The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

In the nineteenth century British evangelicalism largely lost its old expectation of the coming of greater days of revival and the funeral of C.H.Spurgeon (Feb 1892) was regarded by many as the conclusion of Puritan influence.

‘What we are about to consider will tend to shew that, instead of permitting ourselves to hope for a continued progress of good, we must expect a progress of evil; and that the hope of the earth being filled with the knowledge of the Lord before the exercise of His judgment, and the consummation of this judgment on the earth, is delusive.

‘We are to expect evil, until it becomes so flagrant that it will be necessary for the Lord to judge it . . . .

‘I am afraid that many a cherished feeling, dear to the children of God, has been shocked this evening; I mean, their hope that the gospel will spread by itself over the whole earth during the actual dispensation.’

J N. Darby in a lecture delivered in Geneva in 1840 on ‘Progress of Evil on the Earth’. The Collected Writings of J.N. Darby, Prophetic, vol 1,471 and 483

‘The spirit of Sandemanianism has infected many who have quitted the Establishment, and has been imparted to the Plymouth brethren in this country. Here Millenarianism, engrafted on the crab stock, is producing strange hybrid fruits. A profession of extraordinary catholicism is combined with the sectarian pride of the old Sandemanian school; and an auspicious study of the Scriptures is neutralized by the fanaticism of Millenarianism, which is nearly allied to Irvingism.... The Millenarianism, which is not ostensibly a term of communion, is as restless as it is fanatical, and gives to the body a character which is ominous for the future.’

JAMES BENNETT. The History of Dissenters During the Last Thirty Years, 1839, 376-77

BELIEF in a pre-millennial advent of Christ which as we have earlier noted found some advocates in the mid- seventeenth century, practically disappeared from the main-stream of evangelical thought in the century which followed. Those who maintained it might still be found, particularly in some backwaters of Nonconformity, but the belief had no place in the creed of the leaders of the eighteenth century Revival, nor in that of the men who led the missionary movement which followed. Consequently, when the nineteenth century dawned the cause of pre-millennialism was at a very low ebb. David Bogue, preaching in 1813, could regard it as one of the oddities of Church history:

‘How wise and pious men could ever suppose that the saints, whose souls are now in heaven, should, after the resurrection of the body from the grave, descend to live on earth again; and that Jesus Christ should quit the throne of his glory above, and descend and reign personally over them here below, in distinguished splendour, for a thousand years, may justly excite our astonishment, since it is in direct opposition to the whole tenor of the doctrinal parts of the sacred volume. Such, however, have been the opinions of some great men. Happy will it be if we take warning from their aberrations.’

Dr. Bogue, an earnest supporter of missions to the end, died in 1825. At his last public engagement, a missionary meeting in Brighton, he closed the service with a prayer which breathed the whole spirit of the age through which he had lived his seventy-five years and the final petitions were a fitting conclusion to his life: ‘Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven: let all nations call the Saviour blessed, and the whole earth be filled with thy glory. Amen and Amen.’ What Bogue did not know was that the year of his death was to prove memorable for the public commencement of a revolution in prophetic thought, a revolution which was to have far-flung influences upon the future of Protestant Christianity.

The leader of this change of direction was Edward Irving. Born at Annan in the south-west of Scotland in 1792, he was licensed to the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1815 and four years later came into prominence as the assistant of Dr. Chalmers in his Glasgow parish. In 1822 Irving accepted a call to the Church of Scotland congregation at Hatton Garden. London, and within a short time he attained an extraordinary influence in the religious life of the capital. In the opinion of De Quincey, he was ‘by many degrees the greatest orator of our times’. This public esteem qualified Irving for preaching the May anniversary sermon of the London Missionary Society in 1824, and a wet and dreary day did not prevent the immense Chapel, built for Whitefield in Tottenham Court Road, from being filled long before the meeting was due to commence. ‘So early was the congregation assembled, that to keep so vast a throng occupied, the officials considered it wise to begin the preliminary services a full hour before the time appointed.’ When, three and a half hours later, Irving was through his sermon on ‘an ideal missionary’ there was general astonishment and a very mixed reaction. To some the Scottish preacher was a prophet, to others a visionary quack. The officers of the Society did not approve and made their mind known in a letter from the Secretary. This was, however, only the beginning. The next year, 1825, Irving was invited to speak for the Continental Society at a similar London gathering, and on this occasion he poured all the eloquence at his command into a statement of the prophetic belief which Bogue had so recently considered an aberration of the past. The address was on ‘Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed’, and in it Irving advanced the assertion that the Church, far from being on the threshold of a new era of blessing, was about to enter a ‘series of thick-coming judgments and fearful perplexities preparatory to Christ’s advent and reign. This address was later published and dedicated, with a frank acknowledgement of indebtedness, to Hatley Frere, a layman of pre-millennial convictions. The link between the two men is explained by Irving’s biographer: ‘Several years before, Mr. Hatley Frere, one of the most sedulous of those prophetical students who were beginning to make themselves known here and there over the country, had propounded a new scheme of interpretation, for which, up to this time, he had been unable to secure the ear of the religious public. Not less confident in the truth of his scheme that nobody shared his belief in it, Mr. Frere cherished the conviction that if he could but meet some man of candid and open mind, of popularity sufficient to gain a hearing, to whom he could privately explain and open up his system, its success was certain. When Irving, all ingenuous and ready to be taught, was suddenly brought into contact with him, the student of prophecy identified him by an instant intuition.’

