I

The phenomenon of religious revival is most often identified with Evangelicalism.Footnote ⁹ This is a transatlantic movement of religious reform within Protestantism that emerged in the early eighteenth century. It is interdenominational in character and knitted together by certain doctrinal principles as well a commitment to the necessity of personal conversion and the need to spread the Gospel in order to gain converts. W. R. Ward has traced the origins of Evangelicalism to the revivals experienced amongst pockets of persecuted Protestants stranded in the Habsburg Empire in the late seventeenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ These small groups, of which the Moravians are the most notable, developed features of revivalism such as itinerant preaching, protracted meetings, emotional behaviour and the prominent role of the laity that would characterise the Methodist movement, which, by 1800, had become the fastest growing religious movement in the North Atlantic world.Footnote ¹¹

The 1859 revival in Ulster is rightly placed within the transatlantic growth of Evangelical religion, but it is important to recognise that the meaning and nature of revival have changed considerably over the past three centuries.Footnote ¹² Perhaps the most important transformation concerns the origin and aims of revival. According to theologians before 1800, such as Jonathan Edwards, revivals were a product of the sovereign will of God and involved primarily the revitalisation of those already within the church community. By contrast, for Charles Finney writing in the 1830s, a revival ‘is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle in any sense’ but a ‘result of the right use of the constituted means’.Footnote ¹³ The means that he had in mind moved beyond traditional preaching and the sacraments to certain ‘new measures’, which included anxious seats, itinerancy, women-led meetings, enthusiastic preaching and protracted prayer meetings. This ‘new measures’ revivalism caused a problem for many Calvinists who maintained that a revival was ‘prayed down’ rather than ‘worked up’. Over the course of the Victorian period, however, revival became revivalism with organised evangelistic events led by professional revivalists, such as Dwight L. Moody, and designed to appeal to a new commercial, industrial and urban context.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, revivalism also became associated with the retreat of some Evangelicals from the pressures and challenges of the modern world into personal holiness and the so-called ‘second blessing’ by which believers were filled with the Holy Spirit after conversion. The events of 1859 grew out of the first revival tradition but they also marked a crucial moment in the move from revival to modern revivalism in Britain and Ireland.

The origins of the bewildering series of events that constituted the 1859 revival may be traced back to Presbyterian areas of mid-county Antrim and especially the establishment by four young men of a prayer meeting at a Sunday school at Tannybrake in the parish of Connor.Footnote ¹⁵ During the winter of 1858/9, a number of individuals were converted in this and other parishes adjacent to Ballymena, creating a sense of expectancy for conversions throughout the area. The first public manifestation of the revival occurred in nearby Ahoghill on Monday 14 March 1859.Footnote ¹⁶ The meeting-house of the First Presbyterian congregation was packed to give thanks for the communion that had been celebrated the previous day. The attendance was particularly large because many in the area wanted to hear the testimonies of the converts from Connor. They were not disappointed, for in the midst of the solemn proceedings one of them stood up and declared, according to a correspondent in the Ballymena Observer, ‘that a revelation had been committed to him, and that he spoke by command of a power superior to any ministerial authority’. Despite efforts to control him, ‘he proceeded to vociferate religious phrases with a rapidity and fluency which excited the most intense astonishment, and created a panic of very serious alarm among the audience’. The minister was concerned about the excitement and ordered everyone out for fear of the galleries collapsing. Outside the meeting house, several of the Connor converts addressed a crowd of around 3,000. Many in the crowd were deeply moved and some fell to the ground, apparently with anxiety for the fate of their souls. The Ballymena Observer noted that the ‘present crisis may prove a favourable opportunity for extending the knowledge and influence of the Gospel’. However, the unprecedented nature of the excitement led them to comment that ‘prompt measures should be adopted for the soberisation of sentiment on the important subject; and the people – seriously awakened as they now appear to be – more than ever require the vigilant guidance, instruction, and pastoral care of their enlightened ministers’.

