Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/57

Rh of his great strength, and often beyond it—during the whole of the intervening time.

In later days, Darby exercised his ascendency over men who, though very far in many cases from personal insignificance, were for the most part little known outside their own sect. It is therefore the more important to remember that, at the very beginning of his career, he brought into almost servile subjection the mind of one of the most remarkable men of the nineteenth century. This was Francis William Newman, the younger brother by four or five years of the more celebrated (not, I think, the abler) J. H. Newman, the Cardinal. The younger Newman was a man of prodigious versatility. He took a double first at Oxford, became Fellow of Balliol, and was afterwards Professor of Latin at University College, London, and finally Professor of Political Economy at Oxford; and his writings cover an even wider range than these achievements might have led us to expect. Fifty years ago he was a recognised leader of a phase of strongly theistic free thought, and it was chiefly his books that gave rise to that brilliant polemic, Henry Rogers’ Eclipse of Faith. It is in the work that traces the evolution of free thought in his mind that his description of Darby, under the designation of “the Irish clergyman,” occurs. The passage is a remarkably interesting piece of autobiography, and Newman shall be left to tell his own story.

“My second period is characterised, partly by the great ascendency exercised over me by one powerful mind and still more powerful will, partly by the vehement effort which throughout its duration urged me to long after the establishment of Christian Fellowship in a purely Biblical Church as the first great want of Christendom and of the world. …

“After taking my degree I became Fellow of Balliol College; and the next year I accepted an invitation to Ireland, and there became private tutor for fifteen months in the house of one now