Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/228

 obscure and uncultivated congregation. But however far this were the case, it would invalidate nothing that I have said. The centralisation of Exclusivism has to be reckoned with. Darby’s influence, for example, would have sufficed in the long run to secure the expulsion of any teacher, no matter how honoured a name he bore or how strongly he were entrenched in the love and esteem of the church in which he laboured. And the authority of the “assembly” was the instrument of this astounding despotism. Nor could any man, having once assimilated the genuine principles of Darbyism, despise the unrighteous decree of which he was the victim, except by as real a triumph of the freeborn spirit of Christianity over the servile terrors of superstition as the dying nun of Port Royal achieved when, being refused the last rites of the Church by the malice of the triumphant Jesuits, she exclaimed in the words of St. Augustine, “Crede et manducasti”.

The “assembly” in which these awful powers are vested is very simple in its constitution. The Brethren have of course always been thorough believers in the practicability of a “pure communion,”—that is to say, of a Church embracing all converted people, and to all intents and purposes containing none besides. If they speak of a Christian, they understand a person that can make a profession that is satisfactory to them of having been converted to God. Now it is the view of the Brethren generally, (though doubtless not universally), that is the right and duty of every Christian to associate himself with them. But according to the theory of Darbyism all Christians, whether they respond to this