Chapter Fourteen, Stronger Through Turmoil
Chapter Fourteen, Stronger Through Turmoil
To understand the sad events of 1848 requires a rather closer look at one of the young men to whom we were introduced in Chapter 3 — John Nelson Darby.
Darby’s was a complex personality. On the one hand, when engaged in the many bitter controversies of his life he could be obstinate, harsh and rude. On the other, he would show himself to be deeply sympathetic and humble. When travelling, he often preferred to stay with the less well-educated and poor rather than the affluent. He was especially fond of children. W. B. Neatby recorded that:
In the act of addressing a meeting he would roll up his greatcoat as a pillow for a sleeping child whose uncomfortable attitude had struck him. I have heard that, on one of his numerous voyages, he might have been seen pacing the deck all night with a restless child in his arms, in order to afford the worn-out mother an opportunity to rest; and I doubt whether many children were more tenderly nursed that night [quoted by Coad].
And W. G. Turner tells us that on another occasion while visiting the United States a poor family, anxious to provide the best for their visitor, cooked one of their children’s pet rabbits as a meal for Darby.
Whilst the dinner was in process of serving, Mr Darby noticed the little lad’s downcast demeanour, inquired the reason; and the little fellow (contrary to previous instructions) blurted out the whole truth ... Declining to eat any of the little fellow’s pet, as soon as the meal was over Darby took him to where there was a large tank of water, and producing some mechanical toy ducks from his pocket... played with the little boy for an hour or so [also quoted by Coad].
But it was not only children who were attracted by his personality. Neatby records the occasion when an old woman, a candidate for admission to the fellowship of one of Darby’s assemblies, was interviewed first by two if its leaders, and then by Darby himself. ‘She afterwards said that the two were very clever and learned, but she could not understand them; and she could get on best with the simple old gentleman that came.’ Describing a meeting he had attended at Guelph during a visit to the United States in 1866, Darby recalled, ‘We were very numerous. I passed two nights in a tent on the lawn, to leave room in the house for some unexpected Americans’.
The natural ability which enabled him to graduate from Trinity College as a Classical Gold Medallist, was matched by enormous energy: by his death he had founded and guided some fifteen hundred churches in Britain and on the Continent, in North America and the West Indies, in New Zealand and Australia. Indeed, G. H. Lang, a severe critic of Darby on many points, freely acknowledged that ‘on the evangelical side, Darby was one of the greatest instruments employed by the Holy Spirit in the nineteenth century’. His writings, moreover, fill over forty large volumes and in addition to a five volume Synopsis of the Books of the Bible, he wrote individual commentaries on most of the books in the Bible. He translated the Bible into English and French, and the New Testament into Italian. He wrote many profound and sometimes beautiful hymns.
In Ireland Darby had struck up a friendship with F. W. Newman (brother of John Henry—later Cardinal—Newman) who persuaded Darby to visit Oxford in 1830. There Newman introduced Darby to his former pupil Benjamin Wills Newton, now a Fellow of Exeter College, G. V. Wigram of Queen’s, Lancelot Brenton of Oriel, and a certain W. E. Gladstone of Christ Church. Gladstone, however, was to be more influenced by the preaching of John Henry Newman than by his younger brother Francis. In 1832 Newton persuaded Darby to visit the new Brethren meeting at Plymouth. Darby’s influence on the Plymouth meeting in its early years was to be great.
Darby summarised his reasons for leaving the Church of Ireland, in which he had been an energetic clergyman, to become one of the early Brethren as follows: ‘What led me out of the Establishment was the unity of the body: where it is not owned and acted on, I should not go’. And his early years in the new movement were characterised by impeccable non-sectarian principles. ‘This is the true secret of a church well ordered.’ he wrote in 1832, ‘perfect largeness of heart, as large as Christ’s even at His coming .. .’ And in the following year, in a letter to the Brethren at Plymouth, he wrote, ‘I do trust that you will keep infinitely far from sectarianism ... You are nothing, nobody, but Christians, and the moment you cease to be an available mount for communion for any consistent Christian, you will go to pieces or help the evil.’
