Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/271

 the meeting he took up Stoney’s letter in some excitement, and threw it behind him, saying, “The Achan you are required to get rid of is Bethesda, but the very doctrines about which the division was first made, are now being circulated by all the Exclusive leaders, under the title of ‘advanced truth’”. But whatever momentary excitement there might be, it was evident that Dorman was now an utterly broken man. His speeches seemed, singularly contrary to his wont, almost incoherent; and his voice was often inaudible to a portion of the company. He declared, however, with great emphasis that he hated the very name of Brethrenism. Unless he meant Darbyism, the declaration was in questionable taste, but he evidently distrusted the system of the Brethren at large. He had come to attach a decisive importance to the due and formal recognition of elders, and apparently to the regulation of public worship by them.

Dorman doubtless saw that the want of a powerful local eldership was the great negative condition of Darby’s autocracy, and consequently of the whole system of Darbyism. In 1868 he had pleaded the cause of the eldership in a series of six powerful Letters to Harris. Mr. Mackintosh had published a book on The Assembly of God, or the All-sufficiency of the Name of Jesus. If the growing popularity of the writer had not lent his book a fictitious importance it would hardly have been worth Dorman’s while to attack it, for the argument was very incoherent. “The Assembly,” with which Mackintosh was continually confounding the Exclusive community, was a place where God was allowed to rule,—a place from which “numbers” had “departed,” “because their practical ways did not comport with the purity of the place,”—a place in which