Irving certainly had the very platform which was needed to gain the attention of his age, and at Christmas, 1825, he commenced a series of discourses on prophecy in his crowded church. His popularity was still rising, so much so that by the time his church’s splendid new building was opened in Regent Square two years later a thousand sittings had already been taken.

Early in 1826, not long after Irving was launched into the study of prophecy, a work purporting to be by a converted Jew, Ben-Ezra, came into his hands. Finding this to be in general accord with his own convictions, Irving personally translated it and added a preliminary discourse of two hundred pages. The work, entitled The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty, was published in 1827 and at once attracted widespread attention. Irving’s celebrity ensured this and the fact, revealed in the preliminary discourse, that the real author was Manuel Dc Lacunza (1731-1801), a South American Jesuit whose eyes had been opened to the corruption of Rome, stirred further interest. The prefatory material supplied by Irving contends for the premillennial advent with great persuasiveness and also includes a statement of the development of his own convictions. Speaking of the sermons on unfulfilled prophecy which he commenced at Christmas, 1825, he writes:

‘These three points of doctrine concerning the Gentile church, the future Jewish and universal church, and the personal advent of the Lord to destroy the one and to build up the other, I opened and defended out of the scriptures from Sabbath to Sabbath, with all boldness, yet with fear and trembling so far as the sweet harmony and communion of saints, in which I delight, was concerned; for at that time I did not know of one brother in the ministry who held with me in these matters, and of those to whom I broke the subject, I could not get the ear, even for preliminaries. So novel and strange a doctrine... such uncivil and implacable language, concerning overwhelming judgments upon the very eve of the millennial blessedness... such low and derogatory ideas of the risen and exalted Saviour, as that he should ever again come to visit earth, and be visibly present in it for any length of time, could not fail, and certainly did not fail, to call down upon my head all possible forms and degrees of angry and intemperate abuse. . . . But the more I examined, the more I was convinced, and resolved, though alone and single-handed, to maintain these three great heads of doctrine from the holy scriptures, against all who should undertake to uphold the commonly-received notion, that the present Gentile dispensation was about to burst forth with great verdure and fruitfulness, and fill the whole earth with the millennial blessedness, after which, to wind up and consume all, the Lord would come in the latter end.’

The isolation which Irving felt on account of his new beliefs was only temporary, for he soon became the centre of a group of ministers and aristocratic laymen who were eager to crusade for what they regarded as a revived faith in scriptural truth. One of the first to be gained by Irving was Henry Drummond (1786-1860), a London banker and also at one time High Sheriff of Surrey. After a period in Parliament, Drummond had a religious experience in 1817 which changed the course of his life; thereafter he became a mainstay of the Continental Society and other evangelical agencies. Drummond’s new commitment to a pre-millennial advent had wide repercussions. On the first day of Advent, I826 he opened his beautiful home of Albury Park, close to the main road between Guildford and Dorking, to invited guests who for a full week were to deliberate on prophetic questions. Irving was enraptured by this gathering of some twenty men and spoke afterwards of ‘the six days we spent under the holy and hospitable roof of Albury House, within the chime of the church bell, and surrounded by the most picturesque and beautiful forms of nature . . . of which the least I can say is this, that no council, from that first which convened at Jerusalem until this time, seemed more governed, and conducted, and inspired by a spirit of holy communion.’

