Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/28

16 the same thing; for, instead of bringing them to graft them into the vine, the liberty and security of Christ, to pledge their souls to that which (if the civil Sovereign should choose wrong) would be Popery, and is in fact a denial of union with Christ being the vital principle and bond of the true Church, that general assembly and Church of the first born whose names are written in heaven, which is the true Church. … Here is true catholicity, and to affirm it of anything else is Popery, however modified.”

By Darby’s showing, these measures of his diocesan very effectually sacrificed the spiritual power of the Church of Ireland to its civil security. “I may mention,” Darby writes thirty-eight years later, “that just at that time the Roman Catholics were becoming Protestants at the rate of 600 or 800 a week. The Archbishop (Magee) imposed, within the limits of his jurisdiction, the oaths of allegiance and supremacy; and the work everywhere instantly ceased.”

The following paragraph from Darby’s pamphlet may be quoted as being perhaps at once the most striking and the most representative of the position he took up against the great bulk of the Irish clergy.

"“I quote one passage [from the Charge]: ‘The Sovereign cannot prescribe in favour of a system, that maintains a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government.’ There is a spiritual supremacy independent of civil government; the spiritual supremacy of Christ, of which the clergy are ministers—not an earthly dominion, but the very contrary. But when our Lord was brought before Pilate and charged with being a King, He did not affirm the harmlessness of His religion, by stating its amalgamation of interests with the State, or that it was merely ‘another aspect of the same body,’ but unqualifiedly assented to the position, ‘witnessed a good confession,’ that it was a kingdom, but not of this world.”"

The tone of the pamphlet is becoming—firm in its opposition, but neither disrespectful nor unsympathetic. Darby relates that Daly, subsequently Bishop of Cashel,