said to him, “You ought to become a Dissenter”. Daly was a most pronounced Evangelical, and the remark may be taken as a gauge of the Erastianism of the Established Church of that day.
It has been stated that Darby resigned his curacy in this year; but Bellett distinctly says that “he continued in his mountain curacy” after these events, and implies that the continuance was of some duration. The resignation may safely be assigned to 1828, and probably to the latter half of the year. But Bellett fully recognises that his friend’s churchmanship had received a shock from which it did not recover.[1]
With the movement in Dublin Darby was already in touch, partly by his own visits to Dublin, and partly by Bellett’s to Wicklow. It may be gathered from Mr. Andrew Miller’s narrative, which was principally based on statements that Darby made to its author, that the first occasion on which Darby observed the Lord’s Supper at one of the informal meetings for mutual edification was in the winter of 1827-8; but the idea conveyed by that narrative, that this particular meeting became a permanent ecclesiastical institution, and a nucleus round which Brethrenism at large gradually gathered, could scarcely be more erroneous. It is evident that Bellett and Hutchinson “held on loosely” to the Established Church through the greater part of 1828, even if it is safe to assume that this state of things was brought to a close by Groves’ remark at the end of that year. Immediately following his account of the extraordinary
- ↑ Darby’s churchmanship did not, in the judgment of such warm friends and supporters as Bellett and Cronin, terminate with the resignation of his curacy. Bellett brings it down to 1834, when, he says, Darby was “all but detached from the Church of England”. This did not imply, in those early days, that he was not also one of the Brethren.
