Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/191

 substantiate, raising questions about the tribunal before which you are summoned, i.e. taking the very course you so strongly condemned in Mr. B. W. Newton”.

Howard recommended Groves to test the sincerity of Dorman’s expression of willingness to confront him at Bristol. Groves followed the advice, but without avail. Dorman informed him that the grounds on which his reception at the Tottenham meeting were objected to were “entirely of a public nature connected with Bethesda, and not in any way personal”; and reserved any further answer until a meeting could be held for the general investigation of the Bethesda question. Groves naturally directed Dorman’s attention to the distinctly personal objections that had been alleged in the letter of excommunication addressed to Howard. “The attempt,” Groves now writes, “to mix up your accusations against me, and the consideration of them, with the case at Bethesda, so as not to give me a hearing, till after that complicated question has been heard and decided on, I cannot but consider calculated to throw a doubt over the sincerity of your professed wish to have everything clear, by annexing an impossible condition to it.”

The closing paragraph is another proof of a curious sagacity in Groves, notwithstanding the somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic turn of his mind. “The time will come when, if you refuse, you will experience the truth of this. ‘As you render unto others, so it will be rendered unto you.’” The prediction found a striking, if not a perfectly literal fulfilment. From 1846 onward we have seen Dorman the relentless minister of Darby’s despotism. Within twenty years from that date he had fallen himself before the same ruthless stroke. A fate, kindly cruel, gave him the opportunity of redeeming his fame, and well he availed himself of it.