The Bible War In Ireland E-Book

Irene Whelan

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 880

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

At the end of the eighteenth century an evangelical movement gained enormous popularity at all levels of Irish society. Initially driven by the enthusiasm and commitment of Methodists and Dissenters, it quickly gained ascendancy in the Church of Ireland, where its unique blend of moral improvement and conservative piety appealed to those threatened by the democratic revolution and the demands of the Catholic population for political equality. The Bible War in Ireland identifies this evangelical movement as the origin of Ireland's Protestant and Second Reformation, which broke into open expression when Archbishop William Magee of Dublin claimed ecclesiastical supremacy for the Church of Ireland in his famous inaugural sermon in St Patrick's Cathedral in October 1822. This in turn helped provoke a revolution in political consciousness among the Catholic population, led by Bishop James Warren Doyle. The Doyle-Magee controversy set the stage for the emergence of the Catholic Church as a leading player in the Irish political arena, culminating in the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Extensively researched, and illustrated, Irene Whelan's book puts forward a uniquely challenging interpretation of the modern origins of religious and political polarization in Ireland.

Leseprobe

HISTORY OF IRELAND AND THE IRISH DIASPORA

James S. Donnelly, Jr.

Thomas Archdeacon

Series Editors

The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920–1973

Mary E. Daly

The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882

Michael de Nie

Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630-1830

David Dickson

Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years

Brian Feeney

Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland

Martin Ingram and Greg Harkin

New Directions in Irish-American History

Edited by Kevin Kenny

The Same Age as the State

Máire Cruise O’Brien

The Bible War in Ireland: The “Second Reformation” and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1800–1840

Irene Whelan

THE BIBLE WARIN IRELAND

THE “SECOND REFORMATION”AND THE POLARIZATION OF PROTESTANT- CATHOLIC RELATIONS, 1800–1840

IRENE WHELAN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

For my mother, Esther Roche Whelan, and for Daniel Ezergailis

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Abbreviations

ONE: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANTECEDENTS

Religious Revival and International Awakening

Cultural Revival and National Awakening

Renewal and Reaction: A Tale of Two Irelands

TWO: THE AGE OF MORAL REFORM

Religious Revival in the Church of Ireland

Agents and Agencies of Moral Reform

The Grand Design

THREE: THE MISSION TO THE CATHOLIC POPULATION

The Methodist Example 86

The Challenge of Dissent: The London Hibernian and Baptist Societies

The ‘Quiet Progress’ of the Church of Ireland

The Popular Response to the Evangelical Mission

FOUR: THE POLITICS OF CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

Ambitions and Frustrations

The Bible Society Crisis of 1819–20

Millenarianism and Popular Sectarianism

FIVE: THE ‘SECOND REFORMATION’ 1822–7

Archbishop Magee and the Church Militant

Moral Ascendancy and the Landed Elite

Conversions and Controversy: Kingscourt and Askeaton

Conversions and Social Conflict

SIX: THE CATHOLIC COUNTER-ATTACK

The Vindication of Catholic Ireland: Bishop Doyle and Prince Hohenlohe

The Bible War of 1824

Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda

Controversial Sermons and Monster Debates

SEVEN: NEW DIRECTIONS, 1828–40

Retrenchment and Redefinition

Archbishop Trench and the Evangelical Movement in the West

The Idea of Protestant Colonies: The Achill and Dingle Experiments

Conclusion

Appendix A: Tracts on the Popish Controversy

Appendix B: Richard Lalor Shiel’s Account of a Contest between Doyle and Magee

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Copyright

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(between pages 156 and 157)

Selina Hastings, countess of Huntingdon (1707–91).

Gideon Ouseley (1762–1839).

Methodist Meeting House, The Mall, Castlebar, County Mayo. Built by the earl of Lucan. The foundation stone was laid by John Wesley in 1785. Courtesy of Deirdre Hopkins, Ross East, Castlebar, County Mayo.

Robert Jocelyn (1788–1870), 1st Viscount Jocelyn (later Lord Roden). Artist: George Harlow, 1817. Courtesy of Robert Jocelyn, 10th earl of Roden, Doon House, Cashel, County Galway.

James Warren Doyle (1786–1834), bishop of Kildare and Leighlin (1819–34). Courtesy of the Cathedral of the Assumption, Carlow.

Tollymore House, Castlewellan, County Down. Courtesy of Robert Jocelyn, 10th earl of Roden, Doon House, Cashel, County Galway.

Robert Edward King (1773–1881), 1st Viscount Lorton. Courtesy of King House, Boyle, County Roscommon.

View of Rockingham House and Lough Key, Boyle, County Roscommon, from John D’Alton’s Annals of Boyle (Dublin 1845).

Dr William Magee (1766–1831), archbishop of Dublin (1822–31). Courtesy of Trinity College Dublin.

Dr John MacHale (1791–1881), archbishop of Tuam (1834–81). Courtesy of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

Frontispiece of Archbishop Magee’s sermon in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, 24 October 1822.

Frontispiece of Bishop Doyle’s Vindication of the Rights and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics (Dublin 1823).

Memorial to Bishop Doyle by John Hogan in Carlow Cathedral. Courtesy of the Cathedral of the Assumption, Carlow.

Memorial to John Jebb (1775–1833), bishop of Limerick (1822–33), in St Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick.

View of the Church of Ireland, Ardcarne, County Roscommon, from John D’Alton’s Annals of Boyle (Dublin 1845).

Postcard of the Achill Mission from the early twentieth century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have received much support during the years it took to complete this work, and it is a pleasure now to acknowledge it. I would like to thank Queen’s University, Belfast, for a Riddel Bursary during the initial stages of my research, and for a Junior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Irish Studies. I would also like to thank the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation of Princeton, New Jersey, for a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

I am grateful to the following libraries and record depositories for allowing me to consult material in their possession: the British Library; the Cavan County Library; the Church of Ireland College of Education, Rathmines; the Dublin Diocesan Archives; Galway County Library; the Linen Hall Library; the Memorial Library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the National Archives of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland; the New York Public Library; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; the library of Queen’s University, Belfast; the library of the Representative Church Body, Dublin; the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; the library of Trinity College Dublin; the library of Westminster College, Cambridge, for access to the Cheshunt Foundation papers; and the Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, for access to the Pestalozzi papers. Finally, a special thanks to Rhonna Goodman and the staff of Manhattanville College Library, particularly Susan Majdak of interlibrary loans who facilitated my every need with efficiency and patience.

