Montreal Division
For some years, J.N. Darby and F.W. Grant had disagreed
over the doctrine of the sealing of the Spirit. Darby maintained that one is
sealed with the Spirit when he believes the Gospel. Others maintained that one
is sealed with the Spirit when he trusts Christ. This will seem a minor point
to most who will read this FAQ, but evidently to some it was a weighty matter.
All through this dispute, Darby and Grant remained close friends.
In 1879
or 1880, F.W. Grant and his brother R.T. Grant were in Toronto. In the
assembly, it was mentioned that a young man who was very sick wanted to break
bread. Two men from the assembly visited him to examine whether they could
receive him into fellowship (even though he was too sick to go to their meeting
and simply wanted to break bread as a believer before he died). These two men
felt that he had to be sealed with the Spirit before he could break bread with
them, and he could only be considered to be sealed with the Spirit when he had
seen the finished work of Christ. Believing his grasp of this theology to be
insufficient, they left and the young man died without having partaken of the
Lord's Supper. These two men returned to their assembly in Toronto and made a
report about their actions.
R.T Grant heard their report and was appalled.
He immediately wrote an article on the topic and sent it to his brother F.W.
Grant, who was editing a magazine. The article was published, placing the Grant
brothers in direct conflict with Darby's teaching. Lord Adelbert P. Cecil, a
follower of Darby, was allowed to answer R.T. Grant's article in F.W. Grant's
magazine. Darby, very sick at this time, wrote a pamphlet of his own on the
topic. After consideration of this, F.W. Grant wrote a book entitled, "Life in
Christ and Sealing with the Spirit". Regretably, Darby had died by this time,
and Darby's followers took this as a direct attack made by F.W. Grant against a
dead man who was not able to respond.
Adelbert Cecil found some who
sympathized with him in Montreal at an assembly called the Natural History
Hall, and a letter rejecting F.W. Grant's ministry was drawn up. 38 people
signed it, although it would seem that a number of them didn't understand what
they had signed. At a meeting of the assembly, despite protests, a motion
placing F.W. Grant out of fellowship was rammed through. About one quarter of
the exclusive meetings in North America sided with Natural History Hall and
London's Park Street meeting, and about three quarters refused the Natural
History Hall judgement, either out of respect for F.W. Grant or out of protest
against the methods used by Lord Cecil and his associates. Shortly after this,
Adelbert Cecil died in a boating accident on Lake Ontario.
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