The Presbyterian Church in Ireland

30 November, 1999

This book is Finlay Holmes’ popular study of the Presbyterians of Ireland – who they are, where they have come from, their theological and political conflicts, their identity and ethos, and their significant role in Irish religious and political history. 168 pp, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd., 2000. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk […]

This book is Finlay Holmes’ popular study of the Presbyterians of Ireland – who they are, where they have come from, their theological and political conflicts, their identity and ethos, and their significant role in Irish religious and political history.

168 pp, Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd., 2000. To purchase this book online, go to www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. The First Presbyterians in Ireland

2. Laying the Foundations of an Irish Presbyterian Church

3. The Eighteenth Century

4. The Nineteenth Century: Outreach at Home and Abroad

5. The Twentieth Century: Changes and Challenges

Select Bibliography

Index

Review Finlay Holmes’s popular study of the Presbyterians of Ireland looks at the questions of how and why they are in Ireland. He explains how they came largely as the result of waves of immigration from Scotland in the seventeenth century, and remain today the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland, with a much smaller presence in the rest of Ireland. Conservative and evangelical in theology, they are mainly unionist in politics. Yet one of the paradoxes of their history is that they were the main originators of modern Irish Republicanism in the United Irish movement of the late eighteenth century, which led to the rebellion of 1798 in which many Ulster Presbyterians fought as rebels. After the failure of the rebellion and the subsequent Act of Union their outlook, both in theology and politics, changed, and their opposition to Home Rule for Ireland in the late nineteenth century was a major cause of the partition of Ireland and the setting up of the state of Northern Ireland. A thoroughly engaging account which helps explain the power and pride of Irish – and especially of Ulster – Presbyterianism.

CHAPTER ONE

THE FIRST PRESBYTERIANS IN IRELAND

Irish Presbyterianism cannot be said to be an indigenous Irish phenomenon though many Irish Presbyterians feel a strong kinship with St Patrick and early Irish Christianity. Presbyterianism came to Ireland with Scottish immigrants in the seventeenth century. A glance at the map shows how close together the south west of Scotland and the north east of Ireland are. For centuries people and ideas have been crossing the narrow stretch of water between the two countries. This was probably the route taken by Ireland’s first inhabitants 7000 years before Christ. A movement of population eastward from Ireland in the fifth century gave Scotland its name as the land of the Scotti, Latin for Irish, and the Irish Christian community founded by Columba in 563 contributed significantly to the evangelisation of ‘Scotland’ and north Britain. A thousand years later, a movement of population westward from Scotland to Ireland brought Presbyterianism to Ireland

Presbyterianism had taken root in Scotland in the course of the sixteenth-century movement of reformation in the church in Western Europe. The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of the Second Vatican Council declares that ‘The church… is always in need of being purified and incessantly pursues the path of penance and renewal’ The path of renewal in the sixteenth century brought new life to the church but also division. The old bottles of traditional church order, doctrine and discipline were not always able to contain the new wine of reformation, and Presbyterianism was one of the new bottles to take shape, involving a radical re-ordering of the church’s structures and life in obedience to what reformers like the Frenchman, Jean Cauvin (Latin, Calvinus, English, Calvin) in Geneva believed to be the teaching of Scripture. The teaching of Scripture, rather than church tradition, was to be authoritative in all questions of belief and practice. At the centre of Presbyterianism, its theology and worship, is Scripture, the word of God.

The words Presbyterian and Presbyterianism describe the form of government and organisation of what became known as the Reformed Church, emphasising continuity with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, for reformers like Calvin did not believe that they were founding new churches. They were reforming the church, bringing her back to her New Testament origins. The New Testament church, they contended, had been Presbyterian, rather than Episcopalian, in government.

Both these words, presbyterian and episcopalian, come from words in the Greek New Testament – presbuteros, a presbyter or elder, and episkopos, a bishop. Calvin argued that, in the New Testament, bishops were presbyters and presbyters bishops, that they were interchangeable terms, as in Acts chapter 20, where Paul appears to call the church leaders in Ephesus both presbyters and bishops. The Presbyterian form of church government, as developed by Calvin’s disciples, Theodore Beza in Geneva, John Knox in Scotland and Thomas Cartwright in England, offered an alternative to the episcopal system of oversight and leadership which had characterised the Pre-Reformation church and which, in their view, had failed the church. They could not see in delinquent pluralists like Albrecht of Brandenburg, whose shabby arrangements with the papacy to raise money to defray the cost of his pluralism and simony by selling indulgences provoked Martin Luther’s protest in 1517, as the successors of the apostles.