The revival developed a momentum of its own as reports of conversions multiplied and some converts exhibited physical responses such as prostrations or ‘fallings down’. From Ahoghill the revival spread rapidly to Portglenone and districts around Ballymena. By May it had reached Cullybackey and Broughshane before turning south towards Ballyclare. On 17 May, the first ‘cases’ of conversion and prostrations appeared in Ballymena. By the end of the month, Belfast, Carnmoney, Ballycarry, Dundrod and Ballyeaston were affected, while the revival made its appearance for the first time in County Down in Saintfield, Ballynahinch, Comber, Banbridge and Newry. By June the revival was in full swing on the north coast in Ballymoney, Coleraine and Portrush and had spread into west County Londonderry, to Limavady, Moneymore and Derry city itself. Later in the month, County Armagh was visited, and for the rest of the summer reports of the revival were gathered from parts of Tyrone, Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, as well as Dublin. It appeared ‘in weaving districts, urban linen mill districts, farming districts, smaller rural towns and in Harland's shipbuilding yard’.Footnote ¹⁷

In Belfast a daily union prayer meeting in the Music Hall was quickly established, and on 29 June a large open-air prayer meeting in the Botanic Gardens was attended by between thirty-five and forty thousand individuals, fifteen thousand of whom arrived in special trains.Footnote ¹⁸ Across Protestant areas of Ulster, well-known evangelists such as Henry Grattan Guinness, Brownlow North and Phoebe Palmer addressed big crowds; large-scale prayer meetings were held in many areas, including Armagh in September; and in Coleraine the new town hall was used as a ‘hospital’ for those who had been affected by the revival.Footnote ¹⁹ The constant round of preaching and pastoral comfort affected the health of a significant number of ministers, yet it was the conspicuous involvement of the laity that distinguished this revival. Ordinary believers took a prominent part by organising prayer meetings, counselling friends and giving personal testimonies of conversion. Men and women also became preachers, and addresses by the Ahoghill and Connor converts were especially popular. These lay preachers began to exploit the desire for fervent and earthy preaching and were acknowledged, with some misgivings, to have had a considerable effect upon people from their own working-class background.Footnote ²⁰

The revival attracted considerable transatlantic and European interest and led to religious tourism of revival districts.Footnote ²¹ In her excellent study of the 1857/8 revival in America, Kathryn Long points out that it was editors of secular newspapers who defined as a revival the New York prayer meetings and the accompanying conversions. By doing so, they gave a name and shape to the events, provided publicity and made it into a truly national awakening. For ‘the first time in the nineteenth century, revivalism was splashed across the front page of a secular newspaper. The revival became a media event’.Footnote ²² A similar process occurred in the north of Ireland where the secular press eagerly engaged with the startling events in mid-Antrim and ‘the revival became a media event’ that ‘was quickly diffused to Protestant areas throughout the province’.Footnote ²³ It was not just newspapers that carried accounts and critiques of the revival. Myrtle Hill notes that the extensive collection of printed materials produced during the revival ‘should be seen as part of the process itself, dedicated to winning converts and promoting the cause’.Footnote ²⁴

II

Historians have struggled to assign causes of the revival. According to F. S. L. Lyons, ‘Like most such episodes in the history of religious hysteria, its origin, propagation, and eventual decline seemed incapable of rational explanation, except perhaps in terms of a mass hunger for salvation by congregations oppressed in spirit by a too rigid application of the doctrine of election.’Footnote ²⁵ More bluntly, Mark McGovern describes it as ‘the high point of fundamentalist hysteria in nineteenth-century Ulster’.Footnote ²⁶ Some have addressed the causes of 1859 by pointing to social and economic problems that predisposed certain groups within society to experience religious revival. For example, the Marxist Peter Gibbon argues that the revival was a consequence of the dislocation caused by fundamental changes in linen production. In particular, it led to the financial ruin of male domestic handloom weavers and the postponement of marriage amongst young female factory operatives, which meant that they could ‘offer no resistance to a phenomenon like the revival’.Footnote ²⁷ In an important recent survey of Irish religious history, Sean Connolly comments that 1859 should be the ideal case study for testing the relationship between religious change and social developments as formulated by scholars such as Gibbon. Connolly notes, however, that ‘what is striking is the failure of modern studies to establish a compelling correlation between revivalist enthusiasm and any particular variable, whether political, economic or geographical’. He continues that the revival ‘took place in a social and political context that remains crucial to its understanding’, but that the responses brought forth ‘cannot be convincingly reduced to a basis in class, gender or economic experience’.Footnote ²⁸