In October 1832, Darby preached at Bethesda and Gideon Chapels in Bristol and commented on the ‘marked work’ which ‘dear brothers Muller and Craik’ were doing; he added however, ‘I should wish a little more principle of largeness of communion’. This was a rather odd comment, considering that Craik frequently preached for non-conformist ministers and, as Rowdon has pointed out, maintained friendly relations with ministers and scholars of the established church, such as Dean Alford, Archbishop Trench and Dean Ellicott. Furthermore, Muller and Craik ‘invited well-known divines, among them Bonar of Collace, to preach at Bethesda’ (Rowdon).
As early as 1835, however, there is evidence that Darby’s early largeness of heart was being eroded by another and fatal principle. In that year, Anthony Norris Groves, having returned from India, visited Plymouth and detected signs that the Brethren there were becoming exclusive and sectarian: as his widow later put it, he found ‘that their original bond of union in the truth as it is in Jesus, had been changed for a united testimony against all who differed from them’.
Before leaving England for the second time, therefore, Groves wrote a long letter to Darby (dated March 1836) in view of the latter’s paramount influence not only at Plymouth but at so many other new assemblies. He referred to Darby’s ‘enlarged and generous purposes that once so won and riveted’ him (Groves), but frankly told Darby ‘you have departed from those principles ... and are in principle returning to the city from whence you departed’.
I ever understood [Groves told Darby] our principle of communion to be the possession of the common life or common blood of the family of God (for the life is in the blood); these were our early thoughts, and are my matured ones. The transition your little bodies have undergone, in no longer standing forth the witnesses for the glorious and simple truth, so much as standing forth witnesses against all that they judge error, have lowered them in my apprehension from heaven to earth in their position of witnesses ,.. The moment the witnessing for the common life as our bond gives place to a witnessing against errors by separation of persons and preaching ... every individual, or society of individuals, first comes before the mind as those who might need witnessing against, and all their conduct and principles have first to be examined and approved before they can be received; and the position which this occupying the seat of judgment will place you in will be this: the most narrow-minded and bigoted will rule . .. making light not life the measure of Communion ... As any system is in its provision narrower or wider than the truth, I either stop short, or go beyond its provisions, but I would infinitely rather bear with all their evils, than separate from their good.
Before reading the conclusion of his letter, the normally gracious Groves could not resist driving his point home with a cunning reference to what he considered to be Darby’s unscriptural views on baptism. (Darby adhered to infant and family baptism.) ‘Some will not have me hold communion with the Scots, because their views are not satisfactory about the Lord’s Supper; others with you, because of your views about baptism; others with the Church of England, because of her thoughts about ministry. On my principles, I receive them all; but on the principle of witnessing against evil, I should reject them all.’ Groves concluded his letter to Darby, ‘feeling assured in my own heart, that your enlarged and generous spirit, so richly taught of the Lord, will one day burst again those bands which narrower minds than yours have encircled you with, and come forth again, rather anxious to advance ALL the living members of the living Head into the stature of men, than to be encircled by any little bodies, however numerous, that own you for their founder’. Sadly, Groves was expressing a hope which was not fulfilled.
Thus by the middle 1830s the early Brethren movement already embraced divergent tendencies within it. On the other hand, those like Groves, Muller, Craik and Chapman strove to maintain the original non-sectarian principle of receiving all ‘whom Christ has received’; on the other, Darby and the growing number of churches under his influence envisaged the establishment of a corporate worldwide witness to the unity of the body of Christ and emphasised separation from evil as God’s principle of unity.
Other tensions emerged. In 1839, after a fortnight’s retreat to consider certain matters of church order which had arisen at Bethesda, Muller and Craik adopted the firm view that there was a need for a recognised eldership and for ordered government within the church. Darby, on the other hand, disapproved of any formal recognition of the gifts of preaching and teaching, fearing that this might lead to the emergence of a select group of ministers. He regarded the recognition of elders as a restriction upon the free movement of the Holy Spirit, drawing what many now regard as a false distinction between the arranged and formal (which was ‘of man’) and the spontaneous and informal (which was ‘of the Spirit’).