This project was begun when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and it is to my supervisor, James S. Donnelly, that I owe the greatest debt. His conscientiousness helped to keep me on track over what was often a rocky and turbulent road, and the standard of scholarship he upheld was always inspirational. If this book lives up to his expectations I will be well satisfied. I would also like to acknowledge the kindness and support of Dr Ronnie Buchanan who was Director of the Institute of Irish Studies during my time in Belfast, as well as the friendship and advice of David Hempton, Myrtle Hill and Joseph Liechty, scholars whose knowledge of evangelical history was far superior to mine. They pointed me in directions I might not otherwise have considered, and without their input this book would have been much diminished. Needless to add, any errors are solely the responsibility of the author.

In the United States I have benefited greatly from the community of scholars engaged in Irish studies. From the very beginning of my ventures into Irish religious history, Kerby Miller has been a bulwark of support, always ready to share his knowledge and enthusiasm. Bill Kelleher and Jo Thomas, Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin and Cecilia McDonnell, and Nancy J. Curtin have provided fellowship as well as practical help. In Madison Dineen Grow shared her wonderful friendship as well as her love of Irish culture. Likewise, my Irish-American relatives have contributed enormously to my sense of community and belonging in my adoptive homeland. Maureen Barrett and Bill Verdier of Nashville, Kathleen Jennings of Seattle, Bobby Ryan and his family of Staten Island, Maura Ryan Tier and her family of Brielle, New Jersey, and the various outposts of the Roche family in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, have all personified the ties that bind the inhabitants of the Irish diaspora.

In New York there are many who have enhanced my life with their friendship and kindness. Maureen Faherty of New Rochelle and her late husband, Marty, made me a part of their family in a way that only emigrants from Ireland could, and Marty’s premature death left a void in my life that will never be filled. Frank and Monica Durkan were a constant source of reassurance and support. Phil and Ruth D’Antoni provided friendship and hospitality in New York as well as organize, and Jacqueline Sareil helped me to organize my life around keeping a foothold on both sides of the Atlantic.

I wish to express my gratitude to my colleagues at Manhattanville College for providing intellectual stimulation and a supportive work environment. Gillian Greenhill and Randy Hannum deserve special thanks for never failing to be on hand when help was needed, and for their most gracious and generous hospitality. Cecilia Winters has been a model of courage and dedication to her academic community and her family, and not least a wonderful friend to me. My colleagues in the History Department, Lawson Bowling, Mohammed Mbodg and Colin Morris, have helped to make my work environment collegial and intellectually challenging. Finally, a special thanks is due to the technology staff. Tom Joyner’s understated graciousness and gentle humour always made the most difficult computing task seem like child’s play, and Gale Justin was an artist as well as a teacher in guiding me through the mysteries of incorporating visual images and organizing text. They both taught me how technology can serve the needs of scholarship, and it is something I will forever appreciate.

In Ireland there are many people who have made the exigencies of my transatlantic journeyings not only bearable but enjoyable. A special place is reserved for Josephine Griffin who shared the challenges of graduate–student life at the University of Wisconsin and whose friendship has been one of the greatest blessings of my life. In recent years she and her husband, Colm Luibhéid, have made their lovely home in Claregalway a haven of repose and hospitality during my visits home. In Galway and Clare my friends Eileen Mannion and Alan Brannelly, Anne Brew and Daithi Scanlon, and Fidelma O’Neill have proved that distance is no impediment to bonds that seem to grow stronger and more precious with time.

In Dublin, Jackie Hill has been a source of kindness and support beyond what I could ever hope to repay. She provided friendship and accommodation in good times and bad, and kept me in touch with the Irish scholarly and intellectual world. Also in Dublin, Linda Kellicut and Chris Foley, and John Hegarty and Neasa Ní Chinnéide provided wonderful hospitality and helped me to accommodate and to make sense of the breakneck pace of change in contemporary Ireland. To Neasa, whose love of the Irish language has always been inspiring, and who gave most generously of her time and hospitality to introduce me to the Dingle Peninsula, I wish to register a special thanks. To my cousin Jack Whelan of Dundalk and his wife Agnes I would like to express gratitude for a lifetime of care and concern as well as shared memories.

In Clifden it is not just individuals but an entire community whose support I feel compelled to acknowledge. Nevertheless, a number of people deserve to be thanked individually, among them Brendan Flynn, Anne and John Marshall, and Sr Immacula, formerly of the Mercy Convent and Anne Lee Ueltschi of Streamstown. Mrs Mary Whelan and her family of Castle Demesne and my uncle Thomas Roche and his family of Fahy, have always provided that indefinable sense of home so precious to the returning exile. In a similar vein, Bernadette Gavin Flynn, Freddie Gibbons, Bríd Clancy McLoughlin, Mary O’Malley, Laura Kelly, Kathleen Villiers Tuthill, Carmel Lyden and Mary O’Connor de Brún have sustained friendships that are continually renewed and refreshed with each visit.

There are a number of people without whose help this book would never have become a reality. Cormac Ó Gráda and David Dickson played a key role in putting me in touch with The Lilliput Press. Brendan Barrington shepherded the project through the vital early stages of acceptance, and edited the text with a skilful and sensitive hand. Marsha Swan and Aedín Mac Devitt completed the editing process with patience and efficiency, and in record time. Finally, Antony Farrell has been a publisher sans pareil who never skimped on time or energy when I needed assistance and advice. To all of them I owe an enormous debt of gratitude for bringing this project to completion. Robert Jocelyn of Doon House, Cashel, Connemara, read and commented on an earlier version of this work. He also allowed me to consult the Roden family papers in his library and provided the photographs of Viscount Jocelyn and Tollymore House for the illustrations. To him and his wife, Ann Henning, I wish to express heartfelt thanks for having shared their scholarly and literary interests, as well as their great love for Connemara and its people.

No accounting of gratitude owed would be complete without mention of my extended family in Ireland and abroad. The support of my brothers, Tommy and Paddy, and my sisters, Margaret Ann, Mary, Regina and Philomena, and their families has been so great that, simply put, I do not believe I would have prevailed in its absence. My father, Joe Whelan, did not live to see this book completed, but I hope he would have approved of the result. My mother’s generosity and constancy over the years would be impossible either to measure or repay. Her kindness and love, and not least her good humour, ensured that our home on the Sky Road always had a central place in our hearts. In recognition of her devotion to me and to all of our family, I dedicate this book to her. I also dedicate it to Daniel Ezergailis, whose creative spirit and dedication to his art has been the greatest inspiration of my life.