There can be little doubt that the vulnerability of individuals in the face of economic and political insecurity provides an important context for religious conversions. Moreover, as stated by Connolly, social and economic factors helped to shape how the revival was experienced in particular locations. In an important study of the 1858 to 1862 revival in the north-east of Scotland, Kenneth Jeffrey has noted that there were, in fact, three types of revival working in parallel – in the sophisticated urban context of Aberdeen, there was an orderly ‘modern revival’ reminiscent of Moodyite revivalism; in the rural hinterland, the revival was in the traditional form of Presbyterian communion seasons that chimed with the patterns of country life and religion; while in the fishing villages of the east coast, violent and short-lived revivals akin to Methodism were the norm and reflected the precarious and superstitious character of the close-knit fishing communities.Footnote ²⁹ No similar in-depth analysis has been done for Ulster, but the same pattern can be glimpsed. In his various contributions to the social and economic history of mid-Antrim, Kevin James has shown how the revival began as a Presbyterian event in the mid-Antrim countryside and how rural-urban links allowed the revival to spread into the rapidly changing town of Ballymena.Footnote ³⁰ Between 1851 and 1861 its population grew by nearly 10 per cent, especially in the village of Harryville. This growth was caused by the immigration from the rural hinterland of mainly young people who were facing economic difficulties. A strong sense of identity was created in the village owing to its location in a predominately Catholic area. It was these developments that allowed the revival to be easily imported from the countryside as a means of distinguishing Protestant Harryville from its Catholic surroundings. In essence, what began as a Presbyterian revival in the countryside became a Protestant revival in Ballymena. A similar interplay between religious and social developments may be discerned in Belfast where the concentration of population led to large-scale events and attracted a disproportionate share of the physical manifestations. It is significant that amongst Presbyterians a greater share of the religious excitement was experienced in recently founded congregations in working-class areas, such as Great George's Street, Berry Street, Townsend Street, York Street, Linenhall Street and Eglinton Street, rather than the established and more respectable congregations of May Street, Fisherwick Place and Rosemary Street.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, it was young single women, especially female mill workers, who comprised a high proportion of cases of the physical manifestations.Footnote ³²

Recent scholarship has moved attention away from social and economic determinants to the importance of tight-knit communities, such as families, prayer groups and congregations, in promoting revival by creating a sense of expectancy that a revival would occur.Footnote ³³ The 1859 revival was not preceded by years of spiritual apathy, but by the unprecedented growth of Evangelical sentiment and organisations, a transatlantic phenomenon that had its origins in the first half of the eighteenth century and the arrival in Ulster of Moravians, Methodists and Scottish Seceder Presbyterians.Footnote ³⁴ The dislocation of the 1790s caused by the French Revolution, European wars and the 1798 rebellion in Ireland, provided the context for a truly remarkable transatlantic growth both in the numerical power and social influence of Evangelicalism.Footnote ³⁵ In response to this, boisterous and enthusiastic Methodist revivals occurred in south Ulster, while in the large established Anglican and Presbyterian communities, Evangelicals promoted their gospel religion as a solution to the religious and social problems of the day and as a means of encouraging respectable behaviour. To do so they established Sunday schools, missionary societies and various other philanthropic organisations.

