.

The result was that he found himself to a very great extent thrown back on his simple personal ascendency; and this availed for more than thirty years to hold together a world-wide confederacy united by no other bond that was not of the most shadowy description. His followers were in fact without written code or constitution, without denominational history or traditions; they had no national or provincial synods; and they possessed as their distinctive tenet only an ecclesiastical formula of a most subtle and impracticable description. Yet, till within a year of Darby’s death, they cohered so perfectly that every minutest act of discipline that was recognised in any part of the world was recognised in every other. This is surely almost a unique fact.

Darby’s influence was built up on a base of enormous enthusiasm. We must dismiss from our minds once for all any idea of Darby as a man that availed himself of an enthusiasm that he did not share. Even his overweening jealousy for his own supremacy would naturally clothe itself to his own mind in the guise of zeal for the one institution upon earth that embodied a divine idea. After all, it is nothing very new that a man should be profoundly convinced that he is doing God’s work on a great scale, and be filled in the depths of his soul with an answering enthusiasm, yet condescend at the same time to actions that would compromise much less lofty pretensions.

Fundamentally, the conception to which Darby de- voted his enormous energies for more than fifty years was a High Churchism that should disdain the common accompaniment of Ritualism, and should borrow from Protestantism an intensely Biblical element. Fully as we must recognise the gigantic failure of the attempt to embody it, we may yet admit that the conception is a striking and original one. But it is certain that nothing less than a monumental enthusiasm could have initiated—or, still more, could have sustained—a movement that aimed at realising so impracticable an ideal.

It has been often observed that, through a life of ceaseless controversy, devotional literature still remained Darby’s favourite occupation. It was always natural and delightful to him to turn aside, whether from the pressure of controversy or from the absorbing study of unfulfilled prophecy, to the simple beauties of Philippians, or to the perennial calm of the contemplations of St. John. Of all the hymns of the Brethren—and no one can deny the exceptional beauty of very many of them—Darby’s are unequalled (I had almost said unapproached) for depth, force and grandeur; though Darby put himself at a serious disadvantage (especially in comparison with so exquisitely graceful a writer as Sir Edward Denny) by his involved and uncouth style of composition.

I have often heard people who were not blind to Darby’s faults say with immense emphasis, “He was a great man”. If a magnanimous simplicity makes a man great, they were right. He might be a scholar, but he wore none of a scholar’s trappings; he might be supreme in his own little world, but his habitual bearing showed no trace of self-consciousness. To his social inferiors and to young men he was genial and hearty, and he kept his well-known brusquerie for more influential people, and especially for his sycophants—who were many. If he was ruthless in his ecclesiastical conflicts, he had at other times a singularly kindly and sympathetic nature. In the act of addressing a meeting he would roll up his greatcoat as a pillow for a sleeping child whose uncomfortable attitude had struck him. I have heard that, on one of his numerous voyages, he might have been seen pacing the deck all night with a restless child in his arms, in order to afford the worn-out mother an opportunity of rest; and I doubt whether many children were more tenderly nursed that night. The incident is the more interesting for the fact that Darby was never married. Was it the breaking forth of this tenderness, deep-hidden in his lonely heart, that bound men to him in so pathetic a fidelity of devotion?

In the hills of Eastern France or of Switzerland he would often on his pastoral tours receive the hospitality of humble mountaineers. When the materfamilias went out to her work in the fields, half his active mind would suffice for his studies, and with the other half he would help the children that sat about him either with their work or their play. We may cease to wonder that the Continental poor, accustomed to resent the hauteur of the Englishman abroad, should have idolised the great man who was amongst them so genially “as one that serveth”.

Indeed no one ever took fewer airs. The following anecdote I can vouch for. A certain couple had just joined the Exclusive fraternity, and were receiving their first visit from the great man. They had risen from the supper table, and Darby, kneeling close beside it, was offering a prayer with which his hearers were greatly impressed. But whatever the excellence of the prayer, the lady of the house, an old-fashioned housekeeper, was painfully distracted by the unmistakeable sound of the cat feasting on the remains of the supper. Nothing but awe of her distinguished guest could have restrained her from interfering. As they rose from their knees she cast a glance towards the remains of the cold fowl. His eyes followed hers. “It’s all right,” he said reassuringly; “I took care that she got nothing but the bones.”

Another story, which I can relate with equal confidence, illustrates not only this fine simplicity of character, but also the readiness of resource by which he was no less distinguished. He had arrived at the railway station of a Continental town where he was expected to make some little stay, and found himself, as he stepped from the train, face to face with a formidable contingent of the local Brethren. Several ladies of good position were there, all zealous for the honour of becoming his host. Here was a delicate situation, but Solomon could not have been more equal to it. “Qui est-ce qui loge les frères?”^[7] said Darby. All eyes turned upon a very humble-looking brother, who had hitherto kept modestly in the background. Darby immediately went up to him, saying, “Je logerai où logent les frères”.^[8] And the entertainer of obscure itinerants became the host of the great man himself.

The multitude of petty and carping divines who opened their mouths wide for his words were a cause of no small irritation to Darby. He once overheard a company of them discussing the recent death of Dr. Davis—a young coloured man, known as “the good black doctor,” who after qualifying in London as a surgeon lost his life from small-pox while attending on the wounded in the Franco-Prussian war. The work for which he laid down his life was deemed a sadly worldly piece of philanthropy by the zealots of Darbyism, and the group was actually discussing whether it were not by a judgment mingled with mercy that the young surgeon had been called hence. Darby broke in on the debate with an impatient, “Well, well, God has accepted his service and taken him home”. There are some people so small that all the heroism in the world exists in vain for them. Darby was not of their number; and whatever narrow principles of seclusion from the common interests of mankind he may have taught, he was at least incapable of pronouncing so petty an elegy over the valiant dead.

One of the happiest results of this magnanimous disposition was the extreme simplicity that he observed in all his preaching and teaching, and of which he, to a great extent, set the fashion throughout his special section of Brethrenism. He preached from the Authorised Version, and kept all his Greek out of sight. Prominently identified as he was with a peculiar system of dispensations and prophecy, simple devotional matter was always the staple of his teaching. A certain old woman, a candidate for fellowship with the Darbyites, was “visited” by two comparatively young men, and by Darby himself for the third. She afterwards said that she had no doubt that the two were very clever and learned, but she could not understand them; and she could get on best with the simple old gentleman that came.

Amongst lesser, but not unimportant, elements of his power must be reckoned his extraordinary bodily strength. He could subsist upon the most scanty and unappetising diet, and in the midst of immense exertions could do with three or four hours’ sleep in the twenty-four. Even when there was no particular necessity for it he was as abstemious as an anchorite, though he attached no merit whatever to asceticism, and in no way advertised his frugality. Wesley himself was not more sparing of personal indulgences, and this must have been of the greatest service to him in his pastoral tours amongst the Continental poor, whose habits are so much more frugal than those of the same class in our country.

I have not attempted to conceal Darby’s faults, but great as they were I believe they can all be expressed in a single term: he could not brook a questioned or a divided authority. But under the influence of this passion, which domineered (as Macaulay would say) over all his virtues and vices, everything else was forgotten kindliness, pity, old familiar friendship, and the very magnanimity that seemed to be woven with the warp and woof of his nature.

1. Mrs. Bevan’s sacred poetry constitutes an exception to the statement in the text.
2. Quoted in A Caution Against the Darbyites, p. 11.
3. Professor Lindsay (Encyclopedia Britannica, article “Plymouth Brethren”) calls them Neutral Brethren, but the term is no longer in common use.
4. Tregelles pointed this out at the time, in his Three Letters. His authority has obtained recent confirmation from the most perspicacious of all the divines of Brethrenism. Mr. Wm. Kelly wrote in 1890, with palpable reference to Newton: “A prophetic theory drew its devotee into anti-christian error, without any direct assault on the truth of the Person; for it was rather an overthrow of Christ’s true relation to God”. The admission is a serious one for Mr. Kelly as a leader of Exclusivism; but it is all the more significant on that account.
5. Such persons might be received provisionally, with a “warning”; but if they returned afterwards to their former meeting, either as considering the “warning” to be based on unauthentic information, or as considering that such remote quarrels were no business of theirs and no ground of practical church action, the lull rigour of the law was to be put in force against them; that is to say, they had no escape unless they accepted any local exclusive brother that might warn them as an ultimate court of appeal in the history of the case. I therefore judge that the statement in the text does not require qualification.
6. “Put Christ in the first place, and the nice Christians in the second, and you will be all right. … Diotrephes is bad enough, but Open Brethrenism immensely worse,” were the published words of a well-known Exclusive.
7. I.e., “Who [generally] puts up the [ministering] brothers?”
8. i.e., “I will stay where the [ministering] brothers are in the habit of staying.”