INTRODUCTION

This is a study of the role of evangelical religion in shaping the attitudes of Irish Protestants in the great age of revolution and counter-revolution between 1750 and 1840. My purpose in writing it has been twofold. First, to examine how the religious enthusiasm associated with the international awakening of the eighteenth century took root and flourished in Ireland. Second, to illustrate how this movement affected relations between Protestants and Catholics during a period in which existing political establishments throughout the European and colonial worlds were challenged, and in some cases overturned and destroyed, by the rise of democratic nationalism and the demand for representative government.

Religious safety had been an abiding preoccupation for Ireland’s Protestant community since the sixteenth century, and religion continued to define the identity of colonial Ireland in the eighteenth century. It was only to be expected, as the new winds of revivalism swept through the international Protestant world, that Ireland would be among the countries caught up in the excitement. The main focus of the opening chapter of this book is therefore to locate Ireland’s place in the ‘international community of the saints’, to establish the social class of those who first rallied to the evangelical standard, to chart the cultural and political forces that were driving certain well-defined groups to embrace the principle of ‘Protestant ascendancy’ (the exclusion of Catholics from the political process) and to explain why the turmoil of the 1790s caused these trends to converge into a powerful expression of counter-revolutionary zeal.

The challenges facing Irish society in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were a consequence of economic and political change reflective of the country’s position in the dynamic world of Britain’s Atlantic empire. Rapid economic growth, population increase, class conflict and a volatile political climate were all familiar components of Irish life in the decades after 1750. By the 1790s, failure to achieve political reform had brought the country to a condition of civil war, and the catastrophic experience of rebellion and reaction left a dangerous political vacuum in its wake. For many this was filled by a conservative piety, inspired by the belief that moral reform grounded in biblical Christianity was the most effective guarantor of social and political stability.

In the years immediately following the Union, the belief gained widespread currency that the native population of Ireland, like that of Wales and Scotland, could be made peaceful, industrious and loyal through scripture-based education designed to wean them from their traditional allegiance to Catholicism, preparing them for integration into the Protestant establishment of Church and State. The route through which this ideology gained ascendancy in Ireland, the emergence of an evangelical elite of moral reformers in business and the professions as well as clerical life, and the strategies used to extend the moral revolution to the Catholic population are examined in chapters two and three. Among the issues addressed in this part of the book is the degree to which this movement was part of the evangelization of the Celtic fringe, in which the native populations of Wales and Scotland were brought within the orbit of ‘awakened Christianity’ by preachers and instructors fluent in the native languages. This process, it is argued, was part of a broader movement in which the Celtic periphery was subjected to an economic and cultural transformation, through which it was acclimatized to the new political and economic realities of the nineteenth century.

The full implications of the moral revolution in Ireland pointed ultimately to the Protestant establishment claiming authority over the direction in which the consciousness of the Catholic population would develop. It was an ambition that would make a battleground of the area marked out by the evangelicals as their primary territory of advancement, namely popular education. During a period in which the Catholic Church was itself experiencing a powerful surge of growth and renewal and the ambitions of Catholics generally were invested in obtaining political equality, this challenge was bound to cause friction. In the combustible atmosphere that followed the ending of the Napoleonic Wars, it proved to be explosive. Conscious of the threat both to the institutional Church and the political ambitions of Catholics generally, two of the most outspoken leaders, Rev. John MacHale and Daniel O’Connell, publicly condemned the policies of evangelical agencies whom they accused of perverting the ideals of education in order to subvert the political ambitions of the Catholic population. Chapter four examines the Emancipation movement against this background of cultural and political conflict and seeks to explain why the evangelical challenge drew the Catholic clergy into the political arena, where they staked out their own claim for authority over the hearts and minds of their congregations.

Catholic resistance to the evangelical vision for a ‘new reformation’ in Ireland greatly increased the political and sectarian tension of the early 1820s. A new avenue of hostile public debate was opened up with the famous ‘antithetical’ sermon delivered by the archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, at his inauguration in St Patrick’s Cathedral in October of 1822. Magee claimed that the Church of Ireland was the only legitimate ecclesiastical body in the country and called on its followers to embrace the evangelical vision and work towards bringing the entire population, including Catholics and Dissenters, into its fold. His charge revealed the degree to which the Church of Ireland was ready to take the lead in the moral crusade, and the symbiotic relationship between the Church and a core of great landed families who now began a serious campaign to implement the reformation at the local level. Chapter five addresses the political background to Magee’s charge, the role of the ‘Bible gentry’ in furthering the drive for converts, and the effect of these events on denominational relations and popular sectarianism.

More immediate and more dynamic in its impact on political events was the response Magee’s sermon drew from the Catholic quarter, particularly from the youthful and articulate bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, James Warren Doyle. The context of Bishop Doyle’s political debut in responding to the evangelical challenge, the role played by rhetoric and propaganda in the Emancipation campaign, and the forging of political links between Catholic clergy and lay political leaders is examined in chapter six. The primary focus of this chapter is on the importance of print culture and propaganda, most particularly on Doyle’s role as the leading theorist and propagandist of the Catholic cause, and the revolution in consciousness that accompanied the Catholic response to the challenge of the evangelical crusade.

Even as the prospect of a new reformation at the national level began to recede, the evangelical movement did not evaporate, but continued to increase in scope and influence among the Protestant population. The final chapter deals with the emergence of rival religious-based national identities in the period after Emancipation and the redirection of the evangelical movement to the impoverished, Irish-speaking west, where it would set the scene for another, more acrimonious phase of missionary activity during and immediately after the years of the Great Famine.

The scope of the present work was determined by its focus on the origins and growth of the Irish evangelical movement in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the concrete historical circumstances that made the decade of the 1820s the crucible in which the lines of denominational rivalry and political polarization were redrawn and redefined. While the term ‘Second Reformation’ is usually associated with the period 1822–7, and more specifically with the events on the Farnham Estate in County Cavan in 1826–7, I use it in the more general sense to apply to the movement to evangelize the Catholic population that had its origins in the years immediately after 1798.

One advantage of this approach is that it allows for a consideration of the movement’s international origins in the eighteenth century. Historiography of the ‘Second Reformation’ has tended to focus on the 1820s and the uproar occasioned by Archbishop Magee’s famous sermon. In his pioneering study, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70 (1978), Desmond Bowen was certainly correct in highlighting 1822 as a watershed in Protestant–Catholic relations. But his description of the conflict as ‘… beginning abruptly in 1822 with a declaration of war by a Protestant prelate’1 at a time when denominational relations were otherwise congenial, ignores forces that had been in motion for a long time, certainly since the tumultuous 1790s and arguably since Bishop Woodward’s assertion of the need for Protestant ‘ascendancy’ in 1787. If clerical leaders embraced tolerance and conciliation in the early 1820s, it was precisely because they feared the implications of the approaching storm.

