Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/30

18 impression that that remark made on him, Bellett introduces Edward Cronin abruptly, and proceeds: “In a private room we had the Lord’s Supper with, I believe, three others, while I was still going to Sanford Chapel, and John Darby was still in the County Wicklow as a clergyman”

Darby had however, in 1828, published what passes with good right for “the Brethren’s first pamphlet,” under the title of Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ. It was not indeed the manifesto, as Mr. Miller supposed, of a “young community,” for no community as yet existed. It was the expression of a tendency which, though rapidly coming to a head, was as yet a tendency only; and this is just as clear from internal as from external evidence. The tract contains some forcible passages, and attacks the existing order with a good deal of power; but it is strikingly lacking in definiteness of suggestion, and is plainly either the writing of a man who does not yet see his own way clearly, or of one who deliberately prefers to keep his counsel.

Something more will be said of this tract later on, but it is necessary in the meantime to bring up to date the story of the man by whose means a strong Nonconformist element was infused into the new movement.

Edward Cronin was, I understand, slightly Darby’s junior. Professor Stokes states that he was a convert from Roman Catholicism. When he came as a medical student from the South of Ireland to Dublin for his health (about the year 1826, it is said), he belonged to the Independents, and was received to occasional communion by various dissenting churches. “This liberty was continued,” he tells us, “till it was found