Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/61

Rh old age his habit was still rather spare, and owing perhaps to some peculiarity of figure he gave many people the impression that he was short; yet, as a matter of fact, he was decidedly over the middle height, and of a massive frame. Though he was always abstemious to a degree, and unremitting in his exertions, he probably exercised more prudence after the breakdown to which Newman alludes.

The reader has now the means of forming some adequate idea of the equipment with which “this Goliath of Dissent,” as the biographer of the last Archbishop of Tuam called him, addressed himself to a task of extraordinary difficulty. But reference should be made to another peculiarity that must have had a great deal to do with making or marring his influence. He carried his neglect of appearances into his written and spoken composition; and that to such an extent that the style of his writings to the reader of to-day seems half ludicrous, half disgusting. This peculiarity is almost necessarily fatal to abiding influence; but there may well be something singularly impressive in it at the time. All misgiving as to the teacher’s sincerity—even as to his absorbing earnestness of aim—disappears before it. Darby’s own account of the matter was that he could have equalled the rhetorical flights of great masters, but that he never thought it worth while. Some much more thorough-going admirers of Darby than the present writer have regarded this statement as a proof that the great man was not always superior to a little innocent vanity; but indeed it is hard to read Darby’s better works without fancying that a noble eloquence was really at his command, if only he had chosen to cultivate it. Bad as the style is, it is the badness of an