These reformers believed that, in the apostolic church, oversight was provided, not by individual apostles or bishops but by councils of presbyter/bishops, a presbuterion. Therefore they replaced the hierarchical episcopal structure of church government by a series of councils or consistories under a synod or general assembly as the supreme governing body of a territorial or national church. A revolutionary feature of these councils or consistories was the participation of elders, who were not ministers of word and sacrament, but essentially laymen, although, later, they underwent a form of ordination.

Kings and princes who had been accustomed to exercise some control over the church by judicious episcopal appointments disliked Presbyterianism, which made control of the church more difficult. Presbyterians, on the other hand, were conscientiously opposed to any form of Erastianism – the control of the church by the state – claiming that Jesus Christ himself was the sole king and head of the church and his kingship and headship could not be compromised. Christ is Lord, to quote an early Christian credal affirmation, and his authority could not be shared with any other authority, civil or ecclesiastical.

James VI of Scotland, later to be James I of the United Kingdom, believing that he was king by divine right, God’s lieutenant on earth, disliked being told by Presbyterians like Andrew Melville that, in the church, he was not a king, but merely a member, the subject of Jesus, the king and head of the church. Predictably James came to the view that monarchy and Presbyterianism were incompatible and he determined that Presbyterianism must either be extirpated or in some way subjected to the royal will. It was of course the fact that, unlike the Reformation in England, the Scottish Reformation had been led, not by the Crown, but by preachers like John Knox and nobles calling themselves the ‘Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ’, who doubtless had their own agenda, which had contributed to the success of Presbyterianism in Scotland.

James embarked upon a subtle campaign to weaken the power of the Scottish General Assembly and restore episcopacy in Scotland. In neighbouring England, Elizabeth had defeated the attempts of Presbyterians like Thomas Cartwright, professor of divinity at Cambridge, to make the Church of England a Presbyterian Church, and when James succeeded her in 1603, he quickly made it clear that, although he was a Scot, he was not going to advance the Presbyterian cause. In fact he used his new authority to intensify his campaign against Presbyterianism in Scotland, succeeding in restoring episcopacy in 1610 and such Catholic practices as kneeling for communion and observing saints’ days, both abhorrent to Presbyterians as unscriptural and ‘popish’. Some of the Scots Presbyterian ministers who came to Ireland in the early seventeenth century did so in the hope of finding greater freedom in Ireland to follow the Presbyterian way.

Such success as the Protestant Reformation had enjoyed in Scotland and England had not been paralleled in Ireland. By the end of the sixteenth century, the reformed Church of Ireland, the church by law established, had certainly not become the church of a majority of the Irish people. One area in which it was virtually non-existent was in the northern province of Ulster, one of the last strongholds of Gaelic Irish independence. The situation there had changed, however, when James succeeded Elizabeth, with the defeat of Ulster’s Gaelic chieftains after a bitter nine years’ struggle. Although the defeated chieftains, the O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, the O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, and their followers, were treated generously and allowed to continue in their patrimonies, their independent power was greatly diminished and they faced an uncertain future with the prospect of increasing Dublin government control and advancing anglicisation.

Their discomfort and anxieties led to the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607, when the flower of Ulster’s Gaelic aristocracy, led by O’Neill and O’Donnell, sailed from Rathmullan in Donegal to seek security in Catholic Europe with the hope of finding support to recover their heritage. The government responded by confiscating their lands, thus opening the way for the massive enterprise of colonisation known as the Plantation of Ulster.

