Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/226

, whereby the leaders of the movement justified a course to which their strongest instincts impelled them, may be assumed without misgiving. For, if we turn to the prerogatives they claimed for the Church, as “represented” by themselves, we shall find no similar timidity restraining their pretensions. To the “two or three gathered in Christ’s Name,” as we have already seen, the disciplinary authority of the primitive Church is committed, and the passage that closes with the promise of Christ’s presence they regarded as their great charter. No chill doubt seems ever to have struck to their hearts upon the recollection that we have no instance in Scripture of ecclesiastical excommunication without apostolic ratification.

But the Darbyites have always wielded the weapon of excommunication with all the assumption of the Church of Rome itself, and within their little sphere, marvellous as the statement may seem, they have inspired hardly less terror. A young man, just “received into fellowship,” once observed to me that if he were ever “put out” he would never lift up his head again. He to be sure was none of the wisest, but his remark reflected the almost universal spirit, and the veterans felt the terror even more than the recruits. Some of their strongest men, possessing the added strength of the profound conviction that they were threatened for righteousness’ sake only, shuddered and recoiled before the prospect of excommunication. It was in part a vague spiritual dread that oppressed them. They attached an awful authority to the act of “the assembly”. Not that they formally and explicitly claimed infallibility for it; but there was a constant tendency towards the sentiment, if not the tenet, of an infallible “assembly”—or at the least of an assembly whose decisions, so far as “government