These conferences on prophecy, the first of many in the nineteenth century, were apparently held annually at Albury until 1830, and some forty-four individuals attended one or more. Of this number, nineteen were Church of England clergy, one a Moravian, two Nonconformist ministers, four Church of Scotland ministers, eleven English laymen, and half a dozen or more others. For the most part these were persons of position and influence and through their combined efforts Irving rejoiced that ‘the truth of his Son’s glorious advent maketh winged speed in all the churches’.

In the early summer of 1828, Irving carried the excitement of the new message to Scotland and, while the General Assembly was meeting in Edinburgh, he gathered prodigious crowds for twelve early morning lectures on prophecy. On his first attempt even Dr. Chalmers found it quite impossible to gain admittance to one of these services. Upon the phenomena of these addresses Chalmers commented: ‘Certainly there must have been a marvellous power of attraction that could turn a whole population out of their beds so early as five in the morning. The largest church in our metropolis was each time overcrowded. I heard him once; but I must just be honest enough and humble enough to acknowledge that I scarcely understood a single word, nor do I comprehend the ground on which he goes in his violent allegorizations, chiefly of the Old Testament.’

The clamour to hear Irving during this visit to the North had one tragic result when the gallery of a church in Kirkcaldy collapsed shortly before Irving was due to commence a service. Some thirty-five people were killed. Recovering from the shock, Irving continued his Scottish tour and preached shortly afterwards to a full congregation at the East Church, Perth. A hearer recalled that service many years later:

‘His text was taken from the 24th chapter of Matthew, regarding the coming of the Son of Man. I remember nothing of the sermon, save its general subject; but one thing I can never forget. While he was engaged in unfolding his subject, from out of a dark cloud, which obscured the church, there came forth a bright blaze of lightning and a crash of thunder. There was deep stillness in the audience. The preacher paused; and from the stillness and the gloom his powerful voice, clothed with increased solemnity, pronounced these words: “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” You can imagine the effect.’

Later the same year Irving, with characteristic confidence, wrote to Chalmers who, at the age of forty-eight, had just been appointed Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh. After advising his senior on the best type of theological training and mentioning his desire to be examined at Edinburgh for a doctorate in divinity, Irving concludes by turning to the great theme and solicits Chalmers’ aid:

‘I think there is some possibility of my being in Edinburgh next May. Will any of the brethren permit me the use of their church to preach a series of sermons upon the Kingdom, founded upon passages in the New Testament? . . . The second coming of the Lord is the ‘point de vue’, the vantage ground, as one of my friends is wont to word it, from which, and from which alone, the whole purpose of God can be contemplated and understood.’

Irving travelled to the northern capital again in May, 1829, and once more took a series of meetings ‘with an extempore sermon of two hours, every morning at seven o’clock’. But it was without Chalmers’ help and Irving could only get the use of the out-of-the-way Hope Park Chapel. This was better than the open-air to which he had expected he would be reduced. The truth is that the evangelical ministers in the North, having given Irving a patient hearing, had reached their conclusions and were acting accordingly. As early as 1827 Chalmers had observed in private correspondence, ‘I really fear lest his prophecies, and the excessive length and weariness of his services, may unship him altogether.’

By the end of 1829 all the factors were present which were to cast such shadows over the closing years of Irving’s ministry. His fascination for the Curious and the speculative had led him to accept conjectures on Christ’s humanity which alarmed those who saw the danger of obscuring the Redeemer’s perfect sinlessness; he had also used language subversive to the doctrine of imputed righteousness. To Irving, confident of the guidance of the Spirit and no longer bound by ‘received traditions’, the opposition he provoked was proof of the decadence he had complained of in the churches since 1825. A further proof of the unspirituality of the religious world was now added. By 1829 he was convinced that the supernatural powers present in the first century should be possessed by the Church as surely and richly now as in the days of the Apostles’. The absence of miraculous gifts was the fruit of the Church’s long unbelief. Within a year the ‘gift of tongues' had appeared on Clydesdale and by 1831 it was present in numerous instances in Irving’s congregation at Regent Square.

