Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/253

 insight, for an intense and glowing devotion to Christ, his writings have a great and abiding value.

Perhaps no prominent Plymouth Brother ever drew so powerfully the love and esteem of men who had no sympathy with his ecclesiastical position. He and his brother, the Rev. George Bellett, were throughout life singularly closely and tenderly attached. Another clergyman—and he a man of “moderate High Church views”—bore a most emphatic witness in a letter to Miss Bellett.

"“How thankful we ought to be to God who gives us every now and again such witnesses as your most dear and honoured father was, to His own glory, love, and character. If the servant were so lovely, what the Master.

“… He was one of the most remarkable and attractive men, if not the most, I ever met, and after thirty years, the tones of his voice, the expression of his eyes, and the exquisite utterances of his heart are as vivid as though I only saw and heard him today. … Never, never shall I see such an one again.”"

Bellett, like Groves, gave the keynote of his life in one of his last words,—“Oh, the Man of Sychar!”

It is natural to think of this good man as “taken away from the evil to come”. At the time of his death a fresh and very serious storm was brewing. In 1858 and the following year Darby had contributed a series of papers on the sufferings of Christ to the Bible Treasury—a new organ of the Brethren, destined to run a long course, not yet complete, under the able editorship of Mr. William Kelly. These papers, in connexion with one or two that appeared in other magazines, provoked a tumult of disapprobation on the part of persons unfavourable to Darby’s ecclesiastical action. Prominent among these was Mr. Tom Ryan, an Irish Brother that