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The Prince & the Apocalypse 1st Edition Kara Mcdowell
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To Joan Harcourt, my lifetime editor, conscience, and best friend; and to James E. Akenson, a fine scholar of American culture—and a really good brother.
PART I. GEOGRAPHY COUNTS
PART II. THE
CONTINENT
PART III. MASS DIFFUSION
PART IV. BUILDING A NEW SCRIPTURE
Acknowledgments
In this long-running project—three decades or so—I have had the privilege of being advised, aided, criticized, and occasionally rebuked by a small army of persons who know a lot about history, or religion, or about how books work, and sometimes about all three. The project began with research for Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and Talmuds (1998). Throughout the project, I have felt deep gratitude for the enormous good fortune of being part of a culture that has permitted me to encounter tough, world-shaping texts and to think about the way they came into being: and that holds even though some of the texts border on the frightening and the coercive. For practical reasons—so many debts—my specific appreciation expressed below is necessarily limited to individuals and institutions who have been helpful, indeed sometimes instrumental, in facilitating the present volume.
Because of the awkward nature of the sources that relate to the transatlantic spread of radical apocalyptic evangelicalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, one does not conveniently find the necessary material in the usual places, the big international research libraries and archives. Readers of the history of radical apocalyptic evangelicalism are aware that in North America, from 1910 onwards (when The Fundamentals began, the major salvo in the modernist vs. fundamentalist wars), the sources, and thus the literature, are rich. For the early seed-bed years, however, the primary material is surprisingly thin in conventionally approachable repositories. In part this stems from the initial band of authors in the British Isles—the so-called Plymouth Brethren—and their outriders—refusing to recognize the right of the civil state to require legal deposit of their publications. Secondly, until the 1890s when a form of international copyright was introduced in the United States, the pirating and plagiarizing of foreign material (especially from the British Isles) was a common practice, no less in religious publishing than in the secular realm. Thus, one must extol the imaginative and persistent work of smaller, slightly off-piste archives and collections.
Specifically, the following institutions and their staff have been generous and directly helpful, either in person or remotely. (The names of individuals to whom one is especially grateful are noted in parentheses.) Among the collections that document the transatlantic social and doctrinal development of radical apocalyptic evangelicalism, the Christian Brethren Archive of the University of Manchester is the single most important assemblage. In addition to the core collection relating to the British Isles, many of its books and
manuscript items provide information about the United States and Canada that is not available elsewhere (Dr. Graham Johnson, archivist, and his successors Jessica Smith, and Lianne Smith). A smaller North American collection, not entirely catalogued but valuable in its content, is the James H. McNairn collection of the Canadian Baptist Archives, McMaster University. It is a trove of literature, assembled by a committed contemporary Exclusive Brother, reflecting US and Canadian developments in the period 1875–1914 (Professor Gordon Heath and Adam McCulloch). As a broad-based archival and ephemera collection relating to North America, the Moody Bible Institute is splendid in its range of material; it is singularly rich in later nineteenth-century material relating to non-denominational revivalism as a transnational exercise (Corie Zylstra). The archives of Oxford University Press, Oxford, possess a wide array of information on Bible publishing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and unique material on the relationship of Henry Frowde, publisher to the University, with Cyrus Scofield and his reference Bible (Dr. Martin Maw). The archives of McGill University kindly provided holograph material by W. Craig Baynes, pioneer framer of dispensational schema in North America (Professor Nathalie M. Cooke and archivist Julien Couture). The Anglican diocese of Huron has limited, but valuable, records concerning evangelical Anglican clerical converts from the Church of England to radical apocalyptic evangelicalism (Sarah Chase). The largest collection of material in North America concerning Open Brethren is that of Emmaus Bible College, Dubuque, Iowa (Professor David J. MacLeod). The Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan kindly made available data on families and locales in the Great Lakes Basin, in this case the crucial Inglis family. The Swedenborgian Library and Archives, Berkeley, California, generously provided information about James Inglis’s early attacks on that faith. A valuable source for a range of material on evangelical development, especially the eschatologically concerned sector, is the Center for Adventist Research, James White Library, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan. The archives of Dallas Theological Seminary hold selected copies of the historical papers for what is now the Scofield Memorial Church, Dallas, that include some rare printed items of C. I. Scofield (Lolana Thompson). The archives of Northfield Mount Hermon School contain unique manuscript material on nineteenth-century evangelicalism as filtered through the big personality of Dwight L. Moody. The archivist, Dr. Peter Weis, has generously provided access to the unpublished studies of Moody written by E. M. Powell in the 1930s. Further, Dr. Brendan Edwards, curator of W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections at Queen’s University (Ontario), shared his expertise on biblical editions.