In 1830 Irving was called to account for his beliefs before the London Presbytery of the Church of Scotland, but the die was already cast. Irving separated from the Presbytery. Significantly the Continental Society, the same year, carried a resolution by Henry Drummond, ‘That this Meeting, impressed with the thought that the day of labour is far spent, and must soon close.., do recognise the great duty and privilege of raising the cry throughout apostate Christendom, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”

Irving and a number of members adhering to him, who together became founders of the Catholic Apostolic Church, were ejected from the Regent Square building in 1832. The next year he was deposed from the ministry by the Presbytery of Annan where he had been first licensed in happier days. Lesser men would have been overwhelmed by the shadows now gathering around his ministry, but the hope of Christ’s impending advent and the miraculous’ gifts which were serving to announce the nearness of the end impelled Irving onwards. It was not for long. His amazing energies were exhausted and on a preaching visit to Scotland in 1834, at the age of forty-two, death overtook him. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, then a theological student at Edinburgh, was one of thousands who thrilled at the news of his sudden death and his diary entry for November 9 is fitting:

‘Heard of Edward Irving’s death. I look back upon him with awe, as on the saints and martyrs of old. A holy man in spite of all his delusions and errors. He is now with his God and Saviour, whom he wronged so much, yet, I am persuaded, loved so sincerely.”

Today very little remains to speak of Irving. A tomb in the crypt of Glasgow Cathedral, an impressive statue by the roadside at Annan, a desolate Irvingite church, close by Albury Park in the fields of Surrey — these are all sights hardly noticed by a generation which has forgotten his name. We have given considerable space to his ministry, however, because its influence was indeed a great turning point in the history of prophetic study, and the ideas he did so much to set in motion are now to be found all over the English-speaking world. To the fact of Irving’s great influence and to its consequences we shall now turn.

The influence was probably least upon his own Scottish countrymen, yet even there some notable exceptions were to be found. Andrew Bonar, speaking in Edinburgh, in 1888, on ‘The Hope of the Lord’s Return’, recalled how he and his brother Horatius had been led to the pre-millennial view half a century before:

‘May I tell you the history of some of us in Edinburgh? It is about sixty years since I myself felt the first thrill of interest in this subject — when Edward Irving was preaching in this city. He had lectures at seven in the morning during the time of the General Assembly, and for two or three years in succession, on prophetic subjects. We used to go at six in the morning to get a good seat. But I remember what led me to decision was the calm reading of Matthew 24. That chapter decided me on this subject. I could not see a foot-breadth of room for the Millennium before Christ comes in the clouds. It is wave upon wave of tribulation till the Son of Man appears’.

After their student days, Andrew and Horatius Bonar became the most eminent and saintly expositors of the pre-millennial view in Scotland. The prophetic volumes of Horatius, his years as editor of The Quarterly Journal of Prophecy, and his many hymns bearing on the advent theme, detached some of the younger evangelical ministers from the traditional view and gained them the nickname of ‘The Evangelical Light Infantry’.’ Little did the majority of evangelicals think that a day would come when the powerful beliefs of the old brigade in Scotland would pass almost completely away.

In England the stir produced by Irving’s ministry, the Albury Conferences, and The Morning Watch (a prophetic journal which, under Irving’s guidance, commenced in 1829), was profound and many clergy and laity of the Established Church were influenced. John Ellerton who as a child was in the midst of Anglican evangelical circles in London in the 1830’s — when Irving’s personal popularity was waning — records this of the -Scottish preacher:

‘I thought of him chiefly as an open-air preacher, for more than once on Sunday mornings, on my way to St. John’s, Bedford Row, with my father, had I had a vision of that marvelous face and form, in his little movable wooden pulpit, some times in pouring rain, holding an umbrella over his head with one hand, as he poured forth his fervid oratory to a scanty grout of hearers outside the walls of the great prison. But the favourite, the inexhaustible subject of talk among serious people was unfulfilled prophecy. The Irvingite movement (as people would call it) had popularized Millenarian speculations among many who resisted steadily all belief in the new ‘Miracle and ‘Tongues’. Names now utterly forgotten of writers on prophecy formed the staple reading, I am afraid, for a good many of the religious folk among whom I lived; and their speculations turned chiefly on the chronology of the future —in what year the Jews were to be restored, Popery to be destroyed, and the Millennium to begin.’

A belief in Christ’s personal advent to introduce a millennium was certainly taken up by many clergy who had no sympathy with the ‘miraculous gifts’ and separation of Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church. While the Irvingite excesses ended the inter-denominational fellowship at first characteristic of the Albury meetings, the clergy who had been there, among them Lewis Way and Hugh McNeile, continued to spread the new prophetic belief, and the number professing it increased rapidly in the Church of England. Edward Bickersteth, eminent for his work as Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, changed his view and came to believe ‘that our Lord would return to an unconverted world . . . and that after His return there would be further great events upon earth’. Until his’ death in 1850 Bickersteth was a fluent propagator of the premillennial position. His biographer, T. R. Birks, was also a prolific writer on the same theme. Scholars, including Edward Greswell and E. B. Elliott, added the weight of learning to the cause and succeeded in winning the commitment of a number who were to become Anglican evangelical leaders in the next generation. Among the latter was J. C. Ryle.