Bowen’s Protestant Crusade is, to date, the only full-length study of the denominational conflict generated by the ‘Second Reformation’, although the event is dealt with in several other important works on Irish religious history. David Hempton and Myrtle Hill’s landmark study Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (1992) offers an especially valuable account of its impact in Ulster, where evangelicalism eventually came to dominate political culture. Stewart J. Brown’s The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–1846 (2002) examines the movement as the Irish dimension of an attempt to create a Protestant United Kingdom through the imposition of religious orthodoxy. Finally, the influence of the reformation crusade on Catholic politics and public opinion during the crucial years 1824–7 is dealt with in Politics, Interdenominational Relations and Education in the Public Ministry of Bishop JamesDoyle of Kildare and Leighlin, 1786–1834 (1999), the first of Thomas McGrath’s magisterial two-volume work on the career of Bishop Doyle. I have benefited enormously from the work of these scholars and I hope that the present work will build upon what they have accomplished. My main objective in this study is to locate the ‘Second Reformation’ in a broader cultural and historical context and to evaluate its contribution to the growth of rival religious and political traditions in Ireland.

In spite of Catholic victory in the Emancipation campaign and the introduction of a national system of elementary education in 1831, the evangelical crusade to win converts from Catholicism did not cease. In one form or another, either in the colonies of the west or in the slums of Dublin, the reformation movement and the sectarian hostility that accompanied it endured throughout a good part of the nineteenth century. By the 1840s its impetus had spread into the Presbyterian community and was being exported along with the great migration of the Catholic Irish into Britain, the United States and the colonies of Canada and Australia. At the national level, however, in spite of the attempts that were being made on the western seaboard, the battle for the minds and hearts of the Catholic population had been decidedly lost. On the eve of the Famine the Catholic Church was in a stronger position than it ever might have been had evangelicals not issued their challenge of moral and religious supremacy during the crucial decade of the 1820s. The hardened antagonism that had come to define relations between Protestant and Catholic during that turbulent decade would carry over to become a permanent feature of the Irish political landscape.

IRENE WHELAN

Sky Road, Clifden

August 2005

Notes

1. Desmond Bowen, The Protestant Crusade in Ireland, 1800–70:A Study of Protestant–Catholic Relations between the Act of Union and Disestablishment (Dublin and Montreal 1978), p. XI.

ABBREVIATIONS

ADVAssociation for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Knowledge and Practice of the Christian ReligionBFBSBritish and Foreign Bible SocietyCMSChurch Missionary SocietyHBSHibernian Bible SocietyKPSKildare Place Society (The Society for the Education of the Poor in Ireland)LHSLondon Hibernian Society (Originally the London Hibernian Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge in Ireland, in 1814 the name was changed to the London Hibernian Society for Establishing Schools and Circulating the Holy Scriptures in Ireland)LMSLondon Missionary Society

THEBIBLE WARINIRELAND

–ONE–

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANTECEDENTS

These New Lights have arisen in Ireland also. They are nicknamed Swadlers [sic]. As far as I have been able to learn, their religion is a monster in spirituals, begotten by Jacob Beman upon Mrs. Hutchinson—Count Zinzendorf rocked its cradle—Mrs. Law was its nurse—Messrs. Whitefield and Wesley were its sponsors—and the Devil was the midwife that ushered the brat into existence.

ATTRIBUTED TO JONATHAN SWIFT1

Poor wretched Ireland … shall yet have a Gospel day. I can’t yet see how or when, but it must be, and till then, my eye is only waiting darkily [sic] for its accomplishment.

SELINA HASTINGS, COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON2

The British muse is not yet informed that she has an elder sister in this isle; let us introduce them to each other. Together let them walk abroad from their bowers, sweet ambassadresses of cordial union between two countries that seem formed by nature to be joined by every bond of interest and of amity. Let them entreat of Britain to cultivate a nearer acquaintance with her neighbouring isle. Let them conciliate for us her esteem and her affection will follow of course. Let them tell her that the portion of her blood which flows in our veins is rather ennobled than disgraced by the mingling tides that descended from our heroic ancestors.

CHARLOTTE BROOKE3

RELIGIOUS REVIVAL AND INTERNATIONAL AWAKENING

It is clear from the characteristically acerbic account of Dean Swift quoted above that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the hybrid product we have come to know as ‘religious enthusiasm’ or ‘vital religion’ had found a footing in Ireland. A decoding of the terms and personalities referred to by Swift indicates that Irish revivalism was being fed through several international channels that spanned the entire Protestant world, from central Europe to North America.4 Thanks to a rich flowering of scholarship in the history of the evangelical movement in the eighteenth century, we now have a more complete understanding of its dimensions as well as its role as a catalyst in the development of the Protestant missionary awakening.5 In the light of modern historiography, therefore, Swift’s encapsulated account of the origins of evangelicalism may be seen to have stood the test of time. It also provides an obvious and welcome starting point from which to assess the place of Ireland in what Susan O’Brien has called a ‘transatlantic community of saints’.

The wellspring of missionary evangelism in the early eighteenth century was to be found among the oppressed Protestant minorities of central Europe whose geographic location had placed them outside the ring-fence secured by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 for those countries with Protestant Church establishments. Such communities were to be found mainly in Silesia, Moravia and Bohemia. Under threat from the confessional absolutism of the Hapsburg state, they developed a new awareness of how spiritual needs could be accommodated outside the formal structure of a Church establishment. This awareness found expression in the movement known as pietism (essentially a return to the regenerative essence of basic Christianity), and many of the characteristic features of revivalism, such as field-preachers and camp meetings, owe their origin to this period.6 The most influential feature of all, however, was the missionary impulse that often accompanied the forced migration of these minorities, both within Europe and to the New World. It was one such settlement that produced the first Protestant missionary church with a worldwide vision. This was the reconstituted Church of the United Brethren, which came into being among a community of Moravian and Bohemian Protestant refugees who had been given asylum on the estate of Count Nicholas Zinzendorf in Upper Lusatia in 1727.7 Named Herrnhut (literally ‘The House of the Lord’), this communitywas the point from which the beams of the new awakening radiated all over Europe and across the Atlantic.

