Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/101

Rh hell should not prevail against the church He would build.

So far as Darby’s thought can be regarded as definite, there is no doubt that he did treat the outward frame as essential. He made all the characteristic testimony of the Church (and even, it would seem, of Christianity) to depend on the preservation of an external unity. Darby could scarcely even grasp the familiar conception of a transcendental Christian unity rising supreme above all organised expression, and above all organised contradiction. To the end of his days he had no more sympathy with such a view than when he was what might be called a Puseyite before the time. In like manner, his disgust at the distinction between the visible Church and the invisible is so great that he sometimes argues against it in a manner wholly inexplicable, unless he thought “any stick good enough to beat a dog with”. “Believers have sought,” he says, in the first of his series of Swiss tracts, “to shelter themselves under the distinction between a visible and an invisible church. But I read in Scripture—‘Ye are the light of the world’. Of what use is an invisible light? … To say that the true Church has been reduced to the condition of being invisible is at once to decide the question, and to affirm that the Church has entirely lost its original and essential standing. … If it has become invisible it has ceased to answer the purpose for which it was formed.” Did Darby think that an invisible lamp can never afford light? The absurdity of the argument would not signify, if it could be attributed to pure inadvertence; but it is only a sample of the confusion that attends Darby’s whole treatment of the subject.

The clue to the confusion is to be found in his early