As for digital sites, at present there are hundreds and hundreds of evangelically funded electronic entities, many of which make historical assertions. I have tried to limit e-references to information that is accurate and relevant in content
and is most durable electronically. (Interlibrary loan at Queen’s University, managed by Bonnie Brooks, has been crucial in this aspect, providing fact-checks on wobbly net-assertions.) However, neither I nor the publisher is responsible for the accuracy or persistence of sites referred to in this book. Within that necessary context, I would call special attention to the very useful and durable STEM Publishing, created by L. J. L. Hodgett, which has a bank of complete copies of works by major nineteenth-century Brethren writers. Many of these were circulated widely internationally. Also admirable for its admixture of primary documents and printed works of historical value is BrethrenArchive.Org, curated by Thomas Chantry.
The sources for specific illustrations is gratefully acknowledged. References are found in the captions. I am particularly grateful to the National Portrait Gallery, England, and to the Christian Brethren Archive of the University of Manchester, the Wellington County Museum, the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec, and the good offices of the Oxford University Press Archives, Oxford, England.
The following are the public data sources that were generative for geographic illustrations: Figure 4.1: Lakes Basin boundary retrieved from Great Lakes Commission, contemporary US State Boundary file from the U.S. Census Bureau, Provincial Boundary file from Statistics Canada 2016. Figure 6.1: Map composed of 19th Century Canals layer from Jeremy Atack, “Historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database of Nineteenth Century U.S. Canals” (August 2015), Rivers from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Hydrography Dataset Plus (version 2), Northeast layer, NHDPlusV21_NE_ 01_NHDSnapshotFGDB_04.7z (19.0 MB), Hudson River Estuary Bathymetry (polyline contours) from GIS.NY.GOV and Canals from Water Structures layer. Figure 6.2. Railways in Canada up to 1870 from Historical Atlas of Canada and The Atlas of Canada https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=89044dbd4 e7a4ec288d18b2b477237d4
Map courtesy of Historical Atlas of Canada Online Learning Project (www. historicalatlas.ca).
The bibliography of the present study contains the formal citations of the printed material that is used in the text. Learning from authors as they speak in their own texts is a privilege; an even greater one is to be able to talk in person with individuals who have ideas, criticisms, jokes, and the sort of social awareness that softens the edges of analysis that sometimes can become too academic, too tight. Among those to whom I owe a lot are: Randy W. Widdis, Phyllis D. Airhart, Mark Noll, Andrew Holmes, Neil T. R. Dickson, David A. Wilson, Joan Harcourt, Roy Foster, Rankin Sherling, the late Nicholas Wheeler Robinson, Caleb Wheeler Robinson, Gordon Darroch, John A. Keith, David Hempton, Donald M. MacRaild, Ashleigh Akenson, Gillian Akenson, T. C. F. Stunt, Catharine
Wilson, Jeffry R. Collins, Carolyn A. Heald, Amitava Chowdhury, Ryan Paranyi, Brian M. Walker, William V. Trollinger Jr., Richard English, Ian McBride, Crawford Gribben, the late David Fitzpatrick, Dennis C. Kennedy, William M. Jenkins, R. Marvin McInnis, Peter Goheen, James Docherty, Jane Tolerton, Vincent O’Sullivan, Marianne Elliott, Brendan Edwards, Ken Hernden, Patrick Deane, Philip Cercone, Kyla Madden, and the late Edward J. R. Jackman, O.P.
It has been a pleasure to work under the editorship of Cynthia Read, who has long been a truly formative influence upon the field of religious studies and cultural history in North America.
