lasted till 1833, when the bishop was obliged to retire on account of the extreme anti-Church views which were openly avowed.”
If Professor Stokes, whose pen furnishes this account of the Powerscourt meetings, intends to convey that they ceased from the year 1833, he is certainly wrong. Stoney[1] has left us a graphic account of one of these conferences that he attended as late as September, 1838.
“Mr. John Synge was in the chair. He called on each to speak in turn on a given subject. Mr. Darby spoke last, and often for hours, touching on all that had been previously said. Mr. Wigram sat next him. Captain Hall, Mr. George Curzon, Sir Alexander Campbell, Mr. Bellett, Mr. Thomas Mansell, Mr. Mahon, Mr. Edward Synge were there. There were clergymen present, and Irvingites.”
Side by side with this description it is worth while to place Bellett’s, for Bellett was no believer in a golden age of Brethrenism, and had a keen sense of the short-comings of the system at its best.
“Much at the same time dear Lady Powerscourt had begun some prophetic meetings. … It was there I first knew George Wigram, Percy Hall, and others. The meetings were truly precious to the soul, and night after night did I retire to my room at Powerscourt House in a deep sense of how little a one I was in Christ, in the presence of so much grace and devotedness around me through the day.”
In all this preoccupation with the study of unfulfilled prophecy, the Brethren never in any single instance fell into the snare of “fixing dates”. They strongly opposed all the ill-starred attempts of the kind that many of their
- ↑ J. Butler Stoney, who came of a good Irish family, joined the Brethren in 1834. He was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, where he had entered with a view to taking orders. He had been powerfully attracted by the meetings at Aungier Street, and a certain address of Darby’s had a decisive influence on him.
