Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/25

Rh whether for the general public or for the philosophical enquirer.

John Nelson Darby was born in November, 1800. He was therefore a few weeks younger than Macaulay, and about three months older than Cardinal Newman. London was his birthplace, and “he was thus by accident of English birth, but otherwise was thoroughly Irish”. He came “of a highly honourable family”. His father was John Darby of Markley, Sussex, and of Leap Castle, King’s County, Ireland. From Westminster School, where he received his early education, he proceeded to Trinity College, Dublin, which is thus as much the academic parent of Plymouth Brethrenism, as Oxford of the Evangelical revival a hundred years earlier. He entered at Dublin “as a fellow-commoner at the age of fifteen, and graduated there as Classical Gold Medallist, when little more than eighteen years old [he was in fact nearer nineteen], in the summer of 1819”. Though called, like Bellett, to the Irish bar, he soon abandoned the profession, and accepted ordination to a Wicklow curacy. Archbishop Magee ordained him deacon in 1825, and priest in 1826.

Darby passed through the experience of a very High Churchman. He relates that he at one time earnestly disowned the name of Protestant. “I looked for the Church. … I too, governed by a morbid imagination, thought much of Rome, and its professed sanctity, and catholicity, and antiquity.” Elsewhere he says, “I know the system [Puseyism]. I knew it and walked in it years before Dr. Newman, as I learn from his book, thought