Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/38

26 strong and widely-spread revulsion against some of the dominant ecclesiastical principles of that day certainly existed; and many who shared in it were feeling their way more or less vaguely towards a common solution of the difficulty. Nor were there lacking special circumstances in Ireland that tended to turn the minds of the malcontents in one given direction.

The state of things against which Brethrenism was an embodied revolt is described by Professor Stokes in the article to which reference has been already frequently made. He tells us that Darby, after the failure of his protest against the Charge and the Petition, “looked around … for some body which might answer his aspirations after a spiritual communion based on New Testament and religious principles, and not on mere political expediency, and soon found it in a society, or rather an unorganised collection of societies, which had been for many years growing and developing, and which under his guidance was destined to take final shape in the sect now called the Plymouth Brethren,”—of which sect Professor Stokes assigns the original formation to Groves and Bellett. “Now to understand,” he proceeds, “the principal religious movements of the present age, the Broad Church and the Oxford movements, as well as the great disintegrating movement of Plymouth Brethrenism, we must realise the prominent religious features of the days of the Regency and of the reign of George IV.”

In this connexion Professor Stokes lays great stress on the Walkerite movement; and to this the more amiable Kellyite movement ought surely to be added. Walker was a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and chaplain of the Bethesda Chapel. He was a Calvinist of an extreme, not to say a rabid type, and came to find