ton Street thirty-four years earlier. Both steps were taken on purely individual responsibility. Neither carried at the time the approval of the community at large. The Ryde meeting was in much more serious and general disrepute than the Plymouth meeting had been, and Darby himself with characteristic emphasis had spoken of it as “rotten” for twenty years.[1] In some respects the advantage in the comparison rests clearly with Cronin; for he found a protesting meeting already in existence, whereas Darby took the responsibility of setting the dissident movement on foot. Yet Darby described his own act as a return, “if alone, into the essential and infallible unity of the Body”;[2] but came ere long to treat Cronin’s as a crime.
The opposition to Cronin proceeded mainly from some leading Brethren who have been referred to as lending their countenance to the Temperance Hall meeting. The controversy was already sufficiently exasperated, when a furious letter from Darby arrived in
- ↑ This was the common report. Dr. Cronin asked him just before his departure for Pau to visit the meeting and judge of its state. Darby replied, “Never will I put my foot into that unclean place. I have known it for twenty years to be a defiled meeting.” This rests on Dr. Cronin’s testimony. An Examination of the Principles and Practice of the Park Street Confederacy, by G. Kenwrick, p. 14.
- ↑ This expression occurs in a tract that Darby wrote (in October, 1846) entitled Separation from Evil God’s Principle of Unity. J. E. Howard’s sarcastic comment is worth quoting. “What sort of answer have we to ‘the grand question of the nineteenth century—What is the Church?’ The Church is the pearl, and the pearl has many incrustations, and when these incrustations are all stripped off, we have Mr. Darby ‘alone, in the essential and infallible unity of the body,’ a unity which certainly cannot be broken unless it should please this gentleman some time to quarrel with himself; as it was said of one of Cromwell’s captains that if John Lillburn were left alone in the world John would quarrel with Lillburn, and Lillburn with John.”