The union of the kingdoms of Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland in 1603 had opened up the prospect of Scottish emigration to nearby Ulster. Hitherto Scottish immigrants had not been welcome in Ireland, although the MacDonnells, Lords of the Isles, had established themselves in north-east Antrim as early as 1399, when John Mor MacDonnell had married Margery Bisset, heiress of lands acquired by Norman invaders in the twelfth century. Although Sir Randal MacDonnell was a Catholic who had supported the Gaelic chieftains in the Nine Years’ War, he enjoyed James I’s favour and was encouraged to bring Scottish tenants into Ulster, some of whom were lowland Scots and Protestants. Other Scots were turning acquisitive eyes towards Ireland. James allowed two Ayrshire men, James Hamilton, son of the minister of Dunlap, and Hugh Montgomery, Laird of Braidstone, to share in the dismemberment of the county Down lands of the impoverished Conn O’Neill, who was languishing in prison. O’Neill’s part in the bargain was release from prison and a pardon for his alleged offences. The interest of the Crown was that ‘the sea coasts might be possessed by Scottish men who would be traders as proper to his majesty’s future advantage’. This was the beginning of the colonisation of Antrim and Down by lowland Scots which prepared the way for the later and more extensive colonisation of Armagh, Coleraine (later Londonderry), Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone and Donegal – the Plantation of Ulster.

The settlements in Antrim and Down had not exhausted the number of potential colonists from Scotland. According to Sir William Alexander, founder of the unsuccessful Scottish colony of Nova Scotia in 1620 and who acquired land in Armagh and Donegal, Scotland ‘by reason of her populousnesse, being constrained to disburthen herself like the painful bees did every yeere send forth swarmes’. There had been unsuccessful attempts by lowland Scots to colonise the island of Lewis, but now Ulster, with cheap land available on attractive terms, under the protection of the English Crown, offered new possibilities for the upwardly mobile and those needing to repair declining fortunes or make a fresh start in life.

The colonists did not come, originally, as any kind of ecclesiastical missionaries. Certainly some of the ministers who followed them from Scotland did not regard them as exemplary members of the Reformed Church. One of those ministers, Robert Blair of Bangor, judged that:

although amongst those men divine providence did send to Ireland there were several persons eminent for birth, education and parts, yet for the most part were such as either poverty, scandalous lives or, at the best adventurers seeking better accommodation.

Neither Reformation nor Counter-Reformation had made much progress in Ulster. The damning verdict of Sir John Davies, the Irish Attorney-General, on the state of religion in Ireland was particularly true of Ulster:

The churches are ruined and fallen down… There is no divine service, no christening of children, no receiving of the sacrament, no Christian meetings or assembly, no, not once a year; in a word no more demonstration of religion than amongst Tartars or cannibals.

Emissaries of both Reformation and Counter-Reformation who came to Ireland were at one in their opinion that the Irish were essentially pagan. Davies believed that an active preaching ministry, particularly if offered in the Gaelic language of the Irish people, could transform the situation. However, the Church of Ireland was short of active, preaching ministers and shorter still of those who could preach in Gaelic. The first Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry, Raphoe and Clogher – later to be separate bishoprics – was a Gaelic speaking Scot, Denis Campbell, who had been Dean of Limerick, but he died before he could assume his episcopal responsibilities and his successor, another Scot, George Montgomery, brother of Hugh Montgomery, the county Down colonist, had no Gaelic, having formerly been Dean of Norwich.

It was significant for future ecclesiastical developments in Ulster that these first bishops and their successors were Scots who had had experience of Presbyterianism in Scotland. Andrew Knox, who succeeded Montgomery in Raphoe in 1610, had been ordained by the Presbytery of Paisley in 1581. Men like Knox were familiar with the Scottish situation in which, even after the restoration of episcopacy in 1610, elements of Presbyterianism survived. Bishops sometimes acted as bishops in presbtery, presbyters acting with them in ordinations. Undoubtedly this facilitated the ordination and installation in Church of Ireland parishes in Ulster of Scottish ministers who were Presbyterians. They were welcome because of the shortage of clergy and because, as Dean Leslie, later Bishop of Down, and another Scot, observed, ‘in many places a minister as good as none, a dumb dog that cannot bark’.

Certainly some of the Scottish ministers who came to Ulster were not dumb dogs who could not bark. Men like Robert Blair of Bangor or John Livingstone of Killinchy were among the most gifted ministers in the contemporary Scottish. church. Blair had taught philosophy in Glasgow University but was unhappy about developments in the Church of Scotland after 1610. He was invited to Bangor by the Scottish colonist and county Down landlord James Hamilton, first Viscount Claneboy, who was himself, as we have said, a son of the manse. Blair’s account of his ordination and installation in Bangor claims that Echlin, the Bishop of Down and Connor, a Scot who had been ordained by the Presbytery of Dunfermline in 1601, accepted Blair’s scruples about episcopacy and liturgy, agreeing to participate in his ordination with some of the neighbouring ministers, coming ‘amongst them in no other relation than a presbyter’. Echlin, on the other hand, told the Irish Lords Justices in 1632 that Blair had ‘at the time of ordination, no traces of unconformity’. It seems clear that, as so often in situations of compromise, each side had its own interpretation of what was actually happening.

