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