Abbreviations
ADC Dictionary of Christianity in America (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990, ed. Daniel G. Reid)
ANB American National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999ff)
BDEB Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, 1730–1860 (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1995, ed. Donald M. Lewis)
CBA Christian Brethren Archive, University of Manchester
CDIB Cambridge Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
CW The Collected Writings of J. N. Darby (multiple editions). 34 vols. Edited by William Kelly. The first book-form edition of the Collected Writings was published London: George Morrish, 1866–1883? Since the 1880s, half a dozen editions of CW have been published. For the protocols used in the present study to allow citation across editions, see Akenson, Discovering the End of Time, 491-496.
DCB Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966 ff.) Multiple volumes, ongoing.
LAC Library and Archives Canada
L]ND Letters of J.N. D. (multiple editions). 3 vols. Edited by William Kelly. (London: George Morrish, undated [1886–1899]). Later editions had considerable variations in pagination and, to a lesser degree, identification of correspondents. The STEM Publishing online edition includes corrigenda by L. J. L. Hodgett as of December 1995. For cross-edition protocols see Akenson, Discovering the End of Time, 488–489.
MBI Moody Bible Institute, Chicago
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004ff)
OPAE Archives of Oxford University Press, Oxford, England
Pickering Henry Pickering (ed.), Chief Men Among the Brethren (Acts 15:22). (London: Pickering and Inglis, 2nd ed., 1931)
SRB Scofield Reference Bible (Oxford University Press, 1st ed, 1909, “New and Improved Edition,” 1917)
Introduction
The Migration of Ideas
“Where in the world did that come from?” is a question whose informality might obscure the fact that it is a smart query, a lot more useful than are most questions stated in academic language. In the history trade, it is one that we should ask more often, for it reminds us that no event or process or person can be analyzed purely as if it were an abstract entity. All human history needs at least two coordinates—time, of course, and place. A related, more pointed query concerning any belief, ideology, social custom, economic practice, or technological innovation is, “How did that come to be here?” The “here” in the question can be any place: your home today or the senate of the Roman Republic in classical times, or any place and time that is amenable to historical analysis.
Although we rarely speak of our trade this way, I think most shrewd historical analysis is essentially migration history: not simply the movement of individuals, tribes, and social groups from one place to another, although that certainly is a fundamental historical process, but also the migration of ideas and technologies and customs and habits from one culture to another. Often in big-history, suites of ideas and complexes of behaviour seem to have travelled from one continent to another without the aid of much human migration, as if they were fully formed icebergs traversing big patches of ocean. The helpful characteristic of all these migration histories—whether of corporeal individuals or of constellations of ideas—is that when taken together they help us to avoid the implicit (and often unintentional) vainglory of mere locality. Of course every town, province, and nation has its own unique physical geography and cultural topography, and these at several levels are formative of events within the local boundaries. Yet, in any given jurisdiction, most of what happens, most of what is believed, is an adaptation of ideas and behaviours that come from someplace else. That’s just the way the world works. No town, state, or nation is autochthonous, however loudly its propagandists may declare it to be mystically and morally exceptional—or however elegantly its historians play a game of intellectual squash-racquets, with the patterns of cause and effect being limited to the whitewashed walls of the locality or nation.
