I say nothing with regard to a point on which the Brethren might have been expected to lay a certain stress—the uncertainty, that is, as to the extent to which any one form of government obtained in the primitive churches. I have abstained, partly because the Brethren did not really rest their case on that consideration; and partly because they could not have done so without shattering the foundations of their system, since it is quite as impossible to prove the universality of open ministry as the universality of government by a board of presbyters. It is indeed a fundamental vice of Brethrenism, for which the habits of its day afford a certain excuse, that its divines never made any serious attempt to discriminate between the transitory and the permanent in the primitive institutions of the Church. The tacit assumption was that everything was permanent.
To what is this rather arbitrary rejection of recognised government to be attributed? Probably to a prejudice engendered in Darby and his lieutenants by their hatred of what they called “religious radicalism”.[1] Authority cannot, they held, come up from below; that is to say, the people who are to be governed cannot confer authority to govern. But neither has any authorising committee, episcopal or otherwise, any credentials. It remained, as it seemed to them, to have no recognised authority at all. But in truth neither Darby nor his leading associates would have consented to any formal recognition, even though it were entirely severed from so much as the
- ↑ Newton used the reproachful term “radicalism” in an almost opposite sense. To him it stood for the policy that withdrew the administration from the hands of “leading brethren,” to vest it in the assembled church.
spiritual gifts exercised “in the present energy of the Holy Spirit,” but rather to the teaching of faithful men, duly instructed beforehand. (2 Tim. ii. 2.)
