About the year 1802 there were a few persons in Dublin, most of them connected with the religious establishments of the country. The most noted among them were John Walker, G. Carr and Dr. Darby, all of whom organized religious bodies, differing in minor points from one another. Their attention was directed to Christian fellowship, as they perceived it to have existed among the disciples in apostolic times. They concluded from the study of the New Testament that all the first Christians in any place were connected together in the closest brotherhood; and that as their connection was grounded on the one apostolic gospel which they believed, so it was altogether regulated by the precepts delivered to them by the apostles, as the divinely commissioned ambassadors of Christ. They were convinced that every departure of professing Christians from this course must have originated in a withdrawing of their allegiance from the King of Zion, and in the turning away from the instruction of the inspired apostles; that the authority of their word, being divine, was unchangeable, and that it can not have been annulled by or weakened by the lapse of ages, by the varying customs of different nations, or by the enactments of earthly legislators. With such views in their minds they set out in the attempt to return fully to the course marked out in the Scriptures; persuaded that they were not called to make any laws or regulations for their union, but simply to learn and adhere to the law recorded in the divine Word. Their number soon increased; and for some time they did not see that the union which they maintained with each other, on the principles of scripture, was at all inconsistent with the continuance of their connection with the various religious bodies round them. But after a time they were convinced that these two things were utterly incompatible; and that the same divine rule which regulated their fellowship with each other forbade them to maintain any religious fellowship with others. From this view, and the practice consequent upon it, they were called “Separatists.” They held that even two or three disciples in any one place, united together in the faith of the apostolic gospel, and in obedience to the apostolic precepts, constitute the Church of Christ in that place. They held that the only good and sure hope toward God for any sinner is by the belief of this testimony concerning the great things of God and his salvation. And as they understood by faith, with which justification and eternal life were connected, nothing else but belief of the things declared to all alike in the Scriptures, so by repentance they understood nothing else but the new mind which that belief produces. Everything called repentance, but antecedent to the belief of the Word of God, or unconnected with it, they considered spurious and evil.