In 1840 the Plymouth meeting, which had begun in a small house in King Street, before moving to a chapel in Raleigh Street, finally settled at a large building in Ebrington Street, with accommodation for about 1,400 people. W. H. Cole joined the assembly in 1843 and has left some interesting reminiscences: ‘This was a large plain building, erected according to their own plans, without a gallery. The large table was placed in the centre, as the most prominent object, around which were ranged the seats on a gentle rise from the floor, so that everyone could look upon it. There were no pews but comfortable benches.’ Darby had been working in Switzerland since 1838, and Cole’s list of ‘leading ministering brethren’ begins with B. W. Newton. ‘Mr Newton, who in King Street could only at first speak with diffidence to a small number for a few minutes, could afterwards hold, for two hours at a time, the interested attention of a mixed audience of from 1,200 to 1,400 persons from the sects around. He was the principal teacher of the church. His leading subjects were prophetic, yet by no means confined to these, for he had a large grasp of scripture, and seemed deeply acquainted with every part of that mighty volume of truth. He always dealt with high subjects, momentous to the mind, and sacred to the heart. His delivery was calm, orderly, lucid, captivating, such as became a great scholar, one deeply taught in the word, and anxious to lead others on in the knowledge of that which he had himself learnt from its close study’. Cole summed up the atmosphere at Ebrington Street in 1843 as follows: ‘I breathed what appeared to me the pure element of love;
I was in the enjoyment of the liberty of home; I was enlightened by its teachings, cheered by its joys, comforted by its hallowed fellowship, strengthened by godly companionship, and encouraged by those who were over me in the Lord. Those were delightful times, so sweet for their simplicity.’
In the early 1840s Newton began to raise the alarm against what he considered to be Darby’s ‘strange system of dispensational doctrines’, at the heart of which was a sharp distinction between the ‘earthly’ hopes of the Jewish Church, and the ‘heavenly’ hopes of the Christian Church. The faithful Jews of the Old Testament were not comprised in the Church, and the dispensations of Old and New Testaments were totally distinct.
Darby had developed much of his dispensationalism in order to defend a new doctrine of the second coming which emerged after the Albury Prophetic Conferences in 1830, and which is associated with the name of Edward Irving. The doctrine, known as the ‘Secret Rapture’, was a refinement of pre-millennialism, which, as we saw, Muller himself had adopted in 1829. According to the Secret Rapture teaching (which Muller never accepted), the second coming of Christ will take place in two stages: first there will be the ‘rapture of the saints’ when Christ will return to take all true Christians from the earth. Only then will the Antichrist arise and usher in the period of ‘tribulation’. The rule of the Antichrist will be brought to an end by the second stage of the coming—the public ‘appearing’ of Christ in glory. Newton, however—and he was not alone—objected. If the Church was to be removed before the tribulation began, he asked, who were the faithful ones who, according to the Book of Revelation, would suffer during that period? To Newton, the Church comprised all who were redeemed by Christ; the suffering ‘faithful remnant’ therefore must have been redeemed by an act of God other than Christ’s redemption. Newton regarded the theory as conflicting with a central doctrine of the faith.
Darby’s reply was to assert that considerable sections of the New Testament applied not to the Church but only to a future dispensation of the restored Jewish remnant. Newton recorded,
At last Darby wrote from Cork, saying he had discovered a method of reconciling the whole dispute, and would tell me when he came. When he did, it turned out to be the ‘Jewish Interpretation’.
The Gospel of Matthew was not teaching Church Truth but Kingdom Truth, and so on. He explained it to me and I said ‘Darby, if you admit that distinction you virtually give up Christianity.’ Well, they kept on at that until they worked out the result as we know it. The Secret Rapture was bad enough, but this was worse.
