than to seek to account for a movement that has exercised an influence so deep and wide, without the frankest acknowledgment that it must have contained elements of high excellence. The problem is to explain how a system, labouring under such great and palpable drawbacks, has for seventy years been draining the churches of a not contemptible proportion of their most spiritual members; and how a system, divided and subdivided in a series of schisms equally trivial in their causes and embittered in their spirit,—a system presenting a spectacle of sometimes five or six meetings without intercommunion in one moderate-sized town,—is even to this day a force to be reckoned with among the churches. To refuse to acknowledge the virtues of Brethrenism is merely to shirk the problem, or to constitute it insoluble.
In Darbyism itself—in this respect probably representing the original traditions of Brethrenism—the standard of good breeding was very high. It was often remarked how refining an influence association with the Darbyites exercised upon people of an uncultured class. It is a very imperfect explanation to say that the aristocratic infusion was very strong, and gave colour to the whole, although that is true as far as it goes. It was rather a question of the well-known dignifying influence of Calvinism, developed under somewhat new conditions. The heavenly exaltation of the saints in Christ was the constant topic of the conversation of the Brethren, as it was also the sublime theme that ennobled their hymns. Christians have in general been content perhaps to treat this doctrine with a somewhat distant respect; in Darbyism it was the most simple and familiar of truths, and the centre of earthly life. Every individual Darbyite became free of a great esoteric community habituated to this sublime contemplation. Sometimes—and not seldom
