To Mr H St W  Pontis                                Weston s[uper]. M[are]

                                                                                 Feb 21/87

Dear Sir

                  I do not remember that Mr J.N. Darby had any definite place in Oxford for his temporary habitat.  When you ask my general opinion of Mr Darby’s career, I doubt whether in my position (which may seem hostile) I ought to say any thing to the public.  At the same time, facts speak for themselves.

                  Seriously, when I review the past before the Supreme Tribunal, I thank God for Mr Darby’s harsh and wholly unexpected treatment of me.  It was a shock that broke up my previous confidence.  It made me doubt how others, to whom I had looked up or on whom I had leaned, would behave to me.  It forced me to ask: Do I after all know rightly what Christianity is?  It drove me into deeper and more leisurely inquiry; though never did I relax my earliest conviction that moral truth and warm just sentiment [?] were the sacred core of any worthy religion, – not theory or creed, wise or unwise.

                  Mr Darby soon finished off with me:  I saw with wonder his renunciation of the principles which had so worked upon me, and I was able to keep quite out of his way.  But in due time he fell foul of my old College friend Benjamin Newton accusing him of “Irving’s//

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heresy”; i.e. that in expounding the confessions in the Psalms called Messianic, he (like Irving) seemed to ascribe actual sin to the immaculate Jesus. — From my present point of view I find it easy to believe that Newton was open to just attack on his own platform; but Newton frankly disowned the imputations.  In spite of this, Mr Darby not only split up his own brotherhood into two sections with impassable walls, but excommunicated Craik and Müller (revered Baptist Ministers in Bristol) and all who frequented their ministry, barely because they had “received” ladies “who came from Newton”, – and declined to enter the controversy.

                  Darby fought this battle for long years.  My wife was a warm admirer of George Müller (of Bristol) and her sister was married to my old friend Dr Cronin, a supporter of Darby against Newton.  In consequence when my wife went to visit her sister (most affectionate as they were) my wife was kept out of the Darby Eucharist, and treated as an outsider.  The late Lord Congleton (my old friend of our Eastern journeys of old called John Parnell) tried to avoid the error alike of Newton and of Darby, but with the sole result of making “3 Lord’s Tables” instead of two;  strange demonstration of Christian Union.

                  Mr Darby was suddenly accused from within his own body of Newton’s heresy.  One of them sent me ample//

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papers, with Darby’s own confession and retraction, yet [as if saying, Egomet mi agnosco {I do not recognize my own self}] this did not soften him towards Newton, but drove out some of his own friends with disgust.  I have found Darby’s section everywhere called “the Exclusive Section”; justly, I suppose: though each in turn is exclusive.

                  My last painful experience of Darby was in his conduct to his faithful, too loving, too admiring friend Dr Cronin who had gone all lengths of exclusiveness under her sister’s [?] case, and duly tutored his own children to it as far as he  could.  One daughter was married to a Swede, who died early, leaving a family of 5 young children, in very low pecuniary straits.  Cronin, visiting the Isle of Wight, fell in with a question dividing some of Darby’s connexion and took a decisive part on one side.  Darby, on learning it, flatly took the opposite.  What measures in detail he pursued, no one cared to tell me, nor could I inquire: but the hostility was so awful, that Cronin’s daughter regarded her father as excommunicated and permanent/?paramount unclean, insomuch that in her deep poverty she refused her father’s money, and renounced him with such harshness as virtually broke her mother’s heart.  Her mother at once was seized with a head ache that never left her; in short, she declined, languished and died: the father never lost the ???? of heart nor rallied from his wife’s loss, and followed her to the grave, not instantly but without ever recovering//

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from the moral shock.

                  At Oxford an elder Evangelical whom I much respected ^in 1829?^ to whom I tried to commend J N Darby said to me briefly:  “He has peculiar power, but he “stirs up unprofitable questions which cannot lead to unity.”  I was not at all of the good man’s opinion, then: but looking back some 58 years I see the career of J N Darby to have been chiefly “a ministering of/?to strife”.

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Charles Brenton, who soon after became Sir Charles, was loved by me when I was an undergraduate, and was warmly admired when I heard his soul stirring preaching in Bath some years later.  Unhappily he took Holy Orders in the Church of England so young, that in a very few years he had to come out; against the remonstrances of his Academic superiors.  It is a work for an angel rather than for an ardent young man, conscious of spiritual power, so to conduct himself towards Elders and Teachers, as not to seem proud and presumptuous, in breaking away from their sacred routine.  My brother in law Rev Th Mozley seems to have imbibed from them (Oriel College) all the worst and meanest view that could be taken of young Sir Charles, whom I remember with earnest sympathy though I have long left his creed behind me.

Yours truly

         F W Newman