have a greater contempt for such a phrase as “denominational preferences”; and the Anglo-Catholic is a very fortunate person if he ever attains to an equally lofty and serene confidence in the exclusive claims of his own system. The moderation of Protestants has put them at a disadvantage. They have had no substitute to offer for the fascinating claim to an exclusive possession of Divine warrant. But the Brethren, hampered by no such drawback, have confronted the highest claims of High Anglicans with claims at least as lofty, and a confidence much more disdainful.
Not that the Darbyites claimed to be actually the Church of God on earth. If we receive their principles from the teaching of their great leaders, they repudiated such a claim. The Church of God, they said, is the aggregate of all believers in Christ; and a local church is a similar local aggregate. This invisible Church cannot, unhappily, be embodied, as things stand; but it may be “expressed,” and the Exclusive Brethren expressed it. Their meeting in any place was the sole “expression” of the Church of God there. It was Divinely recognised; nothing else was. It was graced by the promised presence of the Lord to two or three gathering in His Name; no other congregation, however apparently simple, Scriptural and godly, could have the Lord “in their midst” according to the terms of the promise. They allowed that the Lord, in the sovereignty of grace, might grant blessing in one or all of the other orthodox Christian communities, schismatical though they were; but they held that we must guard against supposing that such compassionate treatment was any condonation of their schism. If the extreme Anglican holds that, whatever excuses the “present confusion” may afford, a position outside Episcopal communion is in fact schism,