Theologians of the Catholic church have developed a concept— inculturation—that can be secularized to help our understanding of the way that
a small collection of individuals living on the edge of Europe embraced a new concept of Christianity (virtually a new religion, some would say), and eventually this faith came to define the prepotent form of Protestantism in the United States and thus to be a strong component of everyday American culture. Inculturation, though a theologically complex concept concerning the dynamic relationship of belief and culture, can for our purposes be simplified to identify operationally the following stages of interaction: the definition of a boundaried belief system within a given culture; the transfer of that suite of beliefs and practices from one culture into another; the modification of the form (and, however much it might offend the purists) and the content of the original system so that the recipient culture embeds the new material into one of its own existing belief systems; the continued change in the way the recipient culture thinks and acts in its everyday life consequent upon its embrace of the new ideas; simultaneously, the modification of the imported suite of ideas and behaviours that results from the daily rubbing against the local society continues; and, finally, there occurs the attempt to “re-evangelize” the now slightly askew recipient culture by purists who conclude that things have gone somewhat astray.1
The present study is a stand-alone item. It is also the third volume in my study of a big piece of migration history: the passage of a radically new form of Christianity that in the early nineteenth century was created, invented, discovered, or re-discovered (every word one can use will raise someone’s hackles) in the drawing rooms of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and gentry of Co. Wicklow and south Co. Dublin, to England, and thence first to the Canadas and then southwards to the great US cities situated along the St. Lawrence watershed. The previous volumes are Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell (2016) and Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North American Evangelicalism (2018). The scholarly reader should look at the bibliographic conventions that are set down in the first volume; they are my suggestions as to the most convenient and reliable way to deal with a large chunk of the literature on early millennial apocalypticism—that produced in several million words by John Nelson Darby—which tumbled into print in a confusing welter of editions, fascicules, and reprints. Also, because this volume mostly deals with events from the mid-nineteenth century and onwards, I have necessarily compressed the earlier history. For readers who wish to go
1 The concept of inculturation, which developed from, roughly, the 1960s to the present, includes seminal contributions by Karl Rahner, Robert Schreiter, Emmanuel Martey, John Paul II, and Paul VI, among others. The term, in Catholic discussions, is tied to the evangelical outreach of the faith, and the contact-association between inculturation and incarnation is intentional. A useful summary is Dennis M. Doyle, “The Concept of Inculturation in Roman Catholicism: A Theological Consideration,” U.S. Catholic Historian (Winter 2012): 1–13. In evangelical Protestant thought, the cognate field is “missiology,” which tends to be more pragmatic in character and less theologically densely argued.
further into the early story (and also to those who wish to check my documentation), references to the previous volumes in this study are provided.
The pivot of the story—but, emphatically, only a part of the narrative—is the religious community often referred to as the “Plymouth Brethren.” It was they who were chiefly responsible for sling-shotting some loose, but very attractive, front-edge new ideas from the British Isles to North America. They did so by engaging the intermediate step of packaging the theological-faith innovations of the British Isles of the 1820s and 1830s into a single ideational bundle that could be transported efficiently, like a voyageur’s pack of trade goods, across great distances and difficult climes. The nineteenth-century Brethren have long been under-recognized historically and for good reason: they are devilishly hard to deal with historically, because they were secretive, albeit without any apparent joy in their obscurity. They simply focused on their faith. They kept no corporate institutional records: they refused to admit they were an organization in any public sense and, indeed, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century they did not even have address lists of compatible assemblies of the faithful. Most of their adherents did not much like having any distinctive name, preferring just to be called “Christians,” “Brethren,” “Church of God,” or some other blurred term. In practice, after a seismic schism in the late 1840s, it was common to refer to the two main branches as “Open Brethren” and “Exclusive Brethren.” That practice is adopted here, with the full knowledge that there were other terms employed at the time, and still others adopted since then by their theological descendants. By the late nineteenth century, many Brethren in the British Isles and North America were willing to be referred to by outsiders as Plymouth Brethren—the term at least had a false patina of Mayflower pilgrim ancestry—even though they usually would have used a different name among themselves. The real problem with the Brethren as an active force in the inculturation of apocalyptic millennialism into the evangelical sector of the English-speaking world is simply that they were so vivid in retailing their faith—by small, intense meetings and, paradoxically, by a massive publishing program—and yet were so very secretive about the operational details of their faith community.
The Brethren developed a highly distinctive faith system. At a high level of generality, their beliefs had three sharply distinctive features, as well as several others that were unusual, but not quite so remarkable. Of the three, one made no never-mind outside of their own faith world, but two had an especially strong impact in North America. The one that was rarely adopted by religious leaders outside their own camp was the Brethren’s insistence on a totally lay ministry. To make the precept even less palatable, the lay-only practice was situated in an organizational structure that was distinctive for being declared to outsiders as being nonexistent. Such an ecclesiology was not quite the thing for attracting Protestant pastors from existing denominational congregations.
In contrast, secondly, the Brethren invented an attractive new hermeneutic, a way of reading the Old and New Testaments that merged an obeisance to the original intent of the scriptures with a belief that the secret meaning hidden within the Bible could be decrypted. The Brethren were hardly the first faith group to claim to have broken open the true meaning of the scriptures. The radically new trick was to declare that the scriptures should be divided according to those that were intended for Israel and those for the Church. This cleavage did not correspond to the long-held line between the “Old” and “New” Testaments and had to be learned from the Brethren’s hermeneutical adepts. It is possible to argue that effectively the Brethren created an entirely new set of scriptures, so radical was their re-compiling and re-interpreting of the ancient texts.