Presbyterian ministers seeking ordination in Church of Ireland parishes in Ulster found the elderly Bishop Knox of Raphoe particularly helpful. John Livingstone of Killinchy claimed that Knox arranged for ‘some neighbouring ministers’ to join him in ordaining Livingstone in a kind of presbytery ordination. When Knox died in 1634, Archbishop Ussher of Armagh, the Church of Ireland primate, reported that the Raphoe diocese needed ‘a bishop who is acquainted with our kind of government’ for ‘there is not so much as a face of the government of the Church of England’. (sic)



Livingstone, like Blair, was a scholarly man, ‘skilled not only in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Chaldaic’ but ‘with knowledge of French, Italian, German, Spanish and Dutch’. He was a grandson of Lord Livingstone who had been one of the guardians of Mary, Queen of Scots. Josiah Welsh, who ministered in Templepatrick, was a grandson of John Knox. Several of the Scottish nonconforming ministers had family connections with some of the leading Scots colonists. James Hamilton, minister of Ballywalter, was a nephew of James Hamilton, Lord Claneboy. Later, Patrick Adair of Caimcastle, the first historian of Presbyterianism in Ireland, was nephew and son-in-law of Sir Robert Adair, a mid-Antrim landlord.

The nonconformity of these ministers did not begin or end with their ambiguous ordinations. Blair had insisted on preaching to the Bangor congregation and receiving their ‘call’ before he would consent to be their minister. A report on the diocese of Down and Connor in 1634 told a story of widespread nonconformity: ‘it would trouble a man to find 12 Prayer Books in all of the diocese’, while it was alleged that at communion ‘they sit and receive the sacrament together like good fellows’. The Irish Lord Deputy, Sir Thomas Wentworth, observed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, ‘as for bowing at the name of Jesus… they have no more joints in their knees for that than an elephant’.

John Livingstone could claim that in his parish of Killinchy:

not only had we public worship free of any inventions of men, but we had also a tolerable discipline; for after I had been some while amongst them, by the advice of all the heads of families, some ablest for that change were chosen elders to oversee the manners of the rest, and some deacons to gather and distribute the collection. We met every week and such as fell in notorious public scandals were desired to come before us. Such as came we dealt with both in public and private, and prevailed with to confess their scandals before the congregation, at the Saturday sermon before the communion, which was twice in the year, and then were admitted to the communion. Such as after dealing would not come before us or, coming, would not be convinced to confess their faults before the congregation, their names and scandals and impenitency was read out before the congregation, and they debarred from communion, which proved such a terror that we found very few of that sort.

Ecclesiastical discipline was regarded as vital to the life of the Reformed Church. It was the exercise of effective discipline by the Consistory of the Genevan church which had evoked John Knox’s famous eulogy of Geneva as:

the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in the earth since the days of the apostles. In other places I confess Christ to be truly preached but manners and religion to be so sincerely reformed, I have not yet seen in any other place.

But not everyone shared the enthusiasm of Knox or Livingstone for the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline. In Bangor Blair was confronted by ‘a proud young man, the son and heir of a rich man’, who ‘falling into scandal proved obstinate’, appealing from the congregational kirk session – as the court of minister and elders in a congregation was called – to the bishop ‘whereby the order of that discipline was broken’. The youth may have escaped the discipline of the kirk session but, according to Patrick Adair, he did not escape divine punishment: ‘God struck that young man a little while after, that he died and a brother, better than he, succeeded him.’

This case of episcopal interference and discipline was but a prelude to increasing confrontation and conflict. It was inevitable, of course, that the compromise which embraced Presbyterianism and Episcopacy within one church, which the Presbyterian historian Scott Pearson called Prescopalianism, would break down when either tradition gained the upper hand.

