Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/49

Rh would naturally produce. In this spirit, he renounced in the first place all thought of providing for his children; he would give his money to God, and God would care for them. He followed this up by abandoning a lucrative profession without reluctance or misgiving; and when his wife received a legacy of £10,000 or £12,000, he apparently sank it all in the Bagdad mission, and afterwards prosecuted missionary work for many years without the support of a committee at home, and often without visible means of maintenance of any kind. In a similar way he felt himself led, rejecting all human mediation, to derive his right to minister directly from God; and it was by an obvious extension of the same principle that he concluded that it was God’s mind that he and his friends should assemble, were it even in the absence of all adequate provision for edification, in the confidence that God could minister by whomsoever he I pleased.

So far as Groves’ personal course is concerned, any Christian may feel free to allow that it might have been determined by a special operation of the Holy Ghost. In the providence of God, a dormant Church has perhaps not seldom been awakened by measures adapted to the emergency of the moment, and suited to a peculiar energy of faith on the part of the reformer who has adopted them. Whether Groves were right in proposing analogous methods in the worship of the Church, where many persons are involved, and where the average of faith hardly ever rises very high, may well be questioned, even if he had only designed to suggest a passing phase of Christian testimony. Nor would it necessarily be captious to say that Groves might have displayed a more enlightened faith if he had been able to recognise the hand of God, not more