Page:Groves - Darbyism - Its Rise and Development and a Review of the Bethesda Question.djvu/64

 the means made use of to maintain this discipline among all connected with the Priory and London Bridge meetings, which appear to have exercised an absolute control over all that which concerns the interest of the Darby party. The writings of Mr. Stewart, Mr. Culverhouse, and others, sufficiently disclose the state of things among the meetings with which the writers were themselves mixed up, and of which enough has been already written to satisfy the minds of those unbiassed, of the real evil at work, and of the character of the despotic rule that has been usurped over the Lord’s heritage, for which, however, those who rule and those who submit, are jointly responsible to God. If this centralized rule and discipline, which led the London assemblies to take up the concerns of others, and to investigate the doctrines held and the deeds done by believers at a distance, had not existed, they would have had leisure to have examined their own ways, and the life and conduct of those in immediate fellowship with themselves, and they would not have become a reproach for “gross sin,” and their meetings a disgrace for “ungodly disorder.” It would not have been needful to allude to these things, or to the painful occurrences at those meetings at the Priory and elsewhere, had they been merely temporary exhibitions of the evil that dwells in all those who still carry about with them a body of sin and death, into which every saint and every gathering of saints, in a weak and evil hour may fall; but it is necessary to do so because there is seen in them the natural and necessary development of principles, that the Church of God needs to be warned against, as ultimately subversive of all godliness, and of all rectitude of conscience. Individual acts of evil, while involving those who are guilty of them in the punishment that is due, pass away and often ultimately lead to a restoration in grace, and to a strengthening of the fallen in the ways of holiness and peace; but it is otherwise when a “law” of wickedness becomes dominant, or when a principle of evil takes possession of the mind; it grows, it ripens, it brings forth fruit, and sows itself wider and wider, and in the end becomes a devastating torrent, whose course is marked by the destruction and the misery that it causes. It is said of the ungodly, that sin is established by them by a law, an obligation to evil is laid upon the conscience as a rule of action, and under a terrible delusion does the sinner act, never asking himself the question, “Is there not a lie at my right hand?” Into this the saint may in any matter fall, when wilful blindness (a wilfulness of which God alone is the judge), takes possession of the soul, which produces that “incapacity of conscience,” the thought of which may well make the stoutest tremble; in which, however,