the spring of 1827.[1] At one of the social meetings for edification, apparently before the company had dispersed, J. G. Bellett made this statement to her: “Groves has just been telling me, that it appeared to him from Scripture, that believers, meeting together as disciples of Christ, were free to break bread together, as their Lord had admonished them; and that, in as far as the practice of the apostles could be a guide, every Lord’s Day should be set apart for thus remembering the Lord’s death, and obeying his parting command”. “This suggestion of Mr. Groves,” continues his biographer, “was immediately carried out by himself and his friends in Dublin.”
The extraordinary part of it all is that at this time Groves described himself as a “high churchman”. It must of course be borne in mind that the term was used then with a very different meaning from that with which we are now familiar; still, Groves himself illustrates it by saying that he was “so high a churchman” that he “never went to a dissenting place of worship, nor intimately knew a dissenter, except Bessy and Charlotte [Paget]”. His views had no doubt been undergoing a process of modification in Dublin. “From my first going to Dublin,” he writes, “many of my deep-rooted prejudices gave way. I saw those strongly marked distinctions that exist in England little regarded; the
- ↑ Stokes assigns the incident to 1826, but this is not correct. Groves expressly states (Memoir, p. 40) that it was on his return from this visit that Miss Paget induced him to take up evangelistic work at Poltimore. In a letter to Caldecott, under date August 8, 1827 (Memoir, p. 45), he speaks of this as having happened “since I last wrote”. Now a letter to the same correspondent is published bearing date April 2, 1827 (p. 19). But in the summer of 1827 Groves failed to put in an appearance in Dublin, under circumstances that will shortly be related; and he never went there afterwards as a student. We therefore seem shut up to an Easter visit in 1827.