Elliott (1793—1875), in his later days incumbent of St.Mark’s, Brighton, is an example of the remarkable energy devoted to advocating the pre-millennial view. It is hard to say which is more extraordinary, the massive size of his four-volume Horae Apocalypticae (Hours with the Apocalypse), which runs to 2,500 pages, or the fact that in eighteen years it went through five editions! Yet even by the time the first edition of this work appeared, as he tells us, a great change in thought had taken place:

‘In the year 1844, the date of the first publication of my own Work on the Apocalypse, so rapid had been the progress of these views in England, that instead of its appearing a thing strange and half-heretical to hold them, as when Irving published his translation of Ben Ezra, the leaven had evidently now deeply penetrated the religious mind; and from the ineffectiveness of the opposition hitherto formally made to them, they seemed gradually advancing onward to triumph.’

According to another Anglican clergyman, Mourant Brock, some seven hundred ministers of the Establishment were said to believe that Christ’s coming must precede His kingdom upon earth. This was in 1845. The number almost certainly increased in the latter half of the century and it is noticeable that a Prophetical Conference of pre-millennial persuasion, held in London in 1873, had the backing of such notable evangelical churchmen as the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Earl of Cavan and Lord Radstock.

* * *

The group which was to be most closely identified with the prophetic ideas of the 1820’s has still to be mentioned and this group, more than any other, was to be responsible for replacing the old Puritan outlook on the future with a new ‘orthodoxy’. I refer to the Brethren whose outstanding leader on prophetic subjects was J. N. Darby. Born in London in the year 1800, Darby, at his death eighty-two years later, left forty volumes of writings and some fifteen hundred assemblies across the world, ‘who looked to him as their founder or guide’. The movement which these assemblies represented was distinguished from the first by its attention to unfulfilled prophecy, or perhaps ‘it would be more correct to say that it was one of the main foundations of the whole system’. Through Darby’s writings, which include four volumes on prophecy and five giving a Synopsis of the Books of the Bible, his pre-millennial prophetic system was carried to all parts of the English-speaking world. Among the many who absorbed Darby’s teaching was Henry Moorhouse, an evangelist among the Brethren, who, in turn, influenced D. L. Moody. Before the end of the nineteenth century Moody was probably the most esteemed evangelical figure on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Bible College named after him at Chicago became a seminary of ardent premillennial belief. The impact of Darby on another American, C. I. Scofield, was still more momentous, for Scofield’s notes made his master’s teaching on prophecy an integral part of the Reference Bible first published in 1909 and thereafter wedded to Scofield’s name. Within fifty years approximately three million copies of the Scofield Reference Bible were printed in America, a proportionate number were issued by the Oxford University Press in Britain, and the volume had vast influence in making Darby’s prophetical beliefs the norm for evangelicals in the English-speaking world.

There can be no doubt that one reason for the influence of Darby’s writings was their constant appeal to Scripture, and his claim, so repeatedly made, that ‘express revelation’ alone weighed with him. Thus at the outset of his Brief Remarks on the Work of the Rev. David Brown, entitled, ‘Christ’s Second Coming, Is It Pre-Millennial?’ Darby tells us, ‘I have not thought it necessary to follow Dr. B. in all his comments on men’s views. It sufficed to take up those of scripture.’ Brown, we are told, ‘borrowed enormously’ from other sources; ‘his reasoning is the effect of judging new truths by old traditions;’ confusion on prophecy is due to the fact that men ‘mix up traditional theology with the word of God’. Darby, on the other hand, considered it enough to connect his interpretation with particular texts of Scripture plus comments such as, ‘the smallest attention to the passage makes this clear’, or, ‘Nothing can be simpler or clearer’. Again, ‘There are those who must have scripture testimony for what they believe.’ Someone who had never read David Brown might be pardoned in supposing that if this was the state of the case, the controversy for or against pre-millennialism was just a question of being for or against Scripture.

The historical links between the origins of the Brethren and excitement created by Edward Irving puts this matter in quite a different light. David Brown, who was Irving’s assistant at Regent Square before the congregation was broken up, could have pointed this out well had he chosen to answer Darby.

