mystical insight, the apostle of tireless energy and total self-devotion, the ecclesiastic of restless ambitions and stormy strifes,—all were withdrawn from us in John Nelson Darby.
His end is no occasion for harsh judgments. Those who accept the account given in this work, if they cannot, on a review of his life as a whole, acquit him, will have no wish to condemn him. Startling contradictions in character are no novelty, but we might be pardoned for thinking that they culminated in Darby. One of his leading followers said that there never was so much of grace as in him, nor so much of unsubdued nature. To some people this verdict seems mere wanton paradox. I, for one, view it in a very different light; and of Darby’s life and character as a whole I prefer to say, after the fashion of old John Foxe, “Which matter being too hard for me, I remit it to the judgment of God Almighty”.
If Darby had occupied Abraham’s position, he might have left behind him hardly less than Abraham’s fame. It is easy to picture him dwelling in the land of promise as in a strange country, the contented heir of the promises of the world to come; or communing with God in the night-watches, by the lonely tent and altar that mark the stages of his faithful pilgrimage; or despising the gifts of the King of Sodom, and extending a covenant of peace to the Philistine Abimelech; dispensing meanwhile the blessings of a righteous and benignant rule to a family and household that would never dream of a law that they did not read in his eye. But his lot denied him circumstances so favourable to the exercise of his virtues and to the repression of his one great vice, and cast him on the evil days of the turmoil of sects of the nineteenth century. And it was Darby’s supreme misfortune that
