The World’s Tragedy

PREFACE. III listic crusade at Plymouth in its early days was started in Ireland. It was an aristocratic and intellectual movement. John Nelson Darby, a learned man of good family, reasoned thus : The Bible is the Word of God. If its literal interpretation is once abandoned, the whole structure crashes to earth. This it will be seen is identically the Catholic position, save that for “ literal ” Rome reads “ Ecclesiastical.” Darby, too, found himself forced into the practical admis- sion that “ literal ” meant Darbeian ; for some of the more obvious contradictions and absurdities in the Bible are too necessary to the practical side of religion to be ignored. Seeing this, they devised an elaborate system of mental water-tight compartments. The contradictions of Old and New Testament were solved by a Doctrine that what was sauce for the Jewish “ Dispensation ” was not necessarily sauce for the Christian “ Dispensation ”. Cleverer than Luther, they made possible the Epistle of James by a series of sophisms which really deserve to be exposed as master- pieces of human self-deception. My space forbids. So, despite all the simplicity of the original logical posi- tion, they were found shifting as best they might from compromise to compromise. But this they never saw themselves ; and so far did they take their principle that my father would refuse to buy railway shares because