The first groups of Brethren in Dublin, London and Plymouth, dissatisfied with the unspirituality of the Church of England — to which in most cases they belonged — began to meet together for fellowship, additional to that of their Church connection, in the second half of the 1820’s. Darby, who was in touch with the Dublin group, resigned his curacy in County Wicklow in 1828, though he did not sever all connection with the Church of England until some six years later. At the same time several other young men, including a number of university graduates, were moving in the same direction as Darby. This was just the period when Irving’s influence through his preaching and writing, through the Albury Conferences and through The Morning Watch, was at its height. Amongst these Brethren, all earnestly exercised about spiritual things, Irving’s warnings on the worldliness of organized religion and his reiteration of the biblical teaching that the Bridegroom’s advent is the blessed hope received a ready hearing.

In Ireland, in particular, those influenced by Irving were in touch with future leaders of the Brethren. Lady Powerscourt, whose estate of Powerscourt House was situated at Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, attended at least one of the Albury Conferences and in1830 she was an enthusiastic hostess to Irving when he preached in the south of Ireland. This led in 1831, and two successive years, to a prophetic conference at Powerscourt House. Among the four hundred who were present from different parts of Britain at the 183I Powerscourt Conference, described by one participant as ‘the élite of Evangelicals’, was J. N. Darby.

All the salient features of Darby’s scheme are to be found in Irving: the expectation of impending judgments upon Christendom, the imminence of Christ’s advent, his consequent millennial reign upon earth — these beliefs, as we have already seen, were those of the Scottish preacher. There were, however, elaborations of detail. At Albury and in Irving’s London congregation a curious belief practically unknown in earlier Church history, had arisen, namely, that Christ’s appearing before the millennium is to be in two stages, the first, a secret ‘rapture’ removing the Church before a ‘Great Tribulation’ smites the earth, the second his coming with his saints to set up his kingdom. This idea comes into full prominence in Darby. He held that ‘the Church’ is a mystery of which only Paul speaks. She is Christ’s mystic body and will be complete at the ‘rapture’. The Jews and other Gentiles converted thereafter will never be Christ’s bride: ‘I deny that saints before Christ’s first coming, or after his second, are part of the Church.’ With breath-taking dogmatism Darby swept away what had previously been axiomatic in Christian theology:

‘The assertion that His mystical body is the universal family of the redeemed, is unscriptural; all the declaration is founded on this gross and unscriptural error, that all the saved belong to the Church.’

Such was the ‘dispensational’ branch of pre-millennialism, to be held, with few exceptions, by all the Brethren and later to be so widely popularized in the Scofield Reference Bible.

Another development from Irving was Darby’s doctrine of separation from ecclesiastical connections. If the Churches were languishing in unbelief and worldliness, and if the Advent was at hand, then the reformation of these bodies could not be the intention of God. Darby’s charge that the ‘Church is in ruins’ was not made so that believers, by reassembling on a News Testament pattern, should recover the Church to her true position; rather it was separation to escape apostasy and to await a speedy translation to heaven. ‘I believe from Scripture that the ruin is without remedy, that the professing church will be cut off.’ Darby believed his scriptural justification to be his prophetic scheme. The Church belonged to a ‘dispensation’ — a favourite word with Irving - which failed; God’s method is not to restore a dispensation but to usher in a new one, hence the next great event would not be a reformation — to attempt it would be to fail — but the advent of Christ. Thus to expect such promised blessings as the conversion of the Jews in this dispensation was for Darby a positive delusion.

These ideas were in the process of formulation in Darby’s mind in the early 1830’s when, as he tells us, one of the subjects considered at Powerscourt was: ‘What light: does scripture throw on present events, and their moral character? What is next to be looked for and expected? Is there a prospect of a revival of Apostolic churches before the coming of Christ?’ By the time Darby delivered his eleven prophetical lectures on The Hopes of the Church of God at Geneva in 1840, these questions were firmly settled in his mind. In his fifth lecture, on the ‘Progress of Evil on the Earth’, he spoke thus to the inhabitants of John Calvin’s old city:

‘What we are about to consider will tend to shew that, instead of permitting ourselves to hope for a continued progress of good, we must expect a progress of evil; and that the hope of the earth being filled with the knowledge of the Lord before the exercise of His judgment, and the consummation of this judgment on the earth, is delusive. . . Truly Christendom has become completely corrupted; the dispensation of the Gentiles has been found unfaithful: can it be restored? No! impossible.’