However, the influence of Darby’s personality—backed by his more lucid disciple William Kelly (whom some of Darby’s opponents mischievously referred to as ‘his interpreter’) meant that this view of the second coming ‘at any moment’ gained a wide acceptance not only within the Brethren movement. Over the years it has been adopted by many evangelical Anglicans, large numbers of fundamentalists in all Protestant churches, and amongst free-lance Bible teachers and evangelists; the process was forwarded by the adoption of the theory by Scofield in his popular reference Bible.
Newton was not alone among the early Brethren, however, in rejecting the new view as an innovation. Notably Muller, Craik, Chapman, James Wright, and S. P. Tregelles firmly held to the view that certain events much take place before Christ’s return; and amongst Anglicans, Archbishop Trench, Dean Alford, Bishops Ellicott and Ryle, as well as Bonar and Guinness were among those upholding what they considered to be the ancient faith. Their rejection of the new view did not however alter the fact that for them as Muller put it, ‘the Coming of Christ, and not death, is the great Hope of the Church, and, if in a right state of heart, we (as the Thessalonian believers did) shall “serve the living and true God, and wait for His Son from Heaven” ’.
Sadly these emerging tensions between the early Brethren and particularly between Darby and Newton destroyed the tranquillity of Ebrington Street. Cole’s account of that meeting continues ...
it was too fair a scene for Satan to contemplate, and he must by some means mar its beauties and desolate its loveliness. This devastating work began soon after Mr J. N. Darby’s return from the continent in 1845.1 was told that, when he left Plymouth for his mission there, he commended Mr B. W. N. to the assembly as one qualified to lead on the saints in truth (although that ability had been abundantly proved), and to watch over and guide them in all spiritual matters. But, when he returned he found him in a position of great influence, attracting to his teaching believers from various parts of England, many of whom took up their residence in Plymouth, to benefit from his teaching and that of others. What were the feelings this popularity stirred? It would not perhaps be difficult to suppose; but a personal attack was soon made, and the disastrous strife of the two great teachers, who then became rivals, broke up the peace of the assembly and almost stopped the progress of the work ... No account, gathered merely from pamphlets, could describe the distress of mind, the poignant sorrow and heart-grief produced by Mr D as he ruthlessly pursued his course against his former friend ... I deeply regret to have to record that strifes, jealousies, wraths, factions, parties, works of the flesh, took the place, in great measure, of the fruit of the Spirit, and loving fellowship of the saints.
We have already noticed Darby’s preference for the companionship of those less well-educated than himself, his affection for the poor and love of children. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the converse of this was that he could not tolerate a rival. On his return to Plymouth, in March 1845, he commenced his own teaching sessions and began to attack not only Newton’s doctrines but also, it seems, Newton himself: he accused him of acting ‘very badly towards many beloved brethren and in the sight of God’. According to Coad, ‘by avoiding a contest on the doctrinal grounds (where he was undoubtedly weak, and where his own involved arguments were no match for Newton’s incisive intellect), and by concentrating on Newton’s practices towards others, Darby was choosing his opponent’s weakest spot, and the one point on which he might isolate him from his colleagues’. In April, Newton and Darby met before thirteen other men. Unfortunately Newton, the younger man, lost his self-control at this meeting and from then on his colleagues began to lose confidence in him; Darby also admitted afterwards that ‘in manner I might have been more calm.’
Darby thought that he now detected ‘evil’ at work in Plymouth. On October 26th 1845 he announced at Ebrington Street that he was withdrawing from their communion. (Eight years later, Darby confessed that in so dividing the assembly he had acted precipitately, and did not have the endorsement of the Lord.) Asked to attend a meeting to explain the reasons for his action more fully, he ‘launched his public attack on Newton’s personal honesty’ (Coad). He accused Newton of giving false accounts of the April meeting and of falsifying certain evidence in the republication of a controversial letter. Later in the year, following a meeting at Bath attended by a dozen leading Brethren, Lord Congleton, Sir Alexander Campbell, Robert Chapman and others signed a document acquitting Newton of any intention to deceive. At this meeting Chapman addressed Darby personally.
‘You should have waited longer before separating,’ he said.
‘I waited six months,’ Darby replied.
