Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/294



was the wont of Darby’s sagacious eye to survey the whole field of action, and his indefatigable energy enabled him to bring the power of his personal presence to bear wherever it might be needed, even to the ends of the earth. He began a fruitful work in Germany at Elberfeld in 1854. In 1871 he added Italy to his spheres of labour, and his Meditations on the Acts were composed in Italian. A long campaign in the United States began in 1872. The year 1875 found him in New Zealand. For a man born just within the previous century these exertions were surely prodigious. In 1878 he was at Pau, engaged still in translation work.

On New Year’s Day, 1879, Wigram died. He was in his seventy-fifth year. Those who loved him (and they were many) were wont to say, in the months and years that followed, that he, too, had been taken away from the evil to come; for Darbyism was just entering on its long agony of dissolution. Perhaps no leading member of the community left behind him a higher reputation for personal sanctity, unless it were William Trotter. How to reconcile this with many of the plain facts of his history is not at all clear. Doubtless he was constitutionally unfit for controversy, and it was a