Two developments hastened that breakdown. A mass movement of religious enthusiasm, known as the Six Mile Water Revival, and led by some of the nonconforming ministers, drew attention to their nonconformity and brought upon them the condemnation of the bishops. Then the arrival in Ireland in 1633 of Sir Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy, and his chaplain, John Bramhall, both of whom were committed to the ecclesiastical policies of William Laud, who in the same year had become Archbishop of Canterbury, signalled an end to the official toleration of nonconformity in the Church by law established. Laud’s objectives were to encourage the Catholic sacramentarian tradition in Anglicanism and discourage all forms of Puritanism. Theologically he wanted to change the dominant Calvinism of the churches of the Reformation tradition in the United Kingdom, replacing it by Arminianism. Arminianism, like Calvinism and Puritanism, and perhaps even Anglicanism, is a notoriously imprecise term, having different connotations in different circumstances, but essentially it meant the rejection of the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of grace, with its emphasis on original sin and the inability of sinful men and women to co-operate with divine grace, for a quasi-Pelagian emphasis on human responsibility and freewill, rejecting predestination in any form beyond foreknowledge. Arminianism was closer to the soteriology of the Council of Trent, which had reacted to the Augustinianism of the Reformers by insisting that men and women, though sinners, could co-operate with divine grace to earn salvation.

In Wentworth and Bramhall, who soon was made Bishop of Derry, Laud had able and energetic agents of his policy. Wentworth was the enemy of nonconformity of any kind in church and state, believing that the foundation of ordered government lay in obedience to lawfully constituted authority, at the head of which was the Crown. He was determined to enforce the authority of the established Church on the one hand, and the obligations of landowners on the other. The nonconformity exemplified in the Six Mile Water Revival was an obvious challenge to episcopal authority in the Church of Ireland and brought to an end the situation of tolerance and compromise.

The Six Mile Water Revival was an early, if not the earliest, example of a phenomenon which was to appear also in Scotland and colonial America, a movement of popular religious enthusiasm in which nominal church members and godless folk are overwhelmed by a sense of sin and their need of forgiveness. The Six Mile Water Revival followed the earnest preaching of some of the nonconforming ministers in Ulster, described by John Ridge, an English Puritan minister in Antrim, as:

such men for strict walking and abundant pains with their people. Sabbath day, week days, in church and from house to house that I have never known more heavenly in their conversations or more laborious in their ministry.

The Revival, he believed, was a very sweet encouragement for them,

for the Lord hath exceedingly blessed their labours for they have brought a great number of people for twenty miles about them to as great a measure of knowledge and zeal in every good duty as, I think, is to be found again in any part of Christ . .. Their congregations are, some seven or eight hundred, some a thousand, some fifteen hundred, some more, some less.

The Revival began through the preaching of the ‘terrors of the law’ by James Glendinning, minister of Oldstone (Templepatrick), which brought conviction of sin to hitherto irreligious settlers, but this eccentric and unstable preacher could not offer the comfort of the gospel to those whose consciences he had awakened. Other ministers, including Robert Blair and John Ridge, of nearby Antrim, and later Josiah Welsh, who succeeded Glendinning in Templepatrick, and John Livingstone, provided responsible teaching, curbing excesses – swooning and shouting – and giving stability and permanence to the revival movement.

To meet the widespread hunger for spiritual nourishment, for word and sacrament, regular monthly meetings for instruction in the faith were organised at Antrim by John Ridge and became known as the Antrim Meetings. Large numbers assembled for a weekend of religious exercises centring on a Sunday communion service, with Saturday as a day of preparation and Monday a day of thanksgiving. Livingstone recorded how he had known people,

to come from several miles from their homes to the communion, to the Saturday sermon and spent the whole Saturday night in several companies, sometimes a minister being with them, sometimes themselves in conference and prayers, and waiting on the public ordinances the whole Sabbath and spent the Sabbath night likewise, and yet at the Monday sermon not troubled with sleepiness.

Numbers attending were so great that the sacrament was administered in the open air and this and the psychosomatic manifestations which sometimes accompanied spiritual experience groaning and swooning – evoked criticism from ecclesiastical authorities, who were, however, reluctant to move against such popular and effective ministers. Another controversial feature of the Antrim Meetings was the fact that the ministers involved gathered to ‘consult about such things as concerned the carrying on the work of God’. These consultations normally preceded the public meetings and came to be regarded as a kind of protopresbytery, another challenge to episcopal authority….