The rise and expansion of Evangelicalism did not bypass Irish Presbyterianism.Footnote ³⁶ Accounts of 1859 rightly focus upon the Presbyterian community because it is the largest Protestant denomination in Ulster and was the prime mover in promoting revival. Contemporary accounts of the origins of the revival were quick to make the point that the revival had not appeared from nowhere but that for ‘several years a purifying and preparatory process had been going forward over the length and breadth of Ulster’.Footnote ³⁷ An Evangelical party had been making progress since the turn of the century in the largest Presbyterian grouping, the Synod of Ulster, and, during the second half of the 1820s, Henry Cooke had led this group in a campaign to expel a number of Arian ministers from the Synod. As a consequence of Cooke's eventual triumph in 1829, Presbyterianism underwent a comprehensive process of religious reform that sharpened denominational identity and self-confidence, creating an Evangelical ascendancy within the denomination for the rest of the century. Presbyterian Evangelicals wanted to return their Church to the Presbyterianism of the seventeenth century and the Calvinist theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith. They insisted on the reform of Kirk sessions, the formation of prayer, missionary and temperance societies, the improvement of public praise and the adoption of a more earnest and direct style of gospel preaching. For them, revival both described their efforts at reformation and their hope of further, and more abundant, divine blessing in the future.

The restrained description of revival offered by Presbyterians was a reflection of the traditional Calvinist emphasis upon the sovereignty of God.Footnote ³⁸ They were stimulated and encouraged in their efforts by similar developments amongst Presbyterians in the United States, but were suspicious of the ‘new measures’ revivalism of Finney.Footnote ³⁹ During 1859 the Presbyterian newspaper, the Banner of Ulster, suggested that one of the reasons the revival was genuine was because it was ‘the product of no mechanical appliance, and that it has not been marked by the prevalence of what are called in America “new measures”, and of every species of irregularity, but that it has sprung up in a way and by a means which the most exacting and suspicious can hardly help pronouncing unobjectionable’. The editorial continued that there had been ‘no Finney Revivalist calling himself a Brigadier-General of Christ to get up excitement with the same business-like assiduity that he would set about a Presidential canvas’, and that there had been ‘no revival manual’.Footnote ⁴⁰

As revival involved a return to the Presbyterianism of the seventeenth century, Presbyterians turned to their own history in the north of Ireland. In 1834 the historian James Seaton Reid brought the attention of his co-religionists to the revival origins of their Church during the Six Mile Water revival of 1625 to 1630.Footnote ⁴¹ Reid was eager to provide a model of revival for his fellow ministers to follow, describing their seventeenth-century forbears as sober-minded, personally devoted to Christ, committed to Reformed theology and the Presbyterian form of church government, and zealous and faithful in their pastoral duties. Reid's rediscovery of the revival origins of Presbyterianism was enthusiastically developed by his coreligionists and was folded into an emerging ‘Ulster-Scots’ narrative that drew an explicit connection between the Scottish origins of Presbyterian religion, civil and religious liberty and the moral and economic prosperity of the north-east.Footnote ⁴² These themes would be rehearsed time and again in the following decades. In a series of lectures delivered in Australia in 1861–2, the minister of First Coleraine congregation during the revival, the Revd William Richey, began his account of 1859 with an extended discussion of St Patrick, St Columba and the Ulster plantation. Coming into the seventeenth century, he noted that the ministry of the first Presbyterian ministers in Ulster had brought ‘back once more to Ulster freedom of thought and speech, a free press, free institutions, and, in a word, civil and religious liberty’.Footnote ⁴³ Richey argued that prayer, faith and God's providence had secured the foundations of the Scottish settlement: ‘The good seed, sown so richly by godly ministers and their helpers, and watered by a gracious revival, has ever since gone on to bear a succession of harvests, of which the last has been by far the most abundant.’Footnote ⁴⁴ A similar connection was made by Matthew Kerr in The Ulster revival of the seventeenth century, published in March 1859, and by the Revd John Weir in a chapter of his book, The Ulster awakening (1860), entitled ‘The two revivals in Ulster’.Footnote ⁴⁵ It was generally accepted by contemporaries that one of the reasons the revival was genuine was because it ‘has sprung up amongst a people staid and sober to a proverb – very different in temperament from the impulsive Celts of the South and West – a people, in fact, not strongly emotional, and peculiarly exempt from superstitious and fanatical feeling’.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Presbyterians, the revival of 1859 vindicated their religion and its ability to promote economic prosperity and respectable behaviour.

