Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/53

Rh necessarily decline the pursuit of science, knowledge, art, history,—except so far as any of these things might be made useful tools for immediate spiritual results.”

It is of course possible that Darby would have demurred to some particulars of this representation; but it is at all events a description of Darby’s earliest teaching as it was apprehended by a mind of remarkable acuteness.

A graphic account by the same pen of Darby’s personal asceticism will be more conveniently given in our next chapter. Such asceticism was for very long a leading feature of all Brethrenism, and, so far at least as dress was concerned, it lingered down to a period within the recollection of men who have not reached middle life; and, indeed, many traces of it are still to be found. Lord Congleton, as his biographer, Henry Groves, tells us, though in possession of an independent income of £1,200 a year, took a house in Teignmouth of which the rent was £12, furnished it with wooden chairs and a plain deal table, steel forks and pewter tea-spoons, and wholly dispensed with carpets. The deal table, “by concession to the housemaid, was afterwards stained, because of the trouble it gave in constant scouring to keep it clean”. Carpets seem to have been regarded with singular disfavour by the Brethren. The late Benjamin Wills Newton, I have been told, lived at one time in a large and handsome house in the same carpetless state. He also was a man of considerable means.

A symptom of the same general condition was a tendency to a kind of Pentecostal communism. It is related of one of the Brethren—Sir Alexander Campbell, if I mistake not—who had property in the West of England, that he insisted on his servants sitting down with him at table. One day, coming in late for dinner, he