‘But if it had been at Barnstaple, we should have waited six years,’ said Chapman.
In 1847, the emphasis of the conflict switched to a new point of doctrine. In that year, a lady in Exeter lent to Mrs J. L. Harris (wife of one of the leading brethren at Plymouth) notes which she had taken of an address which Newton had given on Psalm 6. Puzzled by certain statements in the notes, Mrs Harris asked her husband to explain them. Harris, incidentally an Old Etonian and, like Newton, formerly a Fellow of Exeter College, was shocked at the implications of some of the notes.
In order to see Newton’s addresses on the Psalms in context, the very briefest explanation is necessary. Some years earlier Edward Irving had been expelled from the ministry of the Church of Scotland for asserting that ‘in its proper nature [Christ’s flesh] was as the flesh of His Mother, but, by virture of the Holy Ghost’s quickening and inhabiting of it, it was preserved sinless and incorruptible’. In other words, in order to redeem fallen human nature Christ had assumed fallen human nature. The leaders of the Brethren movement were among those who rebutted these views, and in the course of his rebuttal, Newton (seeking to disentangle the truth from the error of Irving’s views) had endeavoured to set forth a more biblical account of Christ’s human nature by exploring its relation to the ‘federal headship’ of Adam. While he repudiated Irving’s view that Christ had inherited a sinful nature from Adam, he suggested that it was because of his federal relationship to Adam that he inherited such side-effects of the fall as ‘hunger, thirst, weariness, sorrow etc’. Now the controversial notes of the lecture he had given on Psalm 6 must be seen as a part of his attempt to consider Christ’s ‘non-atoning’ sufferings (as he called them) by expounding some of the ‘individual laments’ of the Psalms in a Christological sense.
Harris—without referring the notes of Newton’s address on Psalm 6 back to him— sent them to a Darby supporter who published them in July 1847. Newton then published a tract in which he set out his views for himself. Darby condemned the views as ‘blasphemous doctrines’ and Muller commented that they seemed to imply ‘that Christ himself needed a Saviour’. Craik suspected that Newton’s errors were ‘only those of a rash speculative intellectualist, who is yet sound at heart and seeking to honour Christ’. In the recent judgment of Professor F. F. Bruce, Newton’s views were not heretical, but based on mistaken principles of Old Testament exegesis. ‘It is an instance of the irony of history that J. N. Darby, who led the attack against Newton, ran into trouble himself twelve years later because of papers on The Sufferings of Christ... While this thesis was not identical with Newton’s, both were based on mistaken exegesis, and some of Darby’s most faithful followers saw little to choose between the two, since both implied that Christ endured divine wrath otherwise than vicariously and by the way of atonement’ ( F. F. Bruce, The Humanity of Jesus Christ, Christian Brethren Research Fellowship Journal, 1974).
According to F. F. Bruce, both Newton and Darby were genuinely concerned to learn and teach the truth but unfortunately each ‘identified their respective interpretations of revealed truth with revealed truth itself, and since their interpretations did not agree, each believed he was defending truth against error’.
Later in the year, realising the error of his thinking, Newton published his Statement and Acknowledgment respecting certain Doctrinal Errors. He now readily admitted that he had erred in attributing Christ’s participation in the afflictions of hunger, thirst, weariness, sorrow, etc. to a federal relationship to Adam.
I ought never to have connected Him with Adam as a federal Head, [Newton wrote] I wish to state distincdy, that I hold the perfectness of Christ’s person and the completeness of His one sacrifice, to be truths so solemnly unquestionable, that every doctrine and opinion must be subordinated to, and guided by these leading and foundation truths; and every statement of mine on the relations of Christ, whether in my recent tracts, which I have now withdrawn, or in any other place, I wish to subject entirely to these primary truths...
Newton concluded with admirable humility:
I would not wish it to be supposed that what I have now said is intended to extenuate the error which I have confessed, I desire to acknowledge it fully, and to acknowledge it as sin; it is my desire thus to confess it before God and His Church; and I desire that this may be considered as an expression of my deep and unfeigned grief and sorrow, especially by those who may have been grieved or injured by the false statement, or by any consequences thence resulting. I trust that the Lord will not only pardon, but will graciously counteract any evil effects which may have arisen to any therefrom.
