Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/43

Rh he speaks of the virtues with which the denominations were adorned he appears to bear his witness with cordiality. But we look in vain either for any thorough analysis of the evil complained of, or for an intelligible suggestion of any possible remedy.

In discussing the evil Darby assumes that the denomination (as, for example, Congregationalism) is the only possible ecclesiastical unit. Now this is a point of view that all the Independent Churches would have disowned. To them the unit was the local church. Yet, if Darby had known or remembered this, it is at least a question whether he could so easily have taken for granted that every existing Church stood condemned by his dictum, that “no meeting, which is not framed to embrace all the children of God in the full basis of the kingdom of the Son, can find the fulness of blessing, because it does not contemplate it—because its faith does not embrace it” (p. 38). He might also have been saved from the smart, but intrinsically poor antithesis—“The bond of communion is not the unity of the people of God, but really (in point of fact) their differences” (p. 33).

After this, it will not excite surprise that it never occurs to Darby to grapple with the great primary obstacle to that outward expression of the inward unity of God’s family on which his heart was set. There are, and always have been, two competing views as to what the visible Church ought to be; and both are widely held amongst those whose vital religion (and whose place therefore in such an external communion as he desired to see) Darby would have heartily acknowledged. There are Christians who hold that the vital profession of Christianity can be distinguished from the merely nominal with so much certainty that the distinction