One of the main outcomes of the process of revival within Presbyterianism was the union in 1840 of the Synod of Ulster and the Secession synod to form the present-day General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. The list of principles underlying the union reflected a desire to return to the doctrines and practices of seventeenth-century Presbyterianism and would ‘claim the admiration of every lover of the “good old way” which was trodden by the Church of Scotland in her days of Covenanted Reformation’.Footnote ⁴⁷ To further the cause of Presbyterian Evangelicalism, the General Assembly in 1844 established a group to consider the best methods ‘of awakening, under the Divine blessing, a higher spirit of piety in our church’, and the next year appointed a State of Religion Committee.Footnote ⁴⁸ For the next fifteen years, reports on the state of religion submitted annually to the General Assembly showed a gradual improvement in the discipline and spiritual fervour of the congregations under its care. Presbyterians continued to desire a revival of religion to further their efforts at reformation, stimulate evangelism amongst Irish Catholics, strengthen their response to the revitalisation of the Catholic Church in Ireland and help deal with the problems associated with industrial and urban expansion.Footnote ⁴⁹ Contrary to interpretations that stress the gap between ministers and the laity, there was a significant effort to enlist the potential offered by the laity in the cause of revival both in traditional areas of the eldership and Kirk sessions, as well as Sunday school teachers, prayer meetings and home visitors.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1845 the State of Religion report strongly urged ‘that the private members of the church should be made distinctly to understand their individual responsibility for the gifts entrusted to their stewardship’.Footnote ⁵¹

The result of this movement for reform was an increased desire for greater spiritual blessing from God. The 1851 report claimed ‘that over all our church there seems to be felt a deep and growing sense of our need of an outpouring of the Spirit of God, together with an earnest desire expressed for the bestowment of that blessing’.Footnote ⁵² A local example of this can be seen in the birthplace of the revival. The congregation of Connor had been ministered to by a series of devoted Evangelicals including the minister in 1859, the Revd J. H. Moore. Moore was not a particularly remarkable preacher, but he was faithful in pastoral visitation and established a number of Sunday schools and prayer meetings in the neighbourhood – it was Moore who had encouraged the formation of the Tannybrake meeting.Footnote ⁵³ In the months leading up to the revival he read in his evening services extracts about the revivals associated with Jonathan Edwards.Footnote ⁵⁴

It is clear from this discussion that an irony of interdenominational Evangelical religion was that it stimulated denominational self-confidence. In parallel with the revival of religion, Presbyterians from the 1830s began to assert their identity against both Anglicans and Catholics. Cooke's Evangelical religion and unionist instincts were shared by the overwhelming majority of his coreligionists, but the majority of ministers and a significant proportion of the Presbyterian laity did not accept his much-discussed policy of pan-Protestant political unity between Anglicans and Presbyterians and instead developed a distinctive Presbyterian politics and supported the Liberal party.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, the opposition of Presbyterians to prelacy and the continued social and political ascendancy of members of the Church of Ireland was matched, if not exceeded, by their opposition to the tyranny represented by Catholicism. By the time of the first Home Rule crisis in 1885, the overwhelming majority of Presbyterians firmly believed that ‘Rome Rule’ would undermine their civil and religious liberties by establishing a Catholic ascendancy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Presbyterian anti-Catholicism was inextricably linked to their interpretation of biblical prophecy, especially their identification of the pope as the AntiChrist which was enshrined in chapter xxv of the Westminster Confession of Faith.Footnote ⁵⁷ Presbyterian anti-Catholicism was strengthened in the mid-nineteenth century by developments within Catholicism that aimed to bring national Catholic Churches into line with the doctrine and ritual of the Vatican. This attempt to increase papal control, often referred to as Ultramontanism, would culminate in the promulgation of papal infallibility at the first Vatican Council in 1870.Footnote ⁵⁸ The process of making the Irish Catholic Church a distinctively Roman Catholic Church is associated with Cardinal Paul Cullen.Footnote ⁵⁹ Scholars have rightly interpreted this move as the Catholic equivalent of the rise of Evangelicalism within Protestantism, especially the reformist and dogmatic logic of both movements.Footnote ⁶⁰ Irish Presbyterians were appalled by government concessions to popery and in 1854 the General Assembly formed a Committee on Popery to monitor the progress of Catholicism in public life and arrange lectures on anti-Catholic themes.Footnote ⁶¹ The concern with the spread of Ultramontane ideas was expressed during the revival at the fourteenth annual meeting of the interdenominational and United Kingdom-based Evangelical Alliance, which met in Belfast in September 1859. It was clear from the proceedings that the two main topics of public conversation were the revival and the Irish Catholic hierarchy's statement on higher education, which reiterated their desire for separate educational provision for Catholics under their sole control.Footnote ⁶²