Nicholas Zinzendorf was a Lutheran nobleman who had been educated at the University of Halle, the centre of the Protestant Enlightenment in Germany. In his association with the exiled Moravians, he discovered the radical power of popular Protestantism and committed himself to ‘religion as the means and way to a better life’, an ideal that lay at the heart of the German Enlightenment.8 Distinguished in the first place by the catholicity of his religious views, he was willing to converse with representatives of every denomination, ‘his one concern being that a man’s heart should beat true to the love of Christ’.9 Beginning in 1727, the Herrnhut settlement under Zinzendorf ’s leadership developed as a religious commune organized on the basis of the revealed truth of the scriptures. During the first twenty years of its existence it experienced repeated outbreaks of religious revival that drew attention from several quarters. Deputations were sent abroad in response to enquiries from Protestant communities in other countries such as Denmark, Switzerland and England, and visitors in search of inspiration came to see for themselves what the awakening was about. Herrnhut also attracted the attention of the Court of Saxony, which observed developments with growing unease because of the continuing arrival of refugees from Moravia. Following a commission of inquiry in 1732, the settlement was granted a licence to continue, provided that the flow of refugees from Moravia was stopped. Perceiving this as a threat to their collective safety, the descendants of the Moravians decided to disperse and form safe colonies in whatever Christian countries would welcome them. The strongest justification for adopting this policy was the biblical directive to spread the Gospel. Those members of the settlement who were native to the area, and mostly Lutheran in origin, decided to stay on and continue the work at Herrnhut, which increasingly assumed the character of a missionary centre.10

Among those influenced by Moravian religious enthusiasm and missionary idealism were John and Charles Wesley, who first came into contact with Count Zinzendorf at a North American missionary colony in Georgia in 1738. This encounter with the Moravians provoked a religious crisis that resulted in the conversion of the Wesley brothers to the new spirit of ‘awakened’ Christianity. Shortly after his return from Georgia, John Wesley went to Herrnhut, where he observed the workings of Zinzendorf’s commune at first hand. Deeply inspired by the experience, he adopted many features of the Herrnhut experiment for the Methodist movement that he founded and led in England, not least of which was the missionary impulse to bring the unenlightened into the fold.11 By the middle of the eighteenth century, therefore, the foundation of the modern Protestant missionary movement was in place, though another fifty years were to pass before the acceleration began that would carry the Bible to every quarter of the globe. During that period, roughly 1740 to 1790, ‘vital religion’ became a powerful force on the fringes of mainstream denominations in Britain and the North American colonies.

The defining feature of eighteenth-century evangelicalism was its emphasis on the personal. Above all else, religious enthusiasm implied a personal and emotional response to the demands of biblical truth. After about 1740 the type of experience that transformed the Wesleys following their meeting with Zinzendorf—the spiritual flooding that brought about a total surrender of the individual will, followed by an intense and unwavering commitment to a particular ideal—multiplied in a way that suggests a movement. Adherents were united across boundaries of geography and denomination in pursuit of a common vision of a society perfected by the serious practice of Christianity. The international evangelical community at this stage can best be seen as one large pen club whose members exchanged views and aspirations across continents and oceans, a religious counterpart to the secular world of the philosophes and freemasons, in which passionate idealists considered the ways religion could and should be adapted to the needs of a changing world. It was also a community characterized by remarkable mobility. The latter part of the eighteenth century was the age of the travelling religious enthusiast, and nothing but revolutionary fervour can explain the number of miles travelled and countries visited by evangelical missionaries and itinerant preachers.

Insofar as it was Protestant, Ireland was part of this world of the international awakening, with similar internal and external forces fostering the growth of the ‘enthusiasm’ that drew the ire of Jonathan Swift. The appearance of revivalist preachers in Dublin in the 1740s was a clear indication that Ireland had fallen within the ambit of those countries touched by the international awakening. Before the arrival of John and Charles Wesley in 1747, the most significant missionary work was undertaken by a Moravian preacher, Rev. John Cennick, an Englishman of Czech origin whose ancestors had fled Bohemia after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. Originally connected with the Wesleys and George Whitefield, Cennick had a disagreement with them that caused him to join the Moravians in 1745. In the following year, at the invitation of a Baptist student named Benjamin Latrobe, he arrived in Dublin and began to preach in the Old Baptist Hall.12 His sermons were received with applause in some quarters and hostility in others, and often with outright derision. The apocryphal tale of how Irish Methodists came to be known as ‘swaddlers’ is associated with an occasion when he made use of the text, ‘Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger’ (Luke, 11, 12). The term ‘swaddling’ was employed so often that it was taken up by a drunkard who ran through the streets calling Cennick and his congregation ‘swaddlers’.13 The name became synonymous with the promoters of the new religion and was ever afterwards used as a derisive term for Methodists; it was eventually applied to evangelicals of every persuasion and even found its way into the Irish language.

Cennick’s stay in Dublin was unfortunately destined to be short-lived. When the Wesleys arrived in 1747, they took over the Old Baptist Hall meeting house. Cennick thereupon left for County Antrim in Ulster and founded a famous Moravian colony at Gracehill, about a mile outside Ballymena.14 The movement spread rapidly to the surrounding counties, especially the area around Lough Neagh, and enjoyed a vigorous though brief existence in the 1750s. A combination of bad management and Cennick’s early death in 1755 contributed to its rapid decline. Apart from providing an inspirational model for evangelicals connected with other denominations, the Moravians made little impact on mainstream religious life in Ireland. Nevertheless, as David Hempton and Myrtle Hill have emphasized in their study of Ulster evangelicalism, the response they evoked in the northern counties indicated that ‘in an area formerly settled by Puritans, the traditions of a strict and self-denying religious culture had by no means died out’.15

In contrast to the experience of Cennick and the Moravians, the Methodists established deep roots in Irish soil and played a central role in pioneering the evangelical cause. From the record of John Wesley’s involvement in the practical operations of Irish Methodism, it is clear that from the beginning he considered Ireland to be part of his spiritual empire. His ambition was not only to inject new zeal into a complacent Protestant Church establishment but also to bid for the allegiance of the Catholic population. In this, as in many other areas of endeavour, he was to pioneer a cause later to be taken up with great zeal by evangelicals of the Church of Ireland. Between his first visit to Dublin in 1747 and his death in 1790, Wesley made a remarkable total of twenty-one visits to Ireland.16 During that period Irish Methodism shifted from the ‘enthusiastic’ fringe to a position, if not of outright acceptance, then certainly of influence and respectability in the country’s religious life.