It is a tragedy that the dispute did not end at this point.
Darby, however, attempted to show that Newton had not renounced his errors despite Newton’s sincere profession to have done so. The result was that the church at Ebrington Street virtually disintegrated, and Newton’s connexion with the Brethren ceased. He lived until 1899, ‘retreating into a little circle of two or three churches of his own, and leaving a devoted following, mainly among strict Baptists’. Muller was not satisfied with Newton’s doctrinal position in 1847. However, he formed the highest regard for his later writings and wrote (many years later): ‘I consider Mr Newton’s writings to be most sound and scriptural, and my wife and I are in the habit of reading them, not only with deepest interest, but with great profit to our souls. His books are certainly most valuable, for they exalt the person and work of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ to the very utmost ... I regard Mr Newton as the most accurate writer on religious themes of the nineteenth century.’
It is interesting to note, before leaving Newton, the following incident which was recounted by Dr Robert Cameron of New York in the magazine Perilous Times in 1917:
Over forty years ago, at my own table in New York City, Mr Darby called Mr Newton ‘dear brother Newton’. I expressed my deep surprise at the use of such an endearing term concerning the one who had been freely called ‘that dangerous man’, ‘the arch enemy’, ‘the fearful blasphemer’, and other equally harsh terms. At once Mr Darby replied: ‘Mr Newton is the most godly man I ever knew’. I said, ‘Well, then, what was all this trouble and condemnation about, if Mr Newton is such a godly man?’ He answered promptly, ‘Oh, but Mr Newton had taught blasphemous doctrines about the person of our blessed Lord, and these had to be dealt with.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘Mr Newton withdrew the tract on which this charge was made and afterwards published another tract that is the clearest, most scriptural and most reverential treatment of that delicate question that has ever been published.’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Darby, ‘but there never was any adequate repentance for the sin!’ Here the conversation ended, because dear Mr Darby (for I loved him) was too venerable a man to admit of my giving ‘adequate expression’ to my indignant feelings.
It is odd that ‘the most godly man’ Darby ever knew never adequately repented of the sin of blasphemy! Most impartial observers would surely regard Newton’s Acknowledgement, quoted above, as an eminently adequate confession of guilt.
At the end of April 1848 Darby visited Bristol and called on Muller as was his usual custom. Muller asked him to preach the following Sunday at Bethesda, but he declined on the grounds of a previous engagement.
In May two members of Ebrington Street—a Captain Woodfall and his brother—came to Bristol and applied for communion at Bethesda. Captain Woodfall had been on the Continent during the Plymouth troubles and was therefore admitted but his brother’s application was held for consideration. Some of Darby’s supporters within Bethesda raised objections to the gentleman’s reception, and Craik then suggested that the three brethren most opposed to the Woodfalls’ reception should visit them. This they did and pronounced the two men clear of Newton’s alleged heresy.
At a meeting at Exeter, Darby then publicly announced that he could never go again to Bethesda because the church had received ‘Newton’s followers’. He then confirmed this in a letter to Muller; and later alleged that Newton’s followers had circulated his writings within Bethesda. Darby’s disciples at Bethesda now began to press for a formal investigation by the church into Newton’s teachings (which had, of course, already been condemned by their author). In June one of Darby’s followers, George Alexander, withdrew from Bethesda; and the elders were forced to summon a church meeting for June 29th 1848. At this meeting a statement (which came to be known as the Letter of the Ten) signed by ten of the elders, including, of course, Muller and Craik, was read (with explanations) and sanctioned by the majority of the church. Darby’s sympathisers, however, promptly withdrew from fellowship.
