But the document that more than any other sheds strong light on this early period of development is the well-known letter that Groves, weather-bound at Milford Haven on the eve of his second voyage for the East, addressed to Darby, under date March 10, 1836. Groves had landed in England about fifteen months before, and had associated freely with the Brethren in Bristol and Plymouth. The whole letter is well worth perusal for the insight it gives into the characters and views of the two men who played the largest parts in the inauguration of the movement. It will be found verbatim in the appendix to Groves’ Memoir. A few extracts must suffice here.
“I wish you to feel assured that nothing has estranged my heart from you, or lowered my confidence in your being still animated by the same enlarged and generous purposes that once so won and riveted me; and though I feel you have departed from those principles by which you once hoped to have effected them, and are in principle returning to the city from whence you departed, still my soul so reposes in the truth of your heart to God that I feel it needs but a step or two more to advance and you will see all the evil of the systems from which you profess to be separated to spring up among yourselves. … You will be known more by what you witness against than what you witness for, and practically this will prove that you witness against all but yourselves as certainly as the Walkerites or the Glassites: your Shibboleth may be different, but it will be as real. It has been asserted … that I have changed my principles; all I can say is, that as far as I know what those principles were in which I gloried in first discovering them in the Word of God, I now glory in them ten times more since I have experienced their applicability to all the various and perplexing circumstances of the present state of the Church; allowing you to give every individual, and collection of individuals, the standing God gives them, without identifying yourselves with any of their evils.”
The following is specially important: —
“I ever understood our principle of communion to be the possession of the common life … of the family of God…; these were
