Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/344

 Bible, in a wonderful way, was a living book to them. It is said that “a closer and more intimate knowledge of the Bible itself as a living book and not as a mere repertory of proof texts, is one of the marks of our time”. It is certainly one of the marks of Brethrenism. A professional man, brought up in an atmosphere of fervent Evangelicalism, and deeply interested in Christian work, once expressed to me his opinion that the episode of the Woman of Samaria would be found in St. Luke. No earnest Darbyite could have perpetrated such a blunder; and he would have avoided it, not merely from the habit of turning to the incident in St. John, but from a profound (even if not always an articulate) sense of its intensely Johannine character.

The system was the reflexion of the mind of its great prophet. Method and logical coherence are no features of Darby’s divinity. Coherence up to a certain point, of course, cannot be lacking where there is genuine insight; but Darby was too impatient to systematise, or even indeed to verify. In his expository writings, he often drops a half-hint that sets in strong light a passage that great commentators have left obscure. Sometimes he seems to explain with the ease and directness of one that had been in the secret of the author. This illumination has exercised a great (in some respects a dangerous) fascination, blinding many to the real confusion in which his mind often moved. To analyse his position is often to refute it. His central principles of the ruin of the Church and of the expression of its unity are cases in point. They will not endure the light of unambiguous language.