Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/92

80 vehement, or even angry, in his denunciations, he at least had not suffered anger to blind his eyes.

Darby’s success in his primary mission was rapid and complete. Methodism vanished before him. His polemic against the Wesleyan views of perfection is unstintedly praised by Herzog, who also does justice to the wisdom with which Darby, avoiding a merely negative and destructive policy, occupied the minds of his hearers with a totally different set of ideas, which he invested with a powerful fascination. It is right, however, to add that Herzog had to take very just exception to Darby’s uncharitable, not to say outrageous, imputation on Wesleyanism that it hardly contained any real Christians, and that it set aside, in its doctrine and its discipline, “all that is most precious in the truths of salvation”. Herzog is surely warranted in saying that such assertions “betray the party man”. Indeed they far exceed the licence to which extreme Calvinists may be said to have a sort of prescriptive title when dealing with Arminians, and Darby’s was not an extreme Calvinism.

These blemishes did not hinder the success of Darby’s mission. In the spring of 1841, Henri Olivier renounced the Methodism of which he had been “the most ardent champion,” and “united his flock to Darby’s”. Nor was this Darby’s first triumph. On the 11th of January, 1841, he writes from Lausanne of three ministers of the State Church that had resigned their office, and of a meeting