Undoubtedly, the decisive factor in its successful growth was its leader’s personal commitment and energy. Dissuaded neither by the contempt of the Protestant establishment nor by the hostility of Catholics, Wesley persevered in gathering together the loose ends of Irish Protestantism—artisans in newly industrialized areas, soldiers in garrison towns, and the occasional disaffected aristocrat—and created a challenge to existing traditions that none of the major denominations, whether Catholic, Protestant or Dissenting, could afford to ignore.17 The Wesley brothers’ first experiment with itinerant preaching in Ireland was less than auspicious. Frequently scoffed at by the rakehelly elements of the Protestant upper classes and physically assaulted by hostile Catholics, initially they could not even depend on the forces of law to defend them. In 1749 in Cork city a small group of Methodists came under attack from a crowd led by a ballad-singer named Nicholas Butler, resulting in the worst case of rioting that Methodism had ever encountered. When charges were laid against Butler and his followers, the grand jury threw out the case and demanded instead that the Methodists be punished, adding that ‘we find Charles Wesley to be a person of ill-fame, a vagabond, and a common disturber of his majesty’s peace, and we pray that he may be transported’.18

The reaction of the authorities and of polite society was not altogether at variance with the treatment frequently accorded the Wesleys in England during the early days of the Methodist movement.19 John Wesley reserved his indignation for fellow Protestants whom he saw as not only allowing Catholic tormentors a free hand in harassing preachers but also in some cases providing active encouragement. Following a visit to Cork shortly after the notorious Butler episode, he penned a censorious letter to the lord mayor, commenting on the lack of hospitality he had found in that city:

I fear God and honour the king. I earnestly desire to be at peace with all men. I have not willingly given offence either to the magistrates, the clergy, or any of the inhabitants of the city of Cork; neither do I desire anything of them but to be treated (I will not say as a clergyman, a gentleman, or a Christian) but with such justice as are due to a Jew, a Turk, or a pagan.20

Despite these early embarrassments, Wesley did succeed in advancing the Methodist cause in Ireland, though as Hempton observes, what he established was ‘not so much a cohesive movement as a motley band of military personnel, Palatine settlers (in the south-east), some lapsed Presbyterians, and a much larger number of enthusiastic Anglicans’. Early successes at winning followers in the garrison towns and among the Palatine settlers suggest that Wesley was following a pattern, already adopted in England, of appealing to those sections of society most likely to be neglected by the Established Church. This was especially true in areas where industrialization was underway. Irish Methodism in the late eighteenth century registered its greatest successes in those areas of Ulster associated with the development of the linen industry and the growth of a commercial economy.21

Although there is some evidence that influential noblemen approved of John Wesley’s vision of revitalized Christianity—the fine meeting house built by the earl of Lucan in Castlebar is one example of the support coming from this quarter—it was rare for individuals from well-to-do backgrounds to involve themselves in the work of evangelization. The most famous case is that of Gideon Ouseley, who was for many years the chief spokesman for Methodism in Ireland, especially in connection with its mission to the Irish-speaking Catholic population. Ouseley came from a wealthy family from Dunmore in east Galway, and as a youth he had been greatly influenced by Wesley’s preaching. To assist him in his work among the peasantry he learned fluent Irish, a skill which served him well during his career as a preacher in rural areas. His long and colourful career as both circuit preacher and polemicist spanned the heyday of the Irish evangelical movement in the early nineteenth century and testifies to the special influence and position occupied by the Methodist community.22

If Ouseley’s espousal of Methodism was symptomatic of revivalist stirrings among the Irish Protestant community in the mid- and late eighteenth century, he was certainly not alone. Dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the complacency of the Church of Ireland was being expressed in several quarters, and manifestations of this unease throughout the latter half of the century brought Irish Protestantism firmly within the boundaries of the international awakening. The popularity of itinerant preachers from England and Scotland indicates a desire for a more effective form of spiritual nourishment than that available through the usual channels. George Whitefield, who was probably the most important figure in the international evangelical world at this time, visited Ireland several times and was particularly welcome in Ulster, where his toleration of Dissent ensured his popularity with the Presbyterian community.23

In the 1760s and 1770s preachers associated with the countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion also became familiar and often highly controversial figures in Ireland. Lady Huntingdon, who along with Wesley and Whitefield was among the most influential evangelicals of her day, especially among the aristocracy, took a keen interest in the promotion of the movement in Ireland.24 Her family connections there included her daughter, Lady Moira, the Rev. Walter Shirley of Loughrea and Lady Mountcashell, all of whom kept her informed on Irish religious affairs, and acted as liaisons for her travelling preachers. Lady Moira was an influential figure in Dublin society, particularly with the group of philanthropists whose ranks included the well-known families of Guinness and La Touche, Alderman Henry Hutton, and Lady Arabella Denny. The Rev. Walter Shirley was an English aristocrat (the son of Earl Ferrers) and beneficed clergyman who had been associated with the Wesleys and the Holy Club during his student days at Oxford.25 His ministry at Loughrea was characterized by deep unhappiness and disillusionment over the apathy of his congregation. ‘Surely my God hath not placed me here to no purpose,’ he commented despairingly to Lady Huntingdon in 1760; ‘if I may not be for the salvation of their souls, the truths I have uttered will be for their condemnation and rise in judgment against them on the last day … I would that it had pleased the Lord that I had been driven to the outermost parts of the earth rather than have come hither.’26

Lady Huntingdon’s attempts at remedying the type of spiritual apathy that Shirley described involved not only deploying itinerant preachers but also paying the cost of maintaining a resident minister of her Connexion in Dublin. In 1771 one of these ministers, Henry Mead, was in a position to complain that he was in need of an assistant because of the pressures of work.27 This is one measure of the degree of interest that revivalist religion was capable of arousing in the metropolis. Progress in the provinces was more dependent upon individual initiative. This is illustrated by the case of Albert Blest of Sligo, worth considering in some detail not merely because of the important consequences it had in the early nineteenth century but also for the light that it sheds on the social class of those who first responded to the evangelical message. Along with his father-in-law, Andrew Maiben, Blest was responsible for establishing a strong tradition of evangelical Dissent in County Sligo.

