really offered a carrière ouverte aux talents; and, above all, it offered a full ministerial career to capable men who were unwilling or unable to make the ministry their profession. And the great world was very thoroughly shut out by the genuine Darbyite. The world might not value his treasure; but the least insight into it was more than the world could buy from him. The contempt with which others too often looked down upon the Brethren contained a suspicious alloy of anger; but the contempt with which the Brethren too often looked down upon others was serene and perfect. They were dogmatists in the last degree of dogmatism. If they described members of other denominations whose excellence they did not question as “having very little light,” or even as “being very ignorant,” nothing insolent or offensive was usually intended. To them it was the most simple and natural statement of a palpable fact.
That Darbyism shared in the weakness inherent in all monasticism, I have made no effort to conceal. It is therefore the more incumbent upon me to state that it strikingly exemplified monastic virtues. Our generation plumes itself on the liberality that has done tardy justice to the strong side of the earlier monachism, and it would be grossly uncandid to withhold a similar tribute from Darbyism. Indeed it is a simple duty to assert that the virtues of the contemplative life—its elevated standard of personal dignity, its devoutness of tone, its refinement of feeling, its tranquil saintliness—can seldom have been more strikingly exemplified.[1] It is not merely that the
- ↑ I painfully feel that this statement, confidently as I make it, may seem to be contradicted by much that I have already recorded, and by much that I have yet to record. But no one can make even a beginning in understanding Brethrenism who does not keep in mind that the system as it may be observed from without,
