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Rh wholly with Mr. Darby; as it is, the blame is partly with Mr. Newton, therefore I cannot go with either of them.”

Whether Newton were wise or unwise,—even whether Darby were righteous or unrighteous,—may be treated as a secondary question now. The important point is that the Brethren in their first great emergency found themselves absolutely unprepared to grapple with it. They had no constitution of any kind. They repudiated congregationalism, but they left their communities to fight their battles on no acknowledged basis and with no defined court of appeal. If once the sense of fair play (one would be ashamed to speak of spirituality) broke down, there was no check on the most arbitrary temper. The Brethren were never weary of denouncing “system,” but they made haste to demonstrate that the worst system can hardly be so bad as no system at all.

Darby had hitherto abstained from observing the communion independently. Soon after the investigation he felt relieved from all scruple. On the 28th of December he “began to break bread, and the first Sunday there were … fifty or sixty”. Wigram openly supported him.

No time was lost in transferring the strife to London. On Sunday, January 11, 1846, Lord Congleton publicly charged Wigram at the morning service at the Rawstorne Street meeting with helping Darby in making a division at Plymouth. It is pleasant to record that Congleton had first gone to Wigram privately, once alone, and then accompanied by a witness. The meeting seemed reluctant to take the matter up, and Congleton therefore stood aloof. He was not a supporter of the