The emergence of Sligo as a base for evangelical Independents was a direct result of its importance as a crossroads of trade between Ulster and Connaught. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century the bulk of the trade of Sligo was with the northern counties, a consequence of the spread of the linen industry introduced by Scottish entrepreneurs who came to play a dominant role in business and commerce in Sligo town.28 Andrew Maiben belonged to this class. By birth a Scotsman and a strict Calvinist, he was ‘an extensive and opulent merchant’ much given to a serious consideration of his religious duties. Disappointed with the apathy of the local Church of Ireland congregation, he took an interest in Methodism. Having found Wesley’s Arminian theology to be at odds with his own Calvinist beliefs, he began his own prayer-meetings, which attracted the attention of the young Albert Blest. Originally from a Church of Ireland background, Blest’s character and temperament were particularly conducive to the spirit of religious awakening. Described as a riotous and dissolute youth, with a mind ‘ardently attached to poetry’, he turned to vital religion following a near-fatal illness and thereafter lived a life of complete dedication to the evangelical cause, a commitment strengthened by his marriage to one of Maiben’s daughters in 1780.29

Blest was especially important for establishing links with English and Scottish evangelicals, and he arranged for the preachers of Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion to visit Sligo in the 1790s. He was also in close contact with the Haldane brothers of Edinburgh and cooperated with them in arranging venues for the preachers they sent to Ireland. Soon after 1800 he was instrumental in setting up the London Hibernian Society’s (LHS) school system in County Sligo and in securing the patronage of the local gentry for its work among the Catholic population. Though he remained a Nonconformist all his life, he kept close links with the Church of Ireland and always maintained that it was the practice rather than the tenets of its faith that caused him to separate from it in the first place.30 He provided inspiration and support for the revival that began in the Established Church in the early nineteenth century, and in fact he had partially laid the foundation for this through his active commitment to the evangelical principle that all who belonged to the ‘Bible world’ were working towards the same goal of transforming the world according to the designs of its maker.31

The ecumenical or pan-evangelical outlook expressed by Blest was fairly typical of the relationship that came to exist among denominational advocates of the evangelical movement in the early nineteenth century. But this had not always been the case. Having begun in the spirit of catholicity advocated by Count Zinzendorf, evangelicalism went through a kind of honeymoon phase between 1740 and 1760, when all followers of the revival actively supported each other in the grand design of spreading Gospel truth. More an attitude to life than a matter of denominational allegiance, it was characterized by an open and spontaneous approach to religion; as John Wesley described it, ‘all controversial points were left alone and Christ alone was preached’.32 But the optimism and fellowship that characterized this first evangelical spring camouflaged the serious theological differences that distinguished the followers of John Wesley from those of Whitefield and Lady Huntingdon, and which are usually interpreted by historians of the movement as reflecting a class bias. Wesley’s theological position was based on the Arminian principles that held that Christ died to save all mankind. Individual salvation depended on the acceptance of this saving grace—faith, in other words—reinforced by a commitment to the development of a moral perfection that Wesley believed should be the goal of every Christian. The element of free will inherent in this doctrine was particularly attractive to the neglected fringe groups among whom Wesley found his most ardent followers—artisans and craftworkers aspiring to improve their status in society through hard work, self-discipline and rigorous attention to religious duties. But Arminianism found little favour with some of his fellow evangelists, who were more accepting of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.

George Whitefield was by far the most significant figure among the Calvinist-oriented evangelicals, and Lady Huntingdon was one of his most faithful and influential supporters. In comparison with the Arminian doctrine that personal salvation was the responsibility of the individual person, Calvinistic Methodists believed that it was preordained by God. Those who were to be saved were the ‘elect’ upon whom grace was bestowed, regardless of merit. Knowledge that one was of the elect came when one was ‘called’ to grace, usually accompanied by some sign or indication that this had taken place. Because there was not the same degree of emphasis on personal piety, Wesleyan Methodists feared that the Calvinist-inspired group tended towards a toleration of immorality. Calvinistic Methodists in turn felt that the Wesleyan stress on good works was not far short of Roman Catholicism.33 Despite Wesley’s ‘accommodating silence’ on the subject of predestination, the seeds of division were deeply embedded in the foundations of eighteenth-century revivalism and sprouted into open conflict in the 1770s.34

The ‘Calvinistic controversy’, as it was known, extended to Ireland and for a time was the cause of a bitter dispute among Dublin evangelicals, with the aristocratic circle of Lady Moira and her husband closing ranks against the Wesleyan Methodists. One of the consequences of this conflict was the forging of stronger links between the Calvinistic Methodists and the Irish Independent evangelicals, especially Albert Blest. Preaching tours by itinerant ministers of Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion became commonplace in Ireland in the 1780s and ’90s, and well-known controversialists like Rowland Hill and Henry Peckwellwell attracted large audiences in Dublin and Sligo.35 The problem of obtaining pulpits for these preachers was remedied by the use of ‘free’ or ‘proprietory’ chapels—private places of worship attached to aristocratic households as allowed for by the Conventicle Act, where a peer might have his own chapel and private chaplain provided that it was not open to the public. Lady Huntingdon had used this system to great effect to expand the chapels of her Connexion in England. In 1773 the Plunkett Street Chapel in Dublin was opened under the auspices of her Connexion. Several other chapels of this type sprang up in the capital around the same time, patronized not only by evangelicals of the Independent churches but more significantly by a growing number of Church of Ireland adherents who wished to hear the doctrine of the revival preached without jeopardizing clerical orthodoxy or their allegiance to the episcopal faith. The emergence of an evangelical party within the Church of Ireland had the effect of softening theological differences between Calvinists and Wesleyans, and helped to pave the way for the cooperation and mutual respect that characterized Protestant interdenominational relations in the early nineteenth century.

The revival that took root in the Church of Ireland in the 1780s was the product of two interconnected trends: the initiative and influence of Methodists and evangelicals of the Independent churches, and the growth of spiritual piety and social responsibility among the aristocracy and business classes that had turned eighteenth-century Dublin into a showcase of Protestant philanthropy.36 The eighteenth-century concept of philanthropy was predicated on the improvement of State and society along rational lines, with a built-in acceptance that limitations were a fact of life: as one historian has described it, it was ‘limited in scope, its doctrine of charity expressed without emotional fuss, commended by rational argument and set at practicable and immediate objectives’.37 It was not possessed of a visionary or apocalyptic urge to build a new Jerusalem or remake the world in God’s image, which was the hallmark of the evangelical approach. This is not to suggest that men like Jonathan Swift or Bartholomew Mosse (the founder of the Rotunda Hospital) were uninfluenced by the ideal of Christian charity; on the contrary, this was the basis of their philosophy. Objectively, however, this approach was cast in a temporal rather than a spiritual mould. With the evangelicals the emphasis was reversed. Good works were to be done in the first place for the love of God; the redemption of the individual soul and the general improvement of society would follow. This renaissance of the Calvinistic spirit was imbued with a certain revolutionary fervour, the full implications of which would not become apparent until well into the nineteenth century, when its effects would be felt not only in the British Isles but also throughout the world. For our purposes, however, what is important was the manner in which evangelicalism took root in the Church of Ireland and grafted itself onto a tradition of philanthropy already in existence.

