For the past two centuries, ecclesiastical historians have cited the Anglo-Irish clergyman and Plymouth Brethren pioneer, John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) as the mastermind behind the septarian dispensational arrangement of history. However, more than a century before Darby presented a dispensational schema replete with different economies related to the different peoples of God, as he perceived them in Scripture, the First Viscount John Shute Barrington (1678-1734) offered an arrangement of biblical history according to seven dispensations that outlined God’s relationship to the different peoples of God, as he understood them. Beginning with Adam in innocence and continuing through the antediluvian patriarchs, followed by Noah, Abraham, Moses, and finally with a clear indication that Pentecost began a new dispensation of the Spirit, Barrington’s dispensational arrangement of history anticipated the restoration of Israel to their land as God’s earthly people, which would serve as the consummation of all God’s dispensations. Barrington’s well delineated septarian dispensational arrangement of history as presented in his recently digitized work An Essay on the Several Dispensations of God to Mankind, in the Order, in which they lie in the Bible (1728) provides the most definitive and conclusive refutation to the claim that Darby was the innovative architect behind the septarian arrangement of the Bible’s dispensations.