The reader is now in a position to see what we mean by ‘the eclipse of the hope’. Under the new teaching the expectation that the Church would yet advance to claim vast numbers of the inhabitants of the earth as Christ’s inheritance was nothing less than presumption and error. The petition ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’, took on an entirely different meaning as men ceased to look for its progressive fulfilment through revivals and the gospel ministry and viewed the kingdom as something to be established only by Christ’s advent. And yet the constant claim of pre-millennialism was that it was restoring ‘hope’ to the Church. Darby and his movement, says Alexander Reese, ‘filled Evangelical Christendom with the new hope’. This statement proceeds on the assumption that only by belief in the immediate return of Christ can we be possessed of a true hope in that event — if his coming lies distant in time, hope must be excluded. We shall deal with this false assumption in the following chapter, but it should be noted that if this teaching was scriptural when it was first preached it is very hard to account for the passing of another one hundred and forty years. In William Blair Neatby’s History of the Plymouth Brethren, published in 1901, Darby’s charge comes full circle when the author closes his fascinating volume with these words:

‘If any one had told the first Brethren that three quarters of a century might elapse and the Church be still on earth, the answer would probably have been a smile, partly of pity, partly of disapproval, wholly of incredulity. Yet so it has proved. It is impossible not to respect hopes so congenial to an ardent devotion; yet it is clear now that Brethrenism took shape under the influence of a delusion, and that that delusion was a decisive element in all it's distinctive features'.

The old Puritan teaching allowed both for hope in a mighty spread of the gospel in the earth and for a yearning for Christ’s gIorious appearing. The new teaching, by reversing the order oft these two things, nullified the first hope as far as the experience of the Church on this side of the Advent is concerned and by making the imminence of the Advent an essential part of what Paul calls ‘the blessed hope’, it introduced practical effects into the present life of Christians which were far from beneficial. Foremost among these effects was that a thorough pessimism about the world, and a refusal to take a long-term view of the prospects of the Church in history, came to be regarded as attitudes which were the hall-marks of orthodoxy.

There is evidence enough to support this criticism. Neatby says:

‘Everybody that has a practical acquaintance with the Brethren must have noticed how strong a tendency there is amongst them to substitute for St. James’s formula — “If the Lord will”, — a formula of their own — “If the Lord tarry”. And more and more the persuasion gained ground that the “tarrying” would not last long, and a suggestion that several years might yet intervene would be disapproved, not indeed as theoretically inadmissible, but as indicating an unworthy attitude of mind towards the Great Hope.’

The same author gives us these striking words from F. W. Newman, who was with the Brethren in the early days:

‘My study of the New Testament at this time had made it impossible for me to overlook that the apostles held it to be a duty of all disciples to expect a near and sudden destruction of the earth by fire, and constantly to be expecting the return of the Lord from heaven . . . .

‘The importance of this doctrine is, that it totally forbids all working for earthly objects distant in time; and here the Irish clergyman [Darby} threw into the same scale the entire weight of his character. For instance, if a youth had a natural aptitude for mathematics, and he asked, ought he to give himself to the study, in hope that he might diffuse a serviceable knowledge of it, or possibly even enlarge the boundaries of the science? my friend would have replied, that such a purpose was very proper, if entertained by a worldly man. Let the dead bury their dead; and let the world study the things of the world. But such studies cannot be eagerly followed by the Christian, except when he yields to unbelief.’

Practically no area of life remained unaffected by this eclipse of the old hope. Political and social endeavour, such as marked the lives of a number of prominent Christians in the Reformation and Puritan periods, and, in more recent times, in William Wilberforce (Footnote: It is interesting to note that in the Dedication of his Evening Exercises to William Wilberforce, William Jay, writing in the year 1831, takes up this subject and says: ‘I rejoice, my dear Sir, that a person of your consideration is in the healthful number of those who, notwithstanding the contemptuous denial of some, and the gloomy forebodings of others, believe that real religion has been advancing, and is spreading, and will continue to spread, till, without any disruption of. the present system, “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. . . .“ If we are not to be weary in well-doing, we need not only exhortation, but hope, which is at once the most active as well as the most cheerful principle. Nothing so unnerves energy and slackens diligence as despondency.’) and the ‘Clapham sect’, was no longer regarded as legitimate evangelical activity. To engage in such pursuits savoured of the error that the world could be made better and it involved participation in a ‘human’ order of things. Thus we find Calvin criticized by one of the pre-millennial writers: ‘Instead of animating his fellow-christians by preaching and instruction to await patiently and in faith the establishment of the kingly rule that Jesus had promised in connexion with his Parousia, he considered it his task to make the secular authorities submissive to his interpretation of the Divine commandments.’” To the Reformer these two things were not mutually exclusive; according to the new teaching they were.