Thirdly, the Brethren developed a form of apocalyptic millennialism that was markedly different from the various end-of-time scenarios that were being affirmed elsewhere in the Western world. The details are complicated, but students of evangelical eschatology will quickly note that the Brethren were the chief retailers of a singular form of “pre-millennial eschatology.” The chief Brethren scheme (there were minority versions of the pattern) was that Jesus would return in the physical form that he possessed when he was previously on earth and would take his people heavenwards (the Rapture). Thereafter, for those left behind, there would be a period of writhing pain on earth (the Tribulation) and then Jesus would reappear to clean up the mess and to reign for one thousand years with his saints and with the holy “remnant” of the Jewish people, who now were restored to sovereignty over their promised land. Finally there would be a splendidly pyrotechnic final judgment of all of history’s unsaved souls, and the Almighty would replace human time with an infinite skein of divine rule.
A complicated and not easily parsed theology: its god is in its details. That so much of the system was inculturated into sectors of American Protestantism is surprising. Still, before the first decade of the twentieth century had passed, the radical apocalypticism of the Irish drawing rooms had been adopted and reshaped to form one of the foundational elements of modern American evangelicalism—not all branches, but even those that rejected it had to consider its tenets. Like so much of the master narrative of the millennia-long Christian diaspora, this smaller story is that of a long march along the path of improbability. It occurred; it deserves our attention.
PART I
GEOGRAPHY COUNTS
1 Ireland: Not the Garden of Eden
The historical literature on religion and its social and ideological offshoots in the United States from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries is the richest of any country in the self-declared “first world.” The bibliodensity is at once amazing and daunting. That is the way it should be. The United States in the present era— say, from World War II onwards—has been the most religious of the economically highly developed nations, and it has every right to know about its parentage. Yet, paradoxically, the strength of American religious historiography is a good reason to put it aside for a time, at least if one is looking for distinctive threads that help to explain why the narrative of American religious history has taken some intriguing and unexpected turns. The wattage of the US national historiography is so great that it is hard to see tiny flashes on the horizon, emanations from distant solar systems that, when they are assessed, are found to have had strong gravitational fields that have directly influenced American beliefs and events.
Take Ireland. It is not controversial to note that in the second half of the nineteenth century (which is to say: after the Great Famine) and until roughly the mid-twentieth century, the Roman Catholic church in Ireland was the single most influential national church in the Catholic world. This occurred by virtue of the homeland’s undergoing a “devotional revolution” that turned the populace into a strongly disciplined worshipping community—which was combined with a large and continuous outflow of the general population. The Irish Catholic church became a missionary church, surfing on the bow waves of the “Second British Empire” and upon that of the emerging American empire. The mission church had a dual purpose: to serve European Catholics (especially, but not solely, the Irish) who migrated to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and more, and less pressingly, to convert indigenous populations, particularly in the portions of Africa conquered by European states. Well into the middle of the twentieth century, the middle and upper management of the church in America was either born in Ireland or was of Irish ethnicity.1
1 The concept of the “devotional revolution” in Ireland after the Great Famine was formulated by Emmet Larkin, “The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75,” American Historical Review 77 (June 1972): 625–652. Larkin’s eight volumes of detailed archivally based research on the Catholic church in the nineteenth century (various publishers, 1975–2006) is a remarkable blend of primary material and contextual analysis. For a recent survey of the diasporic posture of the Irish Catholic church, as well as material on the faith-effects of Irish Protestant emigration, see Colin Barr and
What is much less well known, and doubtlessly is more controversial, is the assertion that the Protestant minority in Ireland in the nineteenth century had a significant general influence upon American religious developments, and among evangelicals, a formative one. Here one must pay tribute to Ernest Sandeen’s pioneering classic, Roots of Fundamentalism. British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), a volume that has been underappreciated.
