Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/205

 and a poet. But his courage, his administrative genius, and his force of will, had far more to do than all his acquirements with the ascendency he exercised—an ascendency that entitles him to no inconspicuous place amongst the born leaders of men.

Other leaders indeed have been equally absolute, but seldom in face of equal obstacles. Wesley, for instance, exercised an unchallenged autocracy over the Wesleyan Methodists of his own life-time, and avowed it with the most engaging frankness. But his followers were, on an average, men of far less striking personality than Darby’s; and his sect, up to the time of his death, was far less widely ramified. Nor was Wesley compelled to exercise the reality of absolutism while disdaining its forms. His frankly voluntary association might adopt what legislation it pleased; but on Darby’s peculiar High Church theory, all legislation for his followers had existed in the first century, and was divine and immutable. His legislation was therefore bound down to the forms of Scriptural interpretation, and he would have found it hard to produce Scriptural authority for him to imitate Wesley’s avowed absolutism.

The result was that he found himself to a very great extent thrown back on his simple personal ascendency; and this availed for more than thirty years to hold together a world-wide confederacy united by no other bond that was not of the most shadowy description. His followers were in fact without written code or constitution, without denominational history or traditions; they had no national or provincial synods; and they possessed as their distinctive tenet only an ecclesiastical formula of a most subtle and impracticable description. Yet, till within a year of Darby’s death, they cohered so perfectly that every minutest act of discipline that was