Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/299

 Street thirty-four years earlier. Both steps were taken on purely individual responsibility. Neither carried at the time the approval of the community at large. The Ryde meeting was in much more serious and general disrepute than the Plymouth meeting had been, and Darby himself with characteristic emphasis had spoken of it as “rotten” for twenty years. In some respects the advantage in the comparison rests clearly with Cronin; for he found a protesting meeting already in existence, whereas Darby took the responsibility of setting the dissident movement on foot. Yet Darby described his own act as a return, “if alone, into the essential and infallible unity of the Body”; but came ere long to treat Cronin’s as a crime.

The opposition to Cronin proceeded mainly from some leading Brethren who have been referred to as lending their countenance to the Temperance Hall meeting. The controversy was already sufficiently exasperated, when a furious letter from Darby arrived in