Among the differences between the Irish Catholic church and the Irish Protestant faiths as they impacted American life in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a key dissonance was less a matter of theology than it was of tone. The Catholic church’s march was that of a church-triumphant; that of the Irish Protestants often smacked of the church-despondent. The Catholic message to the first- and second-generation immigrants was that by God’s grace things would turn out all right; the world would not end. Those Protestants who were deep in apocalyptic doom-casting seemed to suggest that by God’s grace, everything would turn out all right, for the world indeed would end.
Among a very narrow band of Irish Anglicans (to use an anachronistic term; they were adherents of the Church of Ireland, the state church), a deeply pessimistic form of evangelical Protestantism evolved in the 1820s and 1830s. This actually is not surprising, for the doctrinal innovations of this small Anglo-Irish cohort were indirect descriptors of their everyday world, which, in their view, was racing to hell very quickly. They created a faith that was immediately pessimistic (the actual physical world would end quite nastily and rather soon); but, if one chose to look at the end of human history as a good thing, their faith was ultimately optimistic, since eventually God would rule forever. Most emphatically, in my describing an imposingly complex set of historical events in such a summary fashion, I do not wish to be misread. I do not believe that there was a merely mechanical relationship between the social pressures on the AngloIrish Protestants and the formulation by a few of their number of a new religious system. Of course one pays attention to their social and political situation. In this case, one notes the particular importance of the innovators, geographic location, and their self-perception of vulnerability; but, equally, we need to appreciate that the qualities of their new faith were not merely analgesic. Something beyond
Hilary M. Carey (eds.), Religion and Greater Ireland. Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). One particular judgment of Barr and Carey (15) bears emphasis: “[W]ith a few exceptions, the genuinely rich historiography of settler Catholicism largely fails to link colonial Catholic experience to the Greater Ireland of which it was conspicuously a part. The historiography of the other Irish denominations is even less developed, in part because the Protestant churches largely lack the historiographical tradition of the Catholics, and in part because the history of Irish Protestantism is badly served in Ireland itself, let alone in Ireland’s diaspora.” For a conspectus of Irish Anglican historiography, see Mark Empey, Alan Ford, and Miriam Moffitt (eds), The Church of Ireland and Its Past (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017).
simple social compensation took place and a new, full, and very persuasive ideational system emerged.
Here is the situation in the early nineteenth century.2 Ireland in general was a sour place, with too many moral debts falling due at the same time. The largest of these, affecting all branches of Irish society, was the mortmain of a form of colonialism that had reached its apogee (if one may use such a term) in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. This was a national form of imperialism, the British (meaning English and Scots) subduing the Irish. But for our purposes its mode of articulation is the crucial point: it was the subordination by force of the Irish Catholics in a Protestant imperium, whose foot soldiers were not temporary invaders but long-term colonists. At a fairly high level of abstraction, one can view the Protestant-Catholic fissure as simply the Irish version of the rash of European wars that had raged since the Reformation, but on the ground the vitriol was anything but abstract. The signature of Protestant overlordship in the early and mid-eighteenth century was the so-called penal code. This was not really a legal code, but rather an overlapping snarl of statutes that deprived Catholics of most civil rights, subsumed a large proportion of their landholdings, attempted to break their cultural identity, and both directly and indirectly penalized the Catholic faith. Even by European standards of sectarian government, the Irish penal code was striking. In the case of European countries, the government, representing a majority religion, persecuted a minority; in Ireland a minority drove down the majority.3
Between 1782 and 1793, most of the penal code (but not the Protestant subsumption of Catholic land) was erased: in part because of a political climate that temporarily favoured liberal ideas, and in part because of the successful revolution in the American colonies, which suggested that excessive government force applied to a civilian population could be disastrous. This reforming period
2 Documentation of the statements in this chapter concerning Irish religious life and the social and economic life of the hub of events in the development of the new evangelicalism—Co. Wicklow and south Co. Dublin—are found in detail in my Discovering the End of Time Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O’Connell (2016). A selected number of additional relevant bibliographic suggestions are included below and any new factual matters or quotations are given their own citation. There are a number of attractive general histories of Ireland that cover the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. The classic is R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988).
