INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

It was in 1827 and the years immediately following that there first came into evidence the existence in many different places of a work of God, very small in its beginnings, which shewed itself in saints who were feeling dissatisfied with the state of things in the Established Church and dissenting bodies standing apart from the same, and meeting in private houses for the breaking of bread. At first the companies so doing often only numbered three or four, and were ignorant that similar companies in other places were doing the same.

In this work of God, no servant of the Lord can be identified as being specially used; the Spirit of God was operating sovereignly in the hearts of many saints, widely separated from one another, apart from the instrumentality of any one particular servant.

In 1827 Mr. J. N. Darby was a curate in County Wicklow, Ireland, but was much disturbed in mind by the action of the then Archbishop of Dublin, who charged his clergy to petition the Government for protection from molestation by Roman Catholics in carrying out their parochial duties. In the exercise of soul which this occasioned, the Lord shewed him that He was Head of the assembly, which was His body, united to Him by the Holy Spirit, and that each believer was a member of that body. This truth laid hold of him, and as the sovereign right of the Spirit in the assembly to use whom He would became clear to him from Scripture, the error of the clerical principle became apparent to him, and he left the Established Church in 1828, about the same time writing the paper, “The Nature and Unity of the Church of Christ”. The equally important paper,

“The Notion of a Clergyman - Dispensationally the Sin against the Holy Ghost”, was written about that time also, though not published till some years later.

In the years immediately following 1827 the work of God above referred to spread rapidly, and Mr. Darby soon became recognised as one whom the Lord was using in an outstanding way to open up His mind regarding the assembly. Besides Mr. J. N. Darby, Mr. J. G. Bellett, Mr. G. V. Wigram, Capt. Hall, Dr. E. Cronin, Mr. F. Hutchinson and Sir Edward Denny, among others, were identified with the movement, and also from 1833, though then only eighteen years of age, Mr. J. B. Stoney. Mr. B. W. Newton was also identified with it in its early beginnings.

It has always been the case that Satan has sought to oppose and spoil what God is doing, and never has it been more apparent, save in his unceasing opposition to the Lord Jesus in the days of His flesh, than in his opposition to the operations of the Holy Spirit in forming the assembly down here as a heavenly vessel, the body of Christ, united to Him, and taking character only from Him. The Acts of the Apostles shews how unceasingly the labours of the apostles, and especially the apostle Paul, to whom the ministry of the assembly was committed, were opposed by Satan, either by violence or by sedulously introducing elements of corruption, and the condition into which the assembly fell, even while the apostles were still alive, as clearly indicated in the second epistle to Timothy, the second epistle of Peter, the epistle of Jude, and the first three chapters of Revelation, shews how successful that opposition ultimately became. At the time of the Reformation God intervened in power to establish the truth of justification by faith, and to bring in deliverance, over an extended area, from much of the pernicious influence of Rome, but the Reformers never accorded to the Holy Spirit practically the place that was His due, and as a consequence the clerical principle was never overthrown, and the state of Protestantism has long since been that described by the Lord in His address to Sardis, “Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead”, Revelation 3: 1. In these circumstances it is not surprising that when God again intervened, in the first half of the nineteenth century, to recover the truth of the assembly in its distinctiveness and heavenly character, and to establish it in power among His saints, the devil should renew his opposition, and maintain it ceaselessly, and the pages that follow are intended to give a broad account of the way that such opposition has been met by the Lord, and of the truth that has been established as a result of each successive conflict.