tinct warning of the fact; nor is it easy to suppose that he came without such intention. On the other hand, Herzog, much as he blames Darby for his conduct, scarcely goes the length of imputing to him deliberate treachery.
Perhaps, again, Darby underrated the attachment of a large party among the Dissenters to the old forms of their worship. Herzog expressly states that there was in Vaud an extensive predisposition to Darbyism. “People had already begun to regard the Church as destroyed, and its relations with the State as incompatible with the very idea of the Church; to regard the ordination of ministers as a mere matter of human expediency that had no connexion whatever with a divine ordination.” After the revival, special meetings for edification had been instituted, at which there was perfect liberty for any one to take part; and Herzog, while admitting that these meetings had really been useful, considered that a quite undue importance had been attached to them. He rightly deems these tendencies to be much akin to Plymouthism, and it is therefore at least conceivable that Darby was misled by the similarity. Possibly, too, carried away by the evidence of the astonishing influence he was wielding, Darby believed that there would be no destruction of churches, but that the entire dissenting body would embrace his principles, and continue in union, though on what he most sincerely believed to be a far freer, happier, and more edifying basis. His own enjoyment of his meetings was so intense that all he could think of good men who did not like them was that they were under “the curse pronounced upon him who leans upon an arm of flesh,” namely, that “he shall not see when good cometh”[1]
- ↑ Remarks on the pamphlet of M. F. Olivier, Coll. Writ., vol. i., p. 427.