But the teaching went further than encouraging a withdrawal from the secular. It fostered a new attitude towards foreign missions. According to the general pre-millennial view, the predictions of the prophets concerning the blessing of the whole world are not to be realized through the Church or the means of grace now at her disposal; a new order of things personal reign — will have to come into being before the day of salvation for humanity in general dawns. Only then will it be that ‘all nations shall call him blessed’ (Psa. 72.17). By this standpoint the old beliefs of Christ receiving all nations for his inheritance through the preaching of the gospel, and of the Church’s working to fulfil the promises of prophecy were errors; nineteenth-century pre-millennialism had no hesitation in so describing them. In the words of B. W. Newton they were beliefs ‘hastily indeed and erroneously formed’.

A. A. Hodge of Princeton, who was himself a missionary in India in his early years, correctly saw the major change in missionary strategy which the new prophetic viewpoint had brought:

‘Millenarian missionaries have a style of their own. Their theory affects their work in the way of making them seek exclusively, or chiefly, the conversion of individual souls. The true and efficient missionary method is, to aim directly, indeed, at soul winning, but at the same time to plant Christian institutions in heathen lands, which will, in time, develop according to the genius of the nationalities: English missionaries can never hope to convert the world directly by units.’

Perhaps of all the tendencies of the new teaching none was worse than the effect which it had in belittling the importance of the visible Church. In the minds of the generations of evangelicals who lived before the eclipse of the hope, the conversion of the nations was related to the Church of history. Through the centuries God had been building that Church, enriching her with understanding, giving her teachers and preachers, and spreading her bounds through revivals. All this looked forward, in their view, to an era when the Church, garnering the lessons of the past and refreshed by new supplies of grace from heaven, would be more faithful to Scripture, more united in government and discipline, and more able to proclaim to all the earth the salvation of God.

The new teaching almost totally reversed this outlook. Now the Church was regarded as an institution without a future and disparagement of church ties and duties affected the thinking of many evangelicals, even though they did not go as far as Irving and Darby in separating from all ‘ecclesiastical connections’. Whatever Christian work remained to be done before the Advent belonged to new groups, or simply to earnest individuals, who often professed no connection with the Church in her historic past. Even the pastoral office was viewed as no longer necessary and the trained ministry was accordingly set aside.

The study of the Church’s teachers in former ages was discountenanced as turning ‘to human tradition's and each Christian was not only supposed to grasp all scriptural truth without such aids but also to be able to fulfil the role hitherto expected of those appointed to the preacher’s office.

This revolution in thought was, as we have seen, constantly represented by its leaders as an advance in spiritual light. Yet, in truth, it was a repetition of what had occurred before in Church history. On a large scale it had been seen in the Montanist movement in the third century A.D., when Christians, dismayed at the laxity of the Church and at the corruption of the world, proclaimed the end of the world to be at hand. In the words of Gerhard Ulhorn:

‘The coming of the Lord was then believed to be quite near, and this hope dominated the whole life. No provision was made for a long continuance of the Church on earth, and all efforts were exclusively directed towards remaining in the world without spot, till the day of Christ’s coming. The mission of Christianity to conquer the world, to permeate it with the Christian spirit, and thereby to shape it anew, had scarcely received any attention. . . .

Similarly in the eighteenth century, at the time of the Great Awakening in New England, James Davenport had withdrawn himself and his followers from all Church connections and announced that ‘in a very short Time all these Things would be involv’d in devouring Flames’.

From the errors of the Montanists the Church had recovered and, purged of despair, gone forward with growing might. And the deviations of a Davenport had not turned the evangelical, leaders of the eighteenth century from their confidence in the victories which were yet to be given by the ascended Christ. Yet the mood of pessimism, shaken off before, had come to settle heavily upon many evangelical Christians at the dawning of the twentieth century. The growing defection from the Bible to liberalism within the Churches was, without doubt, one major cause, but the courage needed to face this defection had been sapped by the notion that pessimism over the future is Christian orthodoxy. Indeed so prevalent by then was the new prophetic teaching that the outlook of the Puritans, the eighteenth-century leaders1 and the pioneers of world missions, was temporarily almost to disappear from the English-speaking churches.