ABSTRACT
The Brethren movement was in part the product of increased participation by laypeople in nineteenth-century evangelicalism. It arose in the late 1820s in Dublin, quickly spreading to England and arriving in Scotland a decade later. After 1848 it divided into two sections: the Exclusive Brethren who followed the leadership of the ex-Anglican clergyman, John Nelson Darby, and the Open Brethren, a looser grouping of independent churches. There was, in addition, another schism within the latter in 1892-4, which gave birth to the Churches of God, a body governed by a hierarchy of elders.1 Among those who joined the nascent movement there was considerable dissatisfaction with the institutional church and among the causes of discontent was the role of the clergy.2 The Brethren retained the deeply rooted anti-Catholicism of their radical evangelical background:3 for the young J.N. Darby the papacy was ‘Satan’s fiction’ in answer to the true church.4 Robert Beverley, a lawyer and Anglican turned Dissenter, who was for a while associated with the Brethren, judged other churches by the proximity of their ecclesiology to that of Rome. ‘Any one with ordinary intellectual capacities’, he pronounced dismissively, ‘can weigh the Church of England in the gospel balances, and discover its deficiencies.’5 He instanced a hypothetical evangelical vicar in a country parish, who had succeeded in reforming the manners of the village yet who, due to the power of the patrons, would be succeeded by either a ‘rapacious cormorant’ or a younger son of an aristocrat, ‘a famous fox-hunter and an unerring shot’. The consequences for the village were ‘inevitable’.6 Evangelical clergy, he evidently felt, were compromised. Nor did Nonconformity as represented by Congregationalism fare any better, being embarrassed by the monarchical form of its ministerial office. The exaltation of one man could become an excuse for inactivity among the members.7 The laity were marginalized, not emancipated.
