duty of extending the privileges of the Holy Communion to Christians generally, that Cronin’s difficulty is unintelligible to most people at the present day. He was scarcely, however, a man to act in a merely factious spirit, and probably there was a very real sectarianism in existence against which he was setting up his standard, however much he might blunder in his manifesto. Whatever the special faults of the Church of to-day may be, it has certainly acquired a wider outlook; and we may have difficulty in picturing to ourselves the narrowed sympathies that were such an offence seventy or eighty years ago to men in whose minds the more expansive instincts of the Christian life were beginning to stir. It is at least clear that Cronin understood all his associates at Fitzwilliam Square and at Aungier Street to share his views. “Special membership,” he writes, “as it is called among Dissenters, was the primary and most offensive condition of things to all our minds, so that our first assembling was really marked as a small company of evangelical malcontents.”
Cronin’s was in no sense a leading mind, but we may turn to Darby himself without mending matters. In 1828, when, as already related, he issued the first document of the new movement, Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ, he failed as signally as Cronin to raise any definite issue. The tract is an appeal to Christian feeling against the divisions of the Church. As such it is far from contemptible. The tone is fervent and lofty, and though the style is not good, there are passages of no little dignity and beauty. The characteristic faults of the author’s later polemical writings are scarcely, if at all, to be found. He is not censorious or Pharisaical ; he writes in no spirit of detachment from the Church he condemns, and when