Select Bibliography

(Books and articles in order of citation)

R. Blair, Autobiography and Life, ed. T. McCrie (Edinburgh 1848).

P. Adair, A True Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1623-70, ed. W.D. Killen (Belfast 1886).

J. Livingstone, Life, ed. W.K. Tweedie (1847).

A. Ford, J. McGuire and K. Milne, (eds.), By Law Established: The Church of Ireland Since the Reformation (1995).

M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Scottish Migration to Ulster in the Reign of James I (1973).

K. Herlihy, (ed.), The Religion of Irish Dissent (1996).

W. D. Bailie, The Six Mile Water Revival of1625 (1996).

M. Westerkamp, The Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening (1988).

J. Seaton Reid, History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 3 Vols (1867).

W. T. Latimer, History of the Irish Presbyterians (1902)

D. Miller, Queen’s Rebels. Ulster Loyalism in Historical Perspective (1978).

St. J. D. Seymour, The Puritans in Ireland 1647-1661 (1921).

G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age of Reason (1950).

Ian McBride, Scripture Politics. Ulster Presbyterianism and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (1998).

Ian Hazlett, Traditions of Theology in Glasgow, 1450-1990 (1993). L. E. Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989).

Henry Montgomery, ‘Outlines of the History of Presbyterianism in Ireland’, Bible Christian 2 (1847).

S. E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (1972).

A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground (1997).

W. Campbell, ‘Sketches of the History of the Presbyterians In Ireland’, 1803 ms. Presbyterian Historical Society, Belfast.

A. T. Q. Stewart, ‘A Stable Unseen Power. Dr William Drennan and the Origins of the United Irishmen’. J. Boss and P.Jupp’ Essays Presented to Michael Roberts (1976).

D. A. Chart (ed.), The Drennan Letters (1931).

D. Miller, ‘Presbyterians and “Modernization” in Ulster’, Past and Present 80 (1978).

R Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1802).

J. Oman, The Problem of Faith and Freedom (1906).

J. M. Barkley, A Short History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1959).

W. R Ward, ‘The Evangelical Revival’, S. Gilley and W.J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain (1994)

J. E. Davey, The Story of a Hundred Years (1940).

J. Jamieson, History of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (1959).

D. Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland (1978).

R J. Rodgers, ‘Vision Unrealized: The Presbyterian Mission to Irish Roman Catholics in the Nineteenth Century’, The Bulletin of the Irish Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland, Vol. 20, March 1991.

D. Bowen, Paul, Cardinal Cullen and the Shaping of Modern Irish Catholicism (1983).

R. J. Rodgers, ‘Presbyterian” Alternative Schools” in the Nineteenth Century’, RF.G. Holmes and D.B. Knox (eds.) The General Assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church in Ireland 1840-1990 (1990).

H. Magee, Fifty Years in the Irish Mission, nd.

J. Bardon, History of Ulster (1992).

A R Scott, The Ulster Revival of 1859 (1994).

D. Hempton and M. Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society 1740-1890 (1992).

R. Coad, A History of the Brethren Movement (1974).

P. Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1965).

J. Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (1978).

G. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970).

M. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994).

R. Allen, The Presbyterian College. A Centenary History (1953).

R. F. G. Holmes, Magee College 1865-1965 (1965).

J. J. Shaw, Mr Gladstone’s Two Irish Policies, 1869 and 1886 (1888).

P. J. Buckland, A Factory of Grievances (1979).

R. S. Tosh, ‘One Hundred and Fifty Years of Worship. A Survey’ in Holmes and Knox, as above.

J. Thompson (ed.), Into All The World. A History of the Overseas Work of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1840-1990 (1990).

J. A. Mackay, Christianity on the Frontier (1950).

D. Bebbington, The Non-Conformist Conscience (1982).

D. Kennedy, The Widening Gulf. Northern Ireland Attitudes to the Independent Irish State, 1919-48 (1988).

M. Harris, The Catholic Church and the Establishment of Northern Ireland (1992).

A. A. Fulton, Biography of Ernest Davey (1970).

D. Cooke, Persecuting Zeal. A Portrait of Ian Paisley (1996).