3 One of the most prodigious pieces of nineteenth-century scholarship is William E. H. Lecky’s History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols. (London: Longmans, 1892), 1: 136–171, which contains what is still the strongest description of the eighteenth-century Irish penal code. For recent discussions of contextual matters, see Sean Connolly, Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and also Connolly’s Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
later was nostalgically recalled as the golden age of the Irish Protestant nation, and that was accurate at least in the sense that only Protestants were allowed to sit in the Irish parliament and to hold the highest executive posts: crucially, for later events, even after the period of late eighteenth-century reforms, “Catholic Emancipation” (the right to sit in parliament) still was not granted.
Sectarianism, deeply etched on both sides of the religious divide, was a sin that could not be quickly shriven.4 The liberal period, seemingly only a moment, ended in the mid-1790s when a nationalist movement in Ireland coalesced. It overlapped with the British-French war and in 1797–1799 morphed into an Irish sectarian civil war. That civil conflict was particularly strong in the counties of southern Ireland adjacent to the sites where the new Protestant evangelicalism soon was to emerge. As a tactical move to maintain imperial control over Ireland, the British and Irish parliaments were merged in 1801 and “Ireland” became a mere geographic designation, no longer a nation-state. Ireland, now a subset of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, lost its parliament. Dublin no longer was a capital city, but rather a provincial administrative centre. The influence of Irish MPs, Irish bishops of the Established Church, and the holders of Irish titles of nobility all were reduced in the new Westminster parliament. From the viewpoint of the Anglo-Irish ruling class, a failed, but inconvenient, rebellion in 1803 in Dublin and Wicklow was a cruel veneer of ill-fortune; not as cruel, however, as that visited on the lower classes in a series of epidemics and in a partial potato famine in 1821–1822. Ireland indeed was a sour place. Yet, in this diminished world, if one were the right sort of person—which is to say, a large-landowner, Church of Ireland (Anglican), well-born, and male— there was no doubt where in Ireland it was least unpleasant to live and, actually, pleasant enough: Co. Wicklow and south Co. Dublin, including a slice of the classier parts of the city of Dublin, south of the Liffey. Consider County Wicklow (see Figure 1.1). Of the county’s total population of 121,500, nearly 22 percent was Anglican, as high as any county outside of Ulster. (Nationally, Anglicans comprised about 10 percent of the population.) This was enough to buffer against the Catholic majority. Although Dublin no longer was a national capital, the landlords of the posh parts of Wicklow and south Dublin had the advantage of possessing, usually, both a carefully landscaped country estate (with views of the Irish Sea or of sculpted vistas of mountains and watercourses) and a town house in Dublin. Most of the landlord and upper gentry were resident for a large portion of the year. The names of the leading families one associates with the county are Guinness, Parnell, Synge (who provided a whole platoon of Irish bishops), Beresford (marquises of Waterford and more Irish bishops), Hill
4 A perceptive examination of the long duration of sectarianism is Paul Bew, Ireland. The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
1.1. Irish Counties.
Note: before 1922, Offally = King’s County and Leix (var: Leix) = Queen’s County. (Copyright Langdale Productions Ltd.)
(the Downshire marquisate), La Touche (Huguenots who were the Rothschilds of Ireland), Proby (earls of Carysfort), and Wingfield (Viscounts Powerscourt). Their estates in Co. Wicklow ran from 1,000 acres (most also had land holdings elsewhere in Ireland) to upwards of 50,000 acres. Within the coterie of these and similar families and from somewhat less grand, but still solid gentry, the original Brethren movement began, and therefrom arose a radically new form of evangelicalism.
In the first three decades of the nineteenth century it became fashionable for many of the social elite in Ireland (not the majority, but a large number) to become spiritually earnest. This phenomenon was especially strong in the
Figure
Wicklow–south Dublin area. Why this occurred does not admit of any easy explanation, but the reality of the phenomenon is not in doubt. Sometimes the new earnestness took the form of “strict” or “exact churchmanship,” embracing sacramental and liturgical formalism, and other times the contemporary Irish form of Anglican evangelicalism prevailed. Indeed, these two ways of becoming serious about the Anglican faith were not mutually exclusive and one finds individuals, both lay persons and clerics, engaging in the devotional exercises that are (in the English context) often termed “high church,” and at the same time studying the scriptures and experiencing conversion in a manner usually associated with evangelicalism. Here, in discussing Irish Anglican evangelicalism in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, one can be gratefully aware of David Bebbington’s classic conspectus of evangelicalism—conversionism, crucicentrism, biblicism, activism—and still point out that the Irish were a little different from the generality from which Bebbington draws his constellation of characteristics.5 The Irish evangelicals in this early period tended to operate at a cooler temperature. Their conversions often occurred slowly and bit-by-bit, but were no less real for that. The churchmen, both lay and professional, often were very learned in classical languages and patristic theology. Heartfelt emotion was there, but the limitations of good taste and the disinclination to confess one’s failings in public kept their worship from becoming public theatre.
