Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/41

Rh is taken for granted by all the writers of the Brethren, and their polemics ordinarily contemplate only those who acknowledge it.

This twofold position was negatively expressed in their favourite dictum that the Church of England was too broad in its basis, and the dissenting churches too narrow. The charge is too vague to be of much consequence. Indeed by shifting their point of view slightly they might have found that the Church was too narrow and Dissent too broad. The point of the saying is merely rhetorical. What is actually expressed is, on the one hand, the Brethren’s abhorrence of national Christianity, with its assumption (as the Brethren understood it) that every Englishman is a Christian; and, on the other, their recoil from the practical assertion of distinctive denominational tenets at the expense of the cultivation of common Christian sympathies. It was, at the first, far less a theory than a sentiment that lay at the root of the new separatism.

Consequently, Brethrenism from the beginning exhibits a certain confusion on the side of theory, and from this confusion it has never altogether worked itself free. Cronin’s narrative affords an excellent example of this. It can hardly have been the case that the Independents would only have welcomed him to the Lord’s Table if he had definitely accepted their denominational position; doubtless they would have granted him “occasional communion,” even if he had joined the Episcopalians. It was presumably felt that a local church having full knowledge of its members was able to guarantee that they were living a life that did not discredit their Christian profession. This is so reasonable and so little at variance, it would seem, with the