The prophetic books of Scripture may have allowed Presbyterians to identify the papacy as AntiChrist, but Revelation xx also foretold a millennium of peace and prosperity for the Church, before the return of Christ in judgement, that would be built on the ruins of the papal AntiChrist. These postmillennial themes were aired in the State of Religion reports and in the prayers for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit constantly enjoined throughout the 1840s and 1850s. This is important because millennialism and the implicit shape that it gave to history provided the theological and historical context for Presbyterians to expect a revival. The relationship between postmillennialism and revivalism had been established in the seventeenth century and was subsequently reinforced by Jonathan Edwards who drew an explicit connection between revivals and the coming of the millennium.Footnote ⁶³ Following Edward's lead, Irish Presbyterian writers interpreted revival as either a preparation for or an inauguration of the millennium. It was in this context that the State of Religion committee greeted news of the American revival, which, they believed, ‘teaches us how easily the arm of the Lord can secure the fulfilment of those great promises which declare the future and final establishment of the kingdom of Christ over the whole earth’. They noted especially the spirit of prayer ‘which shall universally prevail, before the expected Millennium comes’, and asked ‘Why should we not aim to be possessed of it now?’Footnote ⁶⁴ A pastoral address issued by the General Assembly in October 1858 noted that the revival in the United States had been brought about through preaching, prayer, visitation and ‘ordinary agencies’. The address warned that they could not merely replicate what happened in the US, and that revival could not be experienced through ‘any mechanical process of new and laborious measures, productive of little else than a transient and barren excitement’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The General Assembly quickly dispatched William Gibson and William McClure as a delegation to North America. Gibson published in March 1859 a report of his personal experiences in the previous autumn as an introduction to an account of the revival in Philadelphia by the YMCA. He commented favourably on ‘the noiseless character of the work, and the absence of all unnatural excitement’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Revd S. J. Moore's account of the revival in Ballymena, published in June 1859, noted that the pattern of the American revival paralleled exactly that which had occurred in mid-Antrim:

The revival of 1859 reflected the effort that Presbyterians had expended to revive their Church. They expected and wanted a sober yet fruitful experience along the same lines as the revival in America. The problem was that revivals seldom conform to the sober desires of religious professionals. The revival of 1859 was no different and unleashed forces that challenged the status quo and caused considerable unease and controversy.

III

The considerable majority of ministers from the variety of Protestant denominations in Ulster supported the revival. Unity amongst Evangelicals was seen as a prominent feature and result of the revival, yet it received more overwhelming support from Presbyterians and Methodists; the leadership of the Church of Ireland was more circumspect and sometimes openly opposed.Footnote ⁶⁸ Concern was voiced about the relationship between conversion and assurance of salvation, the use of lay preachers and hymns, as well as the general unrestrained character of the awakening.Footnote ⁶⁹ Outright opponents of the revival comprised a small yet vocal minority amongst Protestants in the north of Ireland. They charged the revival variously with spreading hysteria, increasing vice and illegitimacy and promoting insanity. The only northern newspaper to offer sustained opposition was the Northern Whig, which was identified with Unitarianism. One correspondent in June stated that ‘the present religious furore is irregular, spasmodic, and irrational, grievously overwrought, and that time will bring about an unhappy reaction’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Another letter gave the following description of the ‘Extravagances of the “revival” movement at Coleraine’:

The titles of other letters and reports are indicative – ‘Witchcraft and revivalism’, ‘Death from the effects of “revivalism”’, ‘Revivalism and insanity’ and ‘A revivalist committed’.Footnote ⁷² Other members of the Belfast elite were just as scathing. The noted local medical expert, Henry MacCormac, informed the Journal of Mental Science that the revival had ‘left deeply and densely strewn, seeds of many a future crop of insanity, hysteria, convulsion, and folly, whenever it shall please the fanatic of the future, whether male or female, lay or clerical, at Belfast, or in Ahoghill … to galvanize them into renewed life and activity’.Footnote ⁷³

As suggested by the Northern Whig's coverage, the bitterest controversy centred on the various physical manifestations that accompanied the initial stages of the revival in specific localities. These were neither a feature of the recent American revival nor of the awakening in Connor. The manifestations occurred in a variety of geographical locations and took different forms including stigmata, ‘convulsions, cries, uncontrollable weeping or trembling, temporary blindness or deafness, trances, dreams and visions’, though prostrations were the most common.Footnote ⁷⁴ These accompanied a minority of conversions, but when reported by the press they became the most public characteristic of the revival. There was a notorious case of a Belfast woman who had the words ‘Christ’ and ‘Jesus’ displayed on her breasts and ‘Seek ye the Lord’ on her arm. She raised the sum of 11s. from curious spectators in one day but was found to be a fraud when it was realised she had spelt Jesus, ‘Jeasus’.Footnote ⁷⁵

The controversy over manifestations focused upon two issues – what caused them and their relationship to conversion. As these involved the issue of mental health, a vigorous debate was carried out in the press and in learned journals, including the Lancet and the Journal of Mental Science, about the impact of the revival upon statistics for insanity.Footnote ⁷⁶ Critics took a broad view of the evidence, claiming that any case of insanity occurring during the revival was linked with religious enthusiasm, while supporters examined individual cases to ascertain the precise circumstances of those who had been admitted to the asylum. Amongst critics it was widely believed that the physical manifestations were linked to ‘the more impressionable sex’ and that fanaticism was prevalent amongst ‘the ignorant, uneducated, hard-worked, and easily impressed class, and, in the proportion of nineteenth out of every twenty, young and excitable females’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Janice Holmes has added a flood of new light on the role of women during the revival that has done a singular service in overturning these crude and misleading theories. For example, she notes that the visions were conventionally Christian in content but also expressed a ‘desire for status and recognition within the local community’, a fact that ‘did not occur’ to contemporary commentators.Footnote ⁷⁸

Those who criticised the revival from within the Churches were sometimes motivated by theological unorthodoxy, which was certainly the case for the Unitarians who contributed to the Northern Whig. Yet the two most outspoken critics, William McIlwaine and Isaac Nelson, were Evangelicals. Both agreed that the manifestations were the defining characteristics of the revival – McIlwaine concluded that ‘the physical features of that extraordinary movement were to be considered not merely as an accompaniment or accident, but in reality as an essential and integral portion of it’, while Nelson stated that ‘had there been no falling down, no convulsion, no fainting, there would have been no revival’.Footnote ⁷⁹ McIlwaine was one of a number of Anglican Evangelicals who criticised the enthusiasm of the revival because they feared that it would undermine their defence of Evangelical truth against ritualistic error.Footnote ⁸⁰ As well as a noted anti-Catholic controversialist, McIlwaine was a founder member of the Evangelical Alliance, a regular contributor to its meetings and a member of the executive council.Footnote ⁸¹ Yet he was also a committed churchman and sought to excuse his fellow Anglicans from complicity in the excesses of the revival. In light of the support for the revival from his diocesan and his fellow clergyman in Belfast, particularly Charles Seaver and Theophilius Campbell, McIlwaine claimed disingenuously that during the revival, ‘with very few and inconsiderable exceptions’, the clergy of the Established Church ‘remained unmoved and unshaken from their ancient steadfastness to truth of doctrine and sobriety of practice’.Footnote ⁸² Reflecting his strong churchmanship, he explained the physical affections through an examination of the history of Presbyterianism in Ulster in the seventeenth century that directly contradicted Seaton Reid's description. He concluded that ‘the peculiar sort of physical affections which are now before us, is … the growth of Presbyterianism, more or less strictly so called, as is proved by its history among us, from the days of Hamilton, Blair, and Glendinning, down to the Ulster Revivalists of 1859’.Footnote ⁸³

