Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/119

Rh. Brethren that had sought to avail themselves of their right under a system of open ministry to address the church had been repeatedly hindered, it was said, by Mr. Newton or his friends. Even the beginnings of a settled order in ministry had been made, according to Darby ; for everybody “knew when it was Mr. Newton’s and when Mr. H[arris]’s day: and people took their measures for going accordingly”. This “regular alternation of two,” and discourses prepared beforehand, were principles quite at variance, in Darby’s belief, with “that dependence on the Spirit which characterised the profession of the brethren”. Of course, if Darby referred to the profession of the Brethren in the earliest years, his statement is quite erroneous, and in view of his use of the preterite tense it is difficult to know what other meaning to assign to his words. His constant appeal to original practice, in his controversy with Newton, is indeed always futile. The Brethren started almost without defining anything, and every man was at liberty to work out the problem for himself. When we read of the Plymouth meeting, and of the Bethesda meeting at Bristol, as not being Brethren’s meetings in the full sense, all that the statement amounts to (supposing it to be in some sense correct) is that Darbyism had gradually become the immensely preponderant principle, and that these meetings had undergone a somewhat different development. Plymouth indeed was plainly the metropolitan church in England, and it was naturally a galling thing for Darby that his principles, which so seldom sustained a check anywhere else, should fail to make headway there.

Darby also taxed Newton with trying to engross all power within the Church; with having, to that end,