Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/233

 follow? my reply is simply this, shew me that the Lord has promised His Spirit to this end, and I at once admit its obligation in the face of all practical and experienced difficulties: but if I see pastorship, eldership, and ministry recognised as a settled fixed service in the church to this end, I cannot reject God’s evidently ordained plan, and set up one of my own, because I think it more spiritual.

“D— seems [? feels] justified in rejecting all such helps as the way of obtaining proper subordination in the assembly of God’s saints, by saying the ‘Church is in ruins’; this is his theory; but neither in the word, nor in my own experience or judgment, do I realise that this state of the Church, even though it existed to the full extent he declares, was to be met by the overthrow of God’s order, and the substitution of one so exceedingly spiritual, (if I may so use the term,) as it seemed not good to the Holy Spirit to institute, when all things were comparatively in order.”

Throughout his protracted and painful illness, his frame of mind was singularly peaceful and triumphant. Subjected as he had been to a most unworthy persecution, his friends might well be pardoned if they attached to the fact even more than its real importance. We accept it now as a truism that the life is much more than the death; but in Groves’ case the death was of one piece with the life. “I could not cut off one of Christ’s” were amongst the last words that he spoke.

In the early sixties a long series of disciplinary proceedings, undertaken by the London Central Meeting, afforded ample illustration of the principles that have been explained in this chapter.

This Central Meeting was the great instrument of Darby’s despotism. He found Scriptural authority for it in the fact that the New Testament, though it speaks of the churches of a province, invariably speaks of the