Among the community of people who supported private philanthropy in Dublin in the late eighteenth century, the names that stand out as having exerted a lasting influence are those of Alderman Henry Hutton and Lady Arabella Denny. Hutton was associated with Mary’s Abbey Presbyterian church, and his home on St Stephen’s Green was famous as a meeting place for visiting preachers and lay people interested in religion and philanthropy, particularly students from Trinity College.38 Lady Arabella Denny was famous as the benefactress of the Magdalen Asylum, which she founded for ‘unfortunate females abandoned by their seducers’.39 She was also involved in the running of several other charitable institutions, including the Foundling Hospital. Her close association with Lady Moira suggests that she was part of a circle of wealthy aristocratic women who eschewed the glamour and vanities of the age in favour of a more serious and conscientious commitment to Christianity.40

The most prominent supporters of the charitable works of aristocratic female philanthropists like Lady Arabella were the great brewing and banking families of Dublin, represented by the names of Guinness and La Touche respectively. The appeal of the evangelical message, particularly its emphasis on moral and social reform, to this section of the Dublin haute bourgeoisie bears a striking resemblance to the trend that was concurrently being set in London under the leadership of William Wilberforce and his colleagues in the Clapham Sect. In fact, the route by which the evangelical ethos made inroads into the Church establishment in Ireland is so similar to what took place in the Church of England that one can hardly see it as a separate or distinct development. This is understandable, considering Ireland’s colonial status; as R.B. McDowell has expressed it, ‘during the eighteenth century Ireland could be taken as forming part of the British cultural, intellectual, and social world’.41 However questionable this statement might be when applied to the Catholic population, there can be no doubting its validity with respect to the Protestant community. Both culturally and economically, Irish Protestants were intimately linked to Britain. The symbiotic relationship fostered by strong economic and political ties was reflected in the religious sphere. Similar charges were levelled against the Church establishments in both countries by disaffected idealists, many of whom in the late eighteenth century began to coalesce into an energetic and vocal minority providing both the foundation and leadership for an episcopal evangelical movement.

Such was the influence of the first generation of evangelicals in the Church of England that it has been common ever since the mid-nineteenth century to credit them with having ‘transformed the whole character of English society’ and with having imparted to the Victorian age ‘that moral earnestness that was its distinguishing characteristic’.42 The connection between the growth of evangelicalism in England and the pattern of social change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has provided historians with a unique opportunity to study the links between religious movements and general social trends. But the theories that serve to explain what social transformations were fuelling the spectacular growth of the evangelical revival in England, or ‘the broadening of a sectarian cult into something like a national faith’43 are not easily transferred to Ireland. The problem is compounded by the fact that all the evidence of the nineteenth century suggests that the appeal of the evangelical ethos in Ireland, particularly among the upper classes, was even more intense than that of Britain.

The traditional explanation of evangelical revival is that it was the religious counterpart of the Romantic movement, the turning away from reason as the basis of belief to revelation and ‘religion of the heart’. The noun ‘evangelical’ denotes one who has heard the word of God and who accepts the Bible as the supreme ordinance of His will on earth, with particular emphasis on the command to evangelize or bring the saving grace of ‘true religion’ to those outside the fold, which included Christians of all denominations as well as non-Christians or ‘heathens’. The committed evangelical was therefore concerned not only with his own moral and religious conduct but with securing a social and political environment conducive to the propagation of the evangelical way of life. Earlier scholars such as Harold Perkin, E.P. Thompson and V. Kiernan have interpreted the resurgence of this fundamental tenet of the reformed faith in the late eighteenth century as an indication of the manner in which English society responded to the twin challenges of political and social revolution. Perkin identifies the movement as an expression of the moral ascendancy of the middle classes, a phenomenon he describes as ‘a new morality designed to support a new society’.44 According to this theory, evangelicalism was the offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism ‘shorn of its political radicalism’, which took the form of moral imperialism as the middle classes rose to ascendancy in the wake of the industrial revolution. Thompson and Kiernan are essentially in agreement with this view, except that where Kiernan sees the revival as a progressive trend leading to the development of nineteenth-century liberalism, Thompson emphasizes its potential as an anti-revolutionary force.45 These starkly contrasting views are muted somewhat by later historians who, while not denying the conservative ramifications of the evangelical movement, nevertheless come down heavily in favour of perceiving it as the optimistic creed of those who stood to gain the most from the social and economic changes consequent upon industrialization. The ‘upper working classes’ as described by Stuart Piggin, and the businessmen and factory masters whom Paul Johnson identifies as the driving force behind the revival led by Charles Grandison Finney in western New York during the 1830s, are the two most identifiable groups that fall into this category.46

The most radical and forceful argument in favour of the moral ascendancy theory, however, comes from a cultural and intellectual historian, Gerald Newman, who identifies the evangelical movement as the catalyst that brought together the various currents of English nationalism that had developed in the eighteenth century, providing the ideological fuel for England’s rise to world dominance in the nineteenth century. Newman argues that eighteenth-century England must be seen as part of a general European crisis centred on the conflict that resulted when the political and economic aspirations of an increasingly ambitious bourgeoisie were resisted by an equally ambitious aristocracy bent on preserving exclusivity and privilege. Unlike France, where the battle was fought along political lines, bourgeois ascendancy in England was based upon industrial and technological progress. The revolution that took place was moral and ideological in character (before it assumed explicitly political dimensions in the reform acts of the nineteenth century) and was inspired by a vision of the uniqueness of English national character and society created by artists, writers and intellectuals of the eighteenth century—notably Defoe, Hogarth and Johnson. This vision promoted the virtues of honesty, sincerity and fair play at the expense of the dissipated habits, extravagant lifestyle and arrogant manners of the aristocracy. Rooted in the ‘aesthetic revolution’, or the flowering of interest in antiquities, popular folk culture, music and national character, it was first and foremost anti-French in tone. It strove to assert English national identity over and against the cosmopolitan supremacist doctrine upheld by the French ancien régime to which English aristocrats in almost every aspect of material and intellectual culture were held to be in thrall.47

What secured the moral revolution, according to Newman, was the timely