High Churchmanship. A slightly different turn in his spiritual experiences when he was five and twenty might have led him to forestall Newman and Pusey, and have made him the terrible leader of a “Catholic reaction”. He took instead a Biblical and evangelical direction, but his mind never recovered from its early warp. Though the earlier period of his career as a Plymouth Brother varied essentially from the later, he retained during them both the same vague conception of the Church—a conception formed by a curious blending of Puseyite with ultra-evangelical elements. Accustomed to an unquestioning submission to a presumed Catholic Church, constituted by episcopal succession, he found his spiritual sympathies outgrowing his theory. He felt that the outward had failed to maintain a correspondence with the inward, and he therefore deemed it but a ruin. But Dissent mended nothing. It was an attempt—generally a well-meant attempt—to repair what was irreparable. The substitution of a Presbyterian for an Episcopalian administration, the revision of sacramental conceptions, the abjuration (in some cases) of all connexion with the State, might be improvements as far as they went, but never touched the root of the matter. They could not restore the glory of the Church, for they could not restore its unity, nor gather together the scattered children of God. The only thing to do was to own at once the ruin, and the impotence to remedy it; and in Darby’s view, this was his great and distinctive witness.
To put it briefly, the great duty of all Christians is to recognise the ruin of the Church. This being duly recognised, there are two obvious courses that are in fact equally pernicious. The first is to acquiesce in the ruin; this is the sin of Christians that remain in nationalism, or in any other kind of avowedly “mixed” communion.