The statement made it clear that the truths relative to the person of our blessed Lord ... the divinity of His person—the sinlessness of His nature—and the perfection of His sacrifice, which have been taught [at Bethesda] are, through the grace of God, those which we still maintain... we utterly disclaim the assertion that the blessed Son of God was involved in the guilt of the first Adam; or that He was born under the curse of the broken law, because of His connection with Israel... We utterly reject the thought of His ever having had the experiences of an unconverted person; but maintain that while He suffered outwardly the trials connected with His being a man and an Israelite— still in His feelings and experiences, as well as in His external character, He was entirely ‘separate from sinners’.
The statement gave nine reasons why ‘we have felt a difficulty in complying with the request of our brother, Mr Alexander, that we should formally investigate and give judgment on certain errors which have been taught among Christians meeting at Plymouth’. Briefly, the ten elders did not feel that because errors were taught at Plymouth or elsewhere they as a body were bound to investigate them. The statement pointed out that the tracts in question (Newton’s) were written in such an ambiguous style that the elders would shrink from giving formal judgment on the matter: responsible brethren had come to different conclusions about how much error was contained in the tracts. ‘Those who felt desirous to satisfy their own minds, would naturally be led to wish to peruse the writings for themselves. For this, many of us have no leisure time; many would not be able to understand what the tracts contained, because of the mode of expression employed; and the result, there is much reason to fear, would be such perverse disputations and strifes of words, as minister questions rather than godly edifying.’ The statement contained a timely reminder that, in any case, those meeting at Ebrington Stret had issued a statement disclaiming the errors charged aginst the tracts. Furthermore, the ‘requirements that we should investigate and judge Mr Newton’s tracts, appeared to some of us like the introduction of a fresh test of communion’. The final, and ninth, reason introduced a welcome and presumably intentional element of humour into the whole sad business: ‘We felt that the compliance with Mr Alexander’s request would be the introduction of an evil precedent. If a brother has a right to demand our examining a work of fifty pages, he may require our investigating error said to be contained in one of much larger dimensions; so that all our time might be wasted in the examination of other people’s errors, instead of more important service.’
Darby now, on a visit to Yorkshire, found that churches there were sympathising with Bethesda. Thus on August 26th he issued from Leeds a circular excommunicating Bethesda ‘en bloc’. ‘Members of Ebrington Street, active and unceasing agents of Mr Newton, holding and justifying his views, are received at Bethesda ... Woe be to (Brethren) if they love the Brethren Muller and Craik or their own ease more than the souls of saints dear to Christ!’ Churches sympathetic to Darby were now urged to judge the Bethesda question’.
Muller was not a man to panic easily and took no immediate action. In October, G. V. Wigram, now a Darby supporter, attacked Henry Craik’s Pastoral Letters (published 1835) on the grounds that it contained ‘blasphemous and heretical’ statements concerning the humanity of Christ. However, it appears that Darby well recognised that the able and experienced Craik was nothing if not orthodox and is reported as saying later ‘that Mr Wigram sent him his tracts, and that he [Darby] put them at the back of the fire’.
On October 31st Muller at last decided to act. He publicly announced his personal condemnation of Newton’s teachings. During November and December seven church meetings were held at Bethesda and it was made clear that no one defending, maintaining or upholding Newton’s views should be received into communion. Several of Newton’s sympathisers including the Woodfalls left the meeting as a result.
Henceforth those churches who refused to apply Darby’s decree against Bethesda came to be known as ‘Open Brethren’ and those who followed Darby became known as ‘Exclusive Brethren’. A. N. Groves’ son, Henry, maintained that more was done in Bethesda to judge and repudiate Newton’s views, than by any assembly acting under the Darby discipline. Robert Chapman and those under his influence in the Barnstaple area aligned themselves firmly with Muller and Craik as did Anthony Norris Groves, Lord Congleton, Captain Rhind, Messrs Harris, Soltau and Henry and William Dyer. In London, the notable meetings at Brook Street, Tottenham, (where Dr Bamardo was baptised) and Orchard Street, Hackney were among those siding with Bethesda. Even old friends of Darby like J. M. Code, Charles Hargrove and T. Maunsell remained in fellowship with Bethesda. The influential Hereford meeting stood apart from the controversy for a while until a split in 1850 meant that some Darby supporters left the church. However, although Darby-ism was not to be the enduring and expanding force that ‘Open Brethrenism’ has been, it is probably true that ‘the sheer force of Darby’s personality, coupled with the fact that his travels had made him a personal friend of men to whom Muller was [at that time] only a name, may well have meant that the Darbyite party was the larger in the division’ (Coad).
