Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/327

 work not being necessary to ‘sealing’ (4) “that Romans vii. is the experience of one who is justified in Christ, sealed, seeking to abide in Christ, and to be fruitful and holy;” (5) “that souls may have peace and not know it, be justified and not know it, have the Holy Ghost and be in bondage.”

Imagine a world-wide division ruthlessly precipitated in order that such shreds of this fragment of a system as might be recoverable after the convulsion should be protected against the doctrines that the saints of old had eternal life, and that the 7th of Romans describes Christian experience!

“Playing at churches,” was the sarcastic comment of a veteran Brother upon the Ryde-Ramsgate disruption. What description can he have found for the events of the years that followed?

It appears that there were forty or fifty dissentients from the Montreal decree, but that this was not held to invalidate it—a fact from which we may infer that the purest Darbyites were by this time seriously contaminated with the principles of “Dissent”.

The year 1890 witnessed a still more extensive division. The occasion was the teaching of Mr. F. E. Raven, a Greenwich Brother, whose previous reputation scarcely marked him out for the leader of a school. It is difficult to ascertain the exact truth with regard to the most serious charges against his doctrine, as some pamphlets that were said to prove them appear not to have been published, and therefore cannot always be