In Co. Wicklow and south Co. Dublin something approximating an evangelical freemasonry was formed. It consisted of adherents of the Church of Ireland who were well-educated, socially select, and who ranged in economic status from middling gentry all the way up to the owners of sculpted demesnes and tens of thousands of acres of land. Daniel Corkery was right in asserting that there was a “hidden Ireland’ in eighteenth-century Gaelic Munster,6 and there also was a hidden Ireland of quite a different social complexion amongst the Anglo-Irish of Wicklow and its surrounds. These Anglican evangelicals did all the usual things of their class: hunted, enjoyed balls and banquets, devoured novels and tattling social papers, managed their servants and staff, and repaired to their favourite spots on the Continent. But there was something distinct about the evangelical coterie that went beyond the flick-of-the-hand recognition its members had for each other. When one follows carefully the impact of the Wicklow-area evangelicals on the Church of Ireland, it becomes clear that they quietly pushed the church towards spiritual animation. The evangelicals understood money and also how social power works when applied to an organization. One sees them
5 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), passim, and Bebbington, “Evangelical Conversion, c. 1740–1850,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 18 (Autumn 2000): 102–127.
6 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland. A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1924).
acquiring the patronage rights to clerical livings and appointing evangelical clergy; putting large sums of money towards chapels-of-ease where energetic clergy preached; and supporting para-church groups such as Sunday schools. One observes members of families known in Irish history mostly for their secular attainments metering their lives in terms of not only the visible world, but also an invisible one: a parallel spiritual universe on whose nature they agreed, even if they had differences over details.
Notably, in the 1820s, the Wicklow/south Dublin evangelicals were at the core of a movement to convert the Irish nation from Catholicism to, preferably, the Church of Ireland and, if not that, at least to some vague and quiet form of Protestantism. (Although there were Baptist and Independent proselytizing bodies operating in the 1820s, they were small, and the important nonEstablishment denominations, the Methodists and Presbyterians, steered clear of Anglican-dominated endeavours.) The Anglican agitation, usually called the Second Reformation or the New Reformation, was a delusion in its conception and a disaster in its practical results. The Church of Ireland was unattractive to Catholics, not merely because it was Protestant; it was irredeemably repugnant because, as a state church, it was associated in the mind of most Irish Catholics with the penal code that had deprived Catholics of basic civil rights. Edmund Burke had written in 1792 that preventing the Irish Catholics from enjoying full constitutional privileges tended “deeply to ulcerate their minds.”7 Although the primary penalties for being Catholic had been erased by the start of the nineteenth century, a shadow penal code remained: it consisted, centrally, of the blocking of Catholics from parliament through the mechanism of noxious oaths, some irritating but secondary inhibitions on Catholic religious foundations and ecclesiastical titles, and the vague but continuing awareness that the Church of Ireland, being supported in part by subventions from the civil state, was itself a daily tax upon the general population. The shadow code, like the hard-law penal code of earlier years, ulcerated the minds of the Catholic majority, terribly.
The 1820s saw the development of the successful campaign for Catholic Emancipation (meaning the right to sit in parliament), a mass movement led by Daniel O’Connell that solidified a sense of Catholic identity on a nationwide scale. From any rational point of view, then, the 1820s were the worst time one can imagine to initiate a campaign to Protestantize the country. Yet, somehow, the participants in the Second Reformation movement were purblind to this reality. These New Reformation activists, lay and clerical, and mostly, but not entirely Anglican, engaged in the sort of activities one would expect from zealots: a small army of proselytizing societies, distribution of the scriptures in both English and Irish, and direct attacks in periodicals and tracts on the doctrine and structure of
7 Edmund Burke to Hercules Langrishe, 3 January 1792, quoted in Bew, 21.