Bethesda, and the ‘open meetings’ which sided with her, steadfastly maintained the independence of each local church in deciding whom it received into fellowship; whereas the exclusives argued that this was not ‘practical unity of the body’. E. H. Broadbent, in his Pilgrim Church noted that, ‘by untiring propaganda, a large number of churches were induced to accept as a necessary test of fellowship the condemnation of the church at Bethesda on account of a doctrine never held by it. By dint of constant repetition this circle of churches came to believe in all sincerity, that Bethesda had been cut off for holding Newton’s error, an error which he himself had repudiated, and which the church at Bethesda had never entertained. So consistently was this system carried out that Negro brethren in the West Indies had to judge the Bethesda question, and Swiss peasants in their Alpine villages were obliged to examine the errors attributed to Newton and condemn them. Such a system could not fail to lead to further divisions. Even in Darby’s lifetime, several such took place, the parties taking different sides excluding each other as vigorously as they had unitedly excluded Groves and Muller’. The ‘Open Brethren’ have known no such divisions.
Sadly, few exclusives ever saw Newton’s acknowledgement of his error. One who joined them in 1858, maintained sixty years later the old bitter hostility to Newton but had never seen the Acknowledgment, nor knew of its contents. It was enough for him that ‘JND had rejected it!’ In 1866 J. E. Howard, the founder of the Tottenham assembly, published a penetrating Caution against the Darbyites in which he asked, ‘What then is to be the peculiar excellence and spiritual endowment of the Darbyite structure, which shall enable it to speak loftily, as if it were THE Church of God? Simply separation from evil, according to their own ideas of what is evil, and what separation from evil is.’ Writing recently, F. F. Bruce has said that in his view ‘the root error of Exclusivism is the embracing of the proposition that separation from evil is God’s principle of unity. Biblical unity is based on something much more positive: the common life in the body of Christ—and separation from evil is a corollary’.
Despite the absurdity of Darby’s action against Bethesda and the bitterness of some of his attacks on Newton’s supporters or sympathisers he continued to display at times a strange—almost incredible— respect not only for Newton himself (his comment ‘Mr Newton is the most godly man I ever knew’, already quoted) but also for certain ‘Bethesda Brethren’. It is said that on one occasion he heard some of his supporters criticising Robert Chapman, and broke in abruptly: ‘Leave Robert Chapman alone: we talk about heavenly places, but he lives in them’. It is to Darby’s credit that he clearly bore no bitterness over Chapman’s rebuke at that meeting in Bath so many years earlier.
Mrs Anne Evans continued to be a member of Bethesda throughout this sad and turbulent period. She described it as a ‘time of agony of intense sorrow, and upheaval’. Bethesda was, she wrote, for a time shattered from end to end. Friendships were broken up; families were divided—husband from wife, children from parents, business relations were dissolved, health and even reason wrecked. We [at Bethesda] sadly needed humbling. We had begun to think too much of ourselves. We had increased rapidly in numbers and even in worldly standing, for many had joined us from the upper classes. Our leading brethren, too, were without any check . .. All this was more than flesh and blood could stand, so Satan was permitted to come down on us and humble our pride in the dust.
But all was not lost. Mrs Evans continued:
At this time of sorrow Mr George Muller was a grand stay to us; he did not lose his head; he held the reins with a steady hand; and when at last Bethesda emerged from the turmoil she was stronger, freer than ever before. We had increased in numbers. [By the middle 1850s they were nearly 700 in fellowship.] The orphan work, which was to have come to nought, was the ‘wonder of the world’...
When the great Revival commenced the Open Brethren threw themselves with heart and soul into it. It was the reading of George Muller’s book by two young men that led to it.
But that is the story for a later chapter.