Critic-in-chief of the revival was the Revd Isaac Nelson, Presbyterian minister of Donegall Street in Belfast. Nelson's The year of delusion was an extended critique of William Gibson's official account, The year of grace, and was published as a series of pamphlets between August 1860 and March 1862. Nelson argued that Gibson had ‘inserted the best cases, given a most plausible air of pietism to the whole record, judiciously enough to keep out what the great leaders of the movement consider most essential’.Footnote ⁸⁴ He stated bluntly that ‘we think that the so-called revival of 1859 has been disgraceful to Christianity, a corruption of gospel truth, and the means of filling the Presbyterian Church with vice and immorality under the sanction of religion’.Footnote ⁸⁵ As in his own lifetime, Nelson has polarised opinion amongst scholars – J. T. Carson described him as ‘a severely embittered man’, who ‘allowed his opposition to degenerate into unreasoning prejudice’, while a recent historian has described him as amongst Ulster's ‘most sober churchmen’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Both views are misleading. It is undoubtedly the case that Nelson tended to take a minority position on issues and was disappointed when he was not appointed to a professorial chair in the Presbyterian College.Footnote ⁸⁷ According to a contemporary he was ‘The most pugnacious man in a nation of shillelaghs, the best hater in a country where feuds are as plentiful as potatoes, the most determined utterer of contradictory negatives in a land where from time immemorial the “Noes have had it”, Isaac Nelson has the spirit of a lion and the hide of a rhinoceros.’Footnote ⁸⁸

It is also the case that Nelson was an Evangelical. A perusal of the Belfast News-Letter reveals his membership or support for a plethora of organisations including the Evangelical Alliance, the Belfast Town Mission, the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, the Temperance Society, the London Missionary Society, open-air preaching and the Colonial Mission of the Presbyterian Church.Footnote ⁸⁹ In matter of fact, it was Nelson and his fellow Belfast abolitionist, James Stanfield, who at the inaugural meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in August 1846 introduced a resolution not to have fellowship with American slaveholders.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nelson's robust criticism of the moral ambiguity of Evangelical slaveholders in America was reflected in a chapter in the Year of delusion entitled ‘American religion and the Ulster imitation’. He claimed that

McIlwaine likewise noted that true religion ought to be tested by its fruits and that the adulation of the revival in America was not accompanied by a recognition of the ‘national transgression’ and ‘blot on American Christianity’ that was slavery.Footnote ⁹² Both Nelson and McIlwaine agreed that the revivalist religion of the American Churches led to moral prevarication that permitted slaveholders to remain church members. In their minds, revivalism allowed Evangelicals to ignore the single most important moral issue of the day.

Nelson and McIlwaine were not representative of the overwhelming majority of Evangelical ministers who supported the revival, attempted to curb the excesses of popular revivalism and to control the interpretation of the physical manifestations. It is certainly the case that there was a handful of ministers who ‘had lost their heads in the excitement that prevailed’, but the majority of Presbyterian ministers expressed considerable reservation about the manifestations.Footnote ⁹³ At its meeting in June 1859, the Presbytery of Belfast was positive towards the revival but wary of the manifestations. Professor J. G. Murphy expressed his disapproval and stated his preference for ‘the silent workings of the spirit of God, as likely to be more lasting’. Gibson likewise stated that he ‘had no sympathy with those extravagances’ and recommