A history of the Plymouth Brethren/Chapter 15

by William Blair Neatby

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XV
The Dissolution of Darbyism—The Later Schisms—Open Brethrenism

Throughout the year 1882 the formation of the rival parties went forward in England. As yet it was only making a beginning abroad.

Almost with the opening of the year poor Dr. Cronin passed away. He died in a frame of mind that any Christian might envy. The following are his son’s words: “Nor did he ever allude to the great and sore trouble which had broken our beloved mother’s heart, hastened her death and crushed him! I refer to his having been cast out by that body whom he had so loved and laboured for, nearly half a century. … He was constantly repeating the names of our Lord.” Almost at the last, he sang clearly the verse,

“Glory, honour, praise and power
Be unto the Lamb for ever!
Jesus Christ is my Redeemer!
Hallelujah! Praise ye the Lord.”

The simple devotion of these well-known lines faithfully reflected the childlike, fervent spirit by which the dying man had been characterised through life.

Darby did not long survive his old friend. He died at Bournemouth on the 29th of April, from a gradual breakdown of the entire system. He was in his eighty-second year. It is pleasant to know that before he left London Cronin had called uninvited upon him, and the interview had been friendly. It was not Darby’s way to acknowledge his faults, but it may well be that he felt some compunction. Another old friend, Andrew Miller, was dangerously ill at Bournemouth at the same time. The recent disruption had severed him from the chief whose standard he had faithfully followed for close upon thirty years, but Darby sent daily to enquire of his welfare. A certain gloom seemed to settle down on Darby from the time that the division became inevitable. Physical decay might account for it, but there were surely other influences at work. He had survived precisely to the tragic moment—just long enough to see his work go to pieces in his hands by his own act. It has been conjectured that he expected to carry his point at the last, as he had so often carried it before; but for once the matchless sagacity that had borne him safely through so many critical junctures betrayed him to his undoing.

It was no question now of a secession limited enough to be negligible. It was the formation of a rival party, at least as weighty in gifts^[1] as the party of his own adherents, and not hopelessly inferior in numbers. It was only left to the old man to recognise his defeat in the dearest object of his life, when to retrieve the disaster was beyond all hope.

Not often have men been called to mark the passing of a stranger or more complex personality. The saint of patient, tranquil contemplation, the theologian of deep, mystical insight, the apostle of tireless energy and total self-devotion, the ecclesiastic of restless ambitions and stormy strifes,—all were withdrawn from us in John Nelson Darby.

His end is no occasion for harsh judgments. Those who accept the account given in this work, if they cannot, on a review of his life as a whole, acquit him, will have no wish to condemn him. Startling contradictions in character are no novelty, but we might be pardoned for thinking that they culminated in Darby. One of his leading followers said that there never was so much of grace as in him, nor so much of unsubdued nature. To some people this verdict seems mere wanton paradox. I, for one, view it in a very different light; and of Darby’s life and character as a whole I prefer to say, after the fashion of old John Foxe, “Which matter being too hard for me, I remit it to the judgment of God Almighty”.

If Darby had occupied Abraham’s position, he might have left behind him hardly less than Abraham’s fame. It is easy to picture him dwelling in the land of promise as in a strange country, the contented heir of the promises of the world to come; or communing with God in the night-watches, by the lonely tent and altar that mark the stages of his faithful pilgrimage; or despising the gifts of the King of Sodom, and extending a covenant of peace to the Philistine Abimelech; dispensing meanwhile the blessings of a righteous and benignant rule to a family and household that would never dream of a law that they did not read in his eye. But his lot denied him circumstances so favourable to the exercise of his virtues and to the repression of his one great vice, and cast him on the evil days of the turmoil of sects of the nineteenth century. And it was Darby’s supreme misfortune that his single vice, by the irony of circumstances, had perhaps more to do than all his virtues with fixing the character of his life’s work. This threatens to result in the evil that he did living after him, and the good being interred with his bones; and the present writer would be thankful if this work should in some measure serve as a humble obstruction to such an injustice.

The older Brethren were fast falling out of the ranks. In 1883 the Open Brethren sustained a great loss in the death of Lord Congleton. In the same year Andrew Miller passed away, at the age of seventy-three. A devoted friendship of twenty-eight years had been rudely severed by the disagreement between him and Mr. Mackintosh on the Ramsgate question. Not that Mr. Miller would have suffered the difference to affect their intimacy, but good Mr. Mackintosh unfortunately felt himself bound by the ordinary discipline of his party. Mackintosh long survived his old friend, dying a very few years ago at the age of seventy-seven.

Captain Hall followed in October, 1884, at an exceedingly advanced age. So completely did his act in “leaving the Lord’s table,” as it was termed, alienate from him the whole interest of his former friends, that probably few of them had known for many years whether he were living or dead. Yet this old campaigner of the first days of Brethrenism was one of the bravest and most single-hearted men ever found in its ranks. He belonged, moreover, to the small class of theologians who find it easier to suffer for their convictions than to persecute. In the Plymouth schism of 1845 he had laboured to dissuade Darby from forming a fresh communion, and we have seen him shortly afterwards employed in a work of pacification at Bath; while his plea for a more comprehensive spirit towards the older denominations is unique in the story of the Brethren.

After his breach with Darby, Hall had to a certain extent formed new friendships. In 1873 we find him “in fellowship” with a meeting of the Open Brethren that included Mr. and Mrs. Harris and the Bland family. In all the subdivisions of Brethrenism, he could not have found better company. But, unhappily, among the Brethren there was always the other side to be reckoned with. I am informed that a certain Exclusive declined all intercourse with his own mother, because she took the communion with Hall.

His old ally was at rest before him. In 1878 Dorman sank gradually, and died at the end of the year. He was buried at Reading, the scene of his labours during a great part of his ministry. An Exclusive sister, Mrs. Butcher, had the courage to rally a few old friends to the grave-side. The incident is a real relief to the gloom of the unpitied loneliness of his closing years.

The Darbyites flattered themselves that they had got rid of the unsympathetic element, and could count on a period of peace and spiritual expansion. Never were hopes more dismally belied. In 1885 the London Darbyite meetings excommunicated Mr. Clarence Stuart of Reading, a Brother whose reputation for learning and piety stood high among them. His offence was that he taught that the “standing” of a Christian is complete through his faith in the Atonement, independently of his personal union with Christ as risen from the dead; that this union is a “condition” of added privilege, and that it had been an error of the Brethren not to distinguish duly between “standing” and “condition”. He was attacked with great vehemence by Stoney and Mackintosh,^[2] who seem to have shared Stanley’s doctrine of “justification in a risen Christ”. Stuart’s teaching, on the other hand, was apparently a partial reaction against this tendency, in the direction of the older Evangelicalism. He writes with scholarship and acumen, which is much more than can be said for his assailants. Indeed, if one of his principal champions, Mr. Walter Scott of Hamilton, is right in saying that many “judged Mr. Stuart to be a heretic on the unproved statements” of two such divines as Stoney and Mackintosh, the circumstances give occasion to the most dismal reflexions on the theological indigence of the party.

From his neutral position, Mr. Kelly passed an unfavourable judgment on Mr. Stuart’s doctrines, but held it entirely unwarrantable (as any man in his senses, whatever his dogmatic standpoint, must needs have done) to treat them as offences calling for excommunication. Mr. Kelly’s judgment of the teaching carries far more weight than that of all the Park Street divines taken together, but it must not be allowed too much authority as against Mr. Stuart; for Mr. Stuart scarcely claimed to be other than an innovator, and Mr. Kelly had always been the supreme exponent of the older Darbyite theology.

The Park Street leaders had no scruple about pushing their ignorant quarrel to a world-wide division. Mr. Stuart’s following was fairly considerable in England, and relatively larger in Scotland. The one happy result of this disruption was that the excommunicated party seems to have decided to abandon the Darbyite discipline altogether, and “to heartily welcome any godly member of the body of Christ apart altogether from questions of a mere ecclesiastical kind”. This appears to mean that, while retaining their own list of recognised meetings, and their own internal procedure, they place Open Brethren, Kellyites, and the adherents of whatever other varieties of Plymouthism there may be, on the same footing for “occasional communion” as the members of any other evangelical denomination. This happy example was followed, in 1892, by the Grantites in America.

Almost at the same time, a “discipline,” if possible still more absurd, was being enacted in America under the auspices of two well-known Darbyites, Lord Adelbert Cecil and Mr. Alfred Mace. Mr. Mace was a young evangelist of a good deal of popular power. The connexion of Lord Adelbert Cecil with the Brethren was of longer standing. He was a son of the second Marquis of Exeter, and his adherence to the Brethren had caused some sensation at the first. This was far from having spoilt him, and he was always marked by a particularly unobtrusive bearing, by an extreme simplicity and unworldliness in all his habits, and by great devotion to his work of itinerant evangelisation. His death by drowning in 1889, before he had completed his forty-eighth year, was the occasion of much sincere regret. But Mr. Scott is thoroughly justified in calling both these Brethren “men ministerially unfitted for such work” as the disciplinary proceedings in Montreal.

The object of discipline was Mr. F. W. Grant of Plainfield, New Jersey, probably the most accomplished theologian amongst the Brethren of the American continent. Mr. Grant had persuaded himself that he could accept the “Park Street decision,” with the proviso that the unity of London was a fiction. Though substantially a sincere Darbyite, he sometimes indulged in a little independent speculation; indeed his rejection of London unity would probably have sufficed of itself to arm the Priory cabal for his destruction.

The Montreal Brethren formally excommunicated Mr. Grant for heresy on the 4th of January, 1885. They then issued a tract under the title of a Narrative of Facts which led to the Rejection of Mr. F. W. Grant by the Montreal Assembly. This, being an official document “signed on behalf of the Assembly,” makes it easy to ascertain the grounds of their action. “The Assembly gathered to the name of the Lord in Montreal,” as they magniloquently say, “believe the time has come when the only course left is to obey the command of the Apostle given in Titus iii. 10: ‘A man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject’.”^[3]

The grounds on which Mr. Grant was “rejected,” according to this curious interpretation of St. Paul’s meaning, are carefully specified. He had taught (1) that “the O. T. [Old Testament] Saints were ‘in the Son,’ and had ‘eternal life in Him,’ in virtue of being born again;” (2) “that when thus born we are at that moment forgiven, justified, no longer in the flesh, but in Christ, and dead to sin and the law;” (3) “that this new birth gives us the full position of sons of God, and being sons we are sealed with the Holy Ghost, faith in Christ’s work not being necessary to ‘sealing’^[4] (4) “that Romans vii. is the experience of one who is justified in Christ, sealed, seeking to abide in Christ, and to be fruitful and holy;” (5) “that souls may have peace and not know it, be justified and not know it, have the Holy Ghost and be in bondage.”

Imagine a world-wide division ruthlessly precipitated in order that such shreds of this fragment of a system as might be recoverable after the convulsion should be protected against the doctrines that the saints of old had eternal life, and that the 7th of Romans describes Christian experience!

“Playing at churches,” was the sarcastic comment of a veteran Brother upon the Ryde-Ramsgate disruption. What description can he have found for the events of the years that followed?

It appears that there were forty or fifty dissentients from the Montreal decree, but that this was not held to invalidate it—a fact from which we may infer that the purest Darbyites were by this time seriously contaminated with the principles of “Dissent”.

The year 1890 witnessed a still more extensive division. The occasion was the teaching of Mr. F. E. Raven, a Greenwich Brother, whose previous reputation scarcely marked him out for the leader of a school. It is difficult to ascertain the exact truth with regard to the most serious charges against his doctrine, as some pamphlets that were said to prove them appear not to have been published, and therefore cannot always be procured. The seceders from his communion accused him of denying the orthodox doctrine of the union of the Divine and the human natures in the Man Christ Jesus—not indeed in a Unitarian, but in a Gnostic sense. He clothes his doctrines in a sort of quasi-metaphysical garb, which in the present condition of knowledge among the Darbyites is doubtless very imposing, though I must confess myself sceptical as to its covering any genuine thought at all. This at least seems certain, that he promulgated doctrines, or hints at doctrines, that were widely understood, even within his own little fraternity, to be of a Gnostic character; and that he never vouchsafed any intelligible explanation in an orthodox sense.

Strife waxed furious, not only in England, but in France and Switzerland, in America, and doubtless in the ends of the earth. In this country I believe that Mr. Raven obtained a large majority, but the Continental possessions were lost. I have heard of a certain amount of Ravenism in France, but I should suppose it is comparatively small; while French-speaking Switzerland has gone, I am informed, almost solid against Mr. Raven. This indeed was only what might have been expected; for Mr. Raven’s leading opponents were the two men whose influence was paramount with the Darbyites of the Continent. I refer to Major McCarthy and Mr. William Lowe.

Whatever uncertainty there may be as to the precise character of some of Mr. Raven’s speculations, the imputation against him of heterodoxy as to our Lord’s humanity was in no sense gratuitous. Mr. Grant had asked, “Will F. E. Raven satisfy us as to whether he believes that our Lord had, in the humanity He assumed, a true human spirit and soul?” “Mr. Raven’s only answer was, ‘I decline controversy with Mr. Grant’”^[5]—a refusal he might very likely have sustained by the plea that he and Mr. Grant were not in ecclesiastical intercommunion. Moreover, Mr. Raven distinctly said, in criticising an opponent, “Mr. G[ladwell] appears to me to be in great ignorance of the true moral character of Christ’s humanity. He did not get that character by being made of a woman, though that was the way by which He took man’s form, but Manhood in Him takes its character from what He ever was divinely. ‘The Word became flesh.’ He does not seem to me to have any idea of real heavenly humanity.”

Some of Mr. Raven’s followers, if not Mr. Raven himself, explicitly taught that Christ was man independently of the Incarnation; and the above extract from Mr. Raven’s own pen is unintelligible unless he means that Christ was not man of the substance of His mother, but that He derived from her only the outward form of a man. It is hard to distinguish this from the doctrine that He was man in semblance merely. The Brethren of an earlier generation would have been safer if, instead of yielding themselves to a passionate revulsion from Newton’s errors, they had listened to the warnings of such men as Craik and Tregelles, and had soberly set themselves to judge righteous judgment.

Associated with this error, there was a tendency among Mr. Raven’s disciples to deny that anything that linked Christ with the bodily infirmities of mankind, or even with its natural human sympathies, could be an “expression” of the Eternal Life. It was commonly said that “the Lord, as a babe in the manger, was not the expression of eternal life, though He was Himself that eternal life”. Mr. Kelly, who was induced to take the field by the application of some of the belligerents themselves, mentions that a similar limitation was also expressed with regard to Christ in weariness at the well of Sychar, or weeping at the grave of Lazarus, or commending His mother from the Cross to the care of St. John. A very small amount of spiritual perception, or, failing that, a very slight theological sense, would have enabled these speculators to see that they were frittering away the significance of the Incarnation. It would have been well if they had attempted an answer to the question, Were those acts of Christ which they could not receive as “expressions” of Eternal Life, true expressions of Himself or not?

Mr. Greenman, a transatlantic Brother, considers Mr. Raven’s doctrines “the direct outcome of Mr. J. B. Stoney’s ‘higher life,’ or ‘the Brethren’s Perfectionism’”. He adds that “with Mr. Darby’s and other solid teaching off the scene, Mr. R. carries all before him”. The following passage^[6] illustrates the point:—

“When a Christian has done with the responsible side of his course down here, it is the end of priesthood; we don’t need it any more as connected with infirmities. That part of our christian course will be over, and we shall no longer want the help of the high priest in that sense. It will come to an end in regard to us. And this is true now in so far as our souls enter on the ground of divine purpose. The priest is known in another light.”

It will be judged that Mr. Raven’s language is not always readily intelligible. On another occasion he thought fit to put his thoughts before his hearers in the following form:—

“G. F.—Would you say a believer then had eternal life in a certain sense?”

“F. E. R.—I answer it in a very simple way, he has eternal life if he has it.”

“R. S. S.—It is not a very bad way to ask those people who say they have eternal life, what they have got.”

“F. E. R.—If I came across any one who asserted it at the present time, I would be disposed to say, ‘If you have got it, let us have some account of it’. Our difficulty in England was that nobody could give any account of eternal life. … Everybody claimed to have it, but nobody could give an account of it. Another brother asked me, ‘Have you got eternal life?’ I did not know how to answer it exactly, because he simply meant resting on a statement of Scripture.”^[7]

Again:—

“J. T.—Is the expression ‘heavenly’ included in the idea of eternal life?

“F. E. R.—No, I don’t think so. I think eternal life refers to earth. I don’t think we should talk about eternal life in heaven.

“J. T.—Only we have it there.

“F. E. R.—I don’t think the term will have much force there.

“J. T.—The thing will surely be there.

“F. E. R.—We shall be there.”^[8]

Once more:—

“F. E. R.—In Hebrews vii., where the subject is priesthood, He is made higher than the heavens.

“J. S. A.—And that is where you are in the assembly; that is what you meant, that you touch eternal life in the assembly.

“F. E. R.—In the assembly you are risen with Christ, in association with Him, and there it is you touch what is outside of death.”^[9]

We read elsewhere (p. 241), “Eternal life is realised only in the Assembly; no one touches eternal life now except in that connexion”.

Probably the long habit of considering themselves the sole depositories of everything beyond the most elementary principles of Christianity had tempted the Brethren to seek to enlarge their peculiar province; and owing to the total cessation of genuine thought among them, they had to fall back on mere jargon. If so, all this absurdity is the retribution for that “folly, conceit, and supercilious contempt of other Christians” with which Dorman charged them only too justly thirty-five years ago. The language just quoted from their most popular teacher can mark nothing short of the dotage of the sect.

Nevertheless, Mr. Raven appears to be in the true succession of Darbyism. He is preeminently the apostle of the inner light. Virtually, though not explicitly, Darbyism had always postulated a sort of inspiration of the “Assembly” in its decrees, and of the individual in his ministry. Mr. Raven, as quoted by such a competent and wary antagonist as Mr. Grant, appears a true successor of the Montanists or of the Wittemberg prophets. Positive truth, according to his scheme, seems to be derived from the inward illumination of the spiritual man. The Bible indeed has a regulative office, and can exercise, I presume, a sort of veto upon an alleged revelation of a prophet. Consequently, if Mr. Raven had his life to live over again, he would, by his own account, read his Bible less, and pray more. This course, I have no doubt, would have resulted in a yet higher development of his peculiar principles.

The secessions from the Priory association on account of this teaching did not all take place immediately. In some cases it was the gradual pressure of Ravenism that forced the malcontents out. Of these lingerers the best known was Mr. W. T. Turpin. Unlike many that left from the same cause, Mr. Turpin did not feel able to join any other section of the Brethren, and ultimately resumed his ministry in the Church of England after the interval of half a life-time. He had been one of the most deservedly popular of the preachers of the Brethren. Few of their leading men have gained the ear of the public of Brethrenism—above all, of its youth—in the same degree; and his loss was a very serious one to the party.

A tendency already referred to, which made itself powerfully felt in Darby’s time, and to which he opposed his vast influence with only partial success, seems now to be asserting itself triumphantly on all hands amongst the Ravenites. I refer to the tendency to discountenance and to suppress all energetic evangelistic action. Though the Exclusive Brethren have undoubtedly had very powerful evangelists, whose success under the disadvantages that they accepted was remarkable, people who plumed themselves on their spirituality considered that the labours of such men bore a humiliating resemblance to the labours of “the sects”—that is to say, of all evangelical denominations except their own. The leader of this anti-evangelistic movement was naturally Mr. Stoney. Possessing no popular gifts himself, he had gathered an esoteric school in whose eyes he stood entirely alone. Amongst these ardent disciples, he systematically depreciated aggressive evangelistic effort. The eccentricity of his exegesis may be measured by a single instance. He said that he had no doubt that Demas forsook St. Paul in order to go on a mission tour, and that it was on this conduct that the apostolic censure was based. That is to say, apparently, that Demas’ love of the present world (αίων) was a love for the souls of its heathen millions. This kind of folly spread far and wide. It has been latterly reinforced by a variety of hyper-Calvinism, and those meetings of the followers of Mr. Raven in which an evangelistic party is still to be found seem generally, as far as I can learn, to be divided into two hostile factions; and in several important instances men of marked zeal and success in mission work have been converted from ultra-fervent supporters of the system into its resolute opponents.

I have not spoken of all the divisions. The secession of Mr. S. O. Cluff and his supporters within Darby’s life-time was perhaps the most important of the lesser schisms. The Cluffites had anticipated the Stuartites and Grantites in dropping the Bethesda discipline. Mr. Cluffs divergence for Darbyism was doctrinal, and connected itself with some phase of the so-called “higher life” teaching.

Enough, at any rate, has been said to amply illustrate the disintegration of the system. A certain Brother, meeting a friend of former days after the great division of 1881, put the caustic question, “To what section of the disorganisation do you belong?” He can little have thought how much additional force the sarcasm was destined to gain within the next ten years.

The contents of this chapter are not satire, but simplest fact. Yet, if I were the enemy of the Darbyites (which I am sure I am very far from being), I should consider that their unvarnished story was a satire to which the genius of a Swift could hardly add point. It is devoutly to be hoped that they may yet themselves attend to the lessons that it teaches.

In the case of many there is good ground for such a hope; indeed, not a few eyes have already been opened. But with some it is far otherwise. While the wiser sort are awaking to a perception that the action of their principles has now made Darbyism a spectacle to Christendom, others are so infatuated that every fresh disruption is hailed as another step in the path of sanctity; and by the time that the number of their sects is literally according to the number of their cities, it is likely that some will see in the perfection of dissolution only the summit of their “path of testimony”.

“Let us,” says Mr. John James, a Montreal Brother, “look at ourselves:—

“Some say I am of J. N. D., others I am of W. K.

“Some say I am of J. B. S., others I am of C. E. S.

“Some say I am of A. P. C., others I am of F. W. G.

“Some say I am of F. E. R., others I am of W. J. L.”^[10]

Mr. James is to be mentioned with honour as one to whom this state of things appeared an unmitigated scandal. He quotes from Mr. Grant: “Our shame is public. It requires no spirituality to see that exactly in that which we have professedly sought we have failed most signally. ‘The unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ is just most surely what we have not kept.” Mr. Grant’s own efforts to apply some remedy to these scandals—even if we judge the efforts directed from an imperfect standpoint—surely deserve the recognition of all who have the welfare of the Church of Christ at heart.

During all these convulsions Mr. Kelly’s followers enjoyed a comparative tranquillity. There were indeed some important defections to the Open Brethren, and elsewhere; but for nearly twenty years there was no disruption, nor any new doctrinal vagaries of consequence. This immunity was doubtless due to the happy survival of the great chief of the party. In Darby and Darbyism I made the following observations on Mr. Kelly’s position: “At the age of eighty, he stands before us as the only survivor of a remarkable school; and with unimpaired zeal and energy, with no mean statesmanship, and with the genuine theological sense that even outsiders have often acknowledged,^[11] he guides the affairs of the little section that still, to his mind, represents the original Brethrenism—or, in other words, that represents the Church of God on earth.”

I quote these words with pleasure as a tribute to one who has through a long life, in a most ungrudging and disinterested spirit, devoted his “laborious days” to the cultivation of the highest learning; but I regret to find that they are no longer fully applicable. Quite recently, as I am informed, some fifty meetings have broken off from Mr. Kelly’s lead. Their manifesto is a tract by Mr. W. W. Fereday of Kenilworth, entitled Fellowship in Closing Days. Mr. Fereday and his friends, like the parties of Messrs. Guff, Stuart and Grant, abandon the Bethesda discipline,—a course vainly urged on the Kellyites fifteen years earlier by Dr. Neatby, whose connexion with them was severed from that time.

A short account may conveniently be added here of the relation of Open Brethrenism to Darbyism. A good deal has been said in recent chapters that in its entirety only applies to Darbyism. An attempt will now be made to indicate within what limits the same account holds good of Open Brethrenism.

Open Brethrenism may be best regarded as a kind of incomplete Darbyism. Darby is the prophet of the whole movement in all its ramifications. Newton, for example, represented elements that existed in some strength in primitive Brethrenism, until they were crushed out by Darby; but Newton separated wholly from both sections, and constantly directed the fire of his polemics against the views that they held in common. Both parties alike were heretical in Newton’s eyes, mainly on three points. They denied that the Church would go through the Great Tribulation; they denied the imputed righteousness of Christ, in the sense in which Newton deemed it essential that that doctrine should be held; and they denied that the Old Testament saints formed an integral part of the Church. It is true that on these points there is not the rigid uniformity amongst the Open Brethren that prevails amongst Exclusives; but the immense majority—and a majority that gives its tone to the whole—is as thoroughly Darbyite on these test-questions as Darby himself.

The looseness of the ecclesiastical organisation of the Open Brethren has saved them from the necessity of pushing local quarrels to the point of a universal schism. Each local meeting grants regular communion to such other meetings as it sees fit; and though there is some approach to an understanding amongst them as to what meetings should be generally recognised, there is nothing to prevent two meetings that disown each other from being both alike recognised by the mass of “open” meetings. This has been the great gain of the Open party, and an ample compensation for certain points of decided inferiority. These cannot be denied. For the most part the writers of the Open Brethren are hardly more than an echo of Darby, Kelly, Bellett, Denny and Deck.^[12]

The discipline of the Open Brethren in individual cases of questionable doctrine is doubtless variable, according to the meeting before which the question comes; but, in many instances, it would probably not be much less stringent than that of Exclusivism in its earlier and more sober days. But if the Open Brethren have excommunicated persons whose errors might have been more charitably and more hopefully dealt with from within, they have had the excuse that they were always under the malevolent scrutiny of their Exclusive rivals. The least symptom of a disposition to deal compassionately with some form of speculative error (assuming for the moment that the offensive tenets really were in every case erroneous) was eagerly caught at by the Exclusives, through a natural instinct of self-justification; and probably some of the Open party have been too nervously anxious not to give their adversaries a needless advantage.

In July, 1872, some of the “Open” leaders issued a manifesto, professing the ordinary principles of evangelical orthodoxy. With reference to “discipline,” they observe that it “should be restorative in its character; and the solemn act of separation should be resorted to only after loving and faithful dealing has failed to reclaim”. The honoured name of John Code appears at the head of the signatures.

It would be unsafe to infer that the Open Brethren are a more moderate and conciliatory kind of Darbyites. The truth is that heterogeneity is a leading feature of the Open party. Their variations are at least as remarkable as the proverbial “variations of Popery”. Some of them contentedly take their place, on terms of a friendly equality, with evangelical Christians of every name. Others, unhappily, are to the full as narrow and intolerant as the Exclusives at their worst. This party is strongest in the North and in Scotland, but it has a good deal of weight even in London.

The moderate section comprises some who consider open ministry preferable, but not obligatory; and some who, though deeming it enjoined by Scripture and therefore obligatory, regard it as a secondary point on which difference of opinion is admissible. In both cases therefore there is no disposition to unchurch other denominations. This party has, I believe, gained greatly in strength of late years, by the force of the reaction against an extremely fanatical movement known by the name of “Needed Truth,”—a designation taken from the title of its organ. It aimed at imposing a narrower and more exclusive practice than had ever prevailed in any section of the Brethren whatsoever. Happily, after some prospect of considerable success, it was generally rejected. It exemplified the operation of bigoted principles in so unamiable a light that it did much good, as a warning, to the Open Brethren.

With the more liberal meetings other churches of pronouncedly evangelical principles have found it possible to cooperate with cordiality; and in a day when the efforts of good men are increasingly directed to healing the divisions of the Church, such alliances should surely be cultivated to the utmost. This course, even apart from its direct effect, will be fruitful of good; for it will strengthen the hands of those who, within the ranks of Plymouth, are pleading (often very earnestly) the claims of catholicity. They need the support They confront an influential party that advocates a line of action by which, in many a town and village, the Church of Christ is seriously weakened. Some young fellows entirely careless about religion of any kind are converted among the Methodists of a Yorkshire village, and begin zealously working in the Sunday School or Young Men’s Guild. They come under the influence of a Plymouth Brother elsewhere. At his instigation, they renounce all connexion with the worship and work of the Methodists, although there is no meeting of the Brethren in their village. Until they can form one, they must walk over to the nearest town in which one is found. If they are unable to do this, they must stay at home. If is the greatest mistake to suppose that the Brother who enjoins such a course is necessarily an Exclusive; he may quite well be “Open”. We are bound to give such men the fullest credit for conscientiously holding that all worship except that of the Brethren is positively unlawful; but it is clear that their unenlightened zeal is often a very serious barrier to the union of Christian hearts, and a great impediment to the furtherance of the gospel!

The peculiarities of Open Brethrenism in respect of oversight and local membership have been discussed elsewhere.^[13] Its ministry is at least as uncontrolled as that of the Exclusives, and as it is less regulated by any tacit understanding with regard to what is suitable the want of control is liable to be more keenly felt. The exercises of the Sunday morning meeting amongst the old Exclusives were largely moulded upon a sort of unwritten liturgy, which prescribed the acts and the spiritual tone that were suitable to the various stages of the worship. The control of this liturgy over the conduct of the worship necessarily varied with the intelligence of the local leaders, and to a less extent with the aptitude of their followers; and it might often break down altogether. Still, the general influence of a tradition was unmistakeable. No doubt the standard was over narrow and rigid; no doubt too it might become as formal and mechanical as any other liturgy, for no form has life in itself; yet on the whole the action of the tradition was salutary, and the want of it among Open Brethren has painfully affected many who have passed over from the ranks of the Exclusives.

The institution of any kind of semi-recognised eldership is a plain step in the right direction. Still, a self-appointed presbytery with undefined functions could scarcely, one would suppose, impart much stability to a church at a serious crisis. A few of the Open meetings, it is true, go further, but I believe they are very few.

Ministerial maintenance is on much the same lines as in Darbyism, and the principle is encumbered by similar drawbacks. But at Bethesda from the first it has been deemed lawful to place boxes at the chapel doors to receive contributions for the support of the ministry; and some other meetings (I scarcely think many) have followed this example. Open Brethren would probably share, almost to the full, the dislike of the Exclusives to a specified ministerial salary, or even to an income derived from specified sources. Indeed, the dislike is a manifest feature of the original Brethrenism.

Whatever their weaknesses, the Open Brethren have their great and characteristic virtues. Theological learning, it is true, is now at a very low ebb among them. On the other hand, they are emphatically a Bible-reading and Bible-loving community, and are comparatively free from that morbid craving for novelties by which the later stages of Darbyism have been marked. They hold the mystical theories of ministry rather loosely and vaguely, and they talk little of the authority of the Assembly. Furthermore, when we pass from Darbyism to Open Brethrenism, we leave utterly behind us the supercilious contempt for aggressive evangelisation. Both at home and abroad the Open Brethren give themselves to mission work with ardour. Their stations are dotted over the face of the whole earth. They have added at least one, in Mr. F. S. Arnot of Garenganze, to the roll of the great pioneers of the modern missionary movement; and many other names, less famous, but perhaps no less worthy, might easily be mentioned. This is their truest glory. In this respect they have broken loose from the lead of the more powerful branch of their school, to place themselves side by side with the most zealous of other denominations in the great work of the Church.

1. I take this opportunity of expressing my admiration of one of Mr. Kelly’s principal adherents, the late William Burbidge—a preacher of remarkable power, and truly saintly character. His retiring and self-depreciating disposition long kept him in the background; but Exclusive Brethrenism has had very few to equal him in the pulpit.
2. These were by no means the only critics of the new heresiarch. One zealous Brother published a review of Mr. Stuart’s tract, Christian Standing and Condition, and professed to have examined “in a Bercean spirit” the original Scriptures. He exposed himself to the keen retort of his learned adversary that “an essential condition for acting in that spirit is, surely, a little acquaintance with the language upon which one is writing”.
3. As this text has been the pretext for innumerable follies in the way of “discipline” in these later years of Brethrenism, the English reader should bear in mind that reject in this Scripture has simply the sense of shun or avoid.
4. Some of Mr. Grant’s friends demurred to the representation of his doctrine contained in the last clause. The whole enumeration of his alleged errors proceeds of course from his enemies.
5. B. C. Greenman, An Appeal to our Brethren in Fellowship with Mr. F. E. Raven, p. 3.
6. F. E. R. in Truth for the Time, pt. x., p. 31.
7. Notes of Readings and Addresses in United States and Canada, October, 1898, revised by F. E. R ., p. 107.
8. P. 116.
9. P. 368.
10. I append a list of the surnames in the order of the above table: Darby, Kelly, Stoney, Stuart, Cecil, Grant, Raven, Lowe.
11. I quote a single instance: “A man who born for the universe narrowed his mind by Darbyism” (Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries, p. 164). The severity of the implied criticism on the school enhances the high value of the compliment to the man.
12. It must be remembered that Newton and Tregelles were never in any sense Open Brethren.
13. Chap. x.