Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/322

 his single vice, by the irony of circumstances, had perhaps more to do than all his virtues with fixing the character of his life’s work. This threatens to result in the evil that he did living after him, and the good being interred with his bones; and the present writer would be thankful if this work should in some measure serve as a humble obstruction to such an injustice.

The older Brethren were fast falling out of the ranks. In 1883 the Open Brethren sustained a great loss in the death of Lord Congleton. In the same year Andrew Miller passed away, at the age of seventy-three. A devoted friendship of twenty-eight years had been rudely severed by the disagreement between him and Mr. Mackintosh on the Ramsgate question. Not that Mr. Miller would have suffered the difference to affect their intimacy, but good Mr. Mackintosh unfortunately felt himself bound by the ordinary discipline of his party. Mackintosh long survived his old friend, dying a very few years ago at the age of seventy-seven.

Captain Hall followed in October, 1884, at an exceedingly advanced age. So completely did his act in “leaving the Lord’s table,” as it was termed, alienate from him the whole interest of his former friends, that probably few of them had known for many years whether he were living or dead. Yet this old campaigner of the first days of Brethrenism was one of the bravest and most single-hearted men ever found in its ranks. He belonged, moreover, to the small class of theologians who find it easier to suffer for their convictions than to persecute. In the Plymouth schism of 1845 he had laboured to dissuade Darby from forming a fresh communion, and we have seen him shortly afterwards employed in a work of pacification at Bath; while his