recognised in any part of the world was recognised in every other. This is surely almost a unique fact.
Darby’s influence was built up on a base of enormous enthusiasm. We must dismiss from our minds once for all any idea of Darby as a man that availed himself of an enthusiasm that he did not share. Even his overweening jealousy for his own supremacy would naturally clothe itself to his own mind in the guise of zeal for the one institution upon earth that embodied a divine idea. After all, it is nothing very new that a man should be profoundly convinced that he is doing God’s work on a great scale, and be filled in the depths of his soul with an answering enthusiasm, yet condescend at the same time to actions that would compromise much less lofty pretensions.
Fundamentally, the conception to which Darby de- voted his enormous energies for more than fifty years was a High Churchism that should disdain the common accompaniment of Ritualism, and should borrow from Protestantism an intensely Biblical element. Fully as we must recognise the gigantic failure of the attempt to embody it, we may yet admit that the conception is a striking and original one. But it is certain that nothing less than a monumental enthusiasm could have initiated—or, still more, could have sustained—a movement that aimed at realising so impracticable an ideal.
It has been often observed that, through a life of ceaseless controversy, devotional literature still remained Darby’s favourite occupation. It was always natural and delightful to him to turn aside, whether from the pressure of controversy or from the absorbing study of unfulfilled prophecy, to the simple beauties of Philippians, or to the perennial calm of the contemplations of St. John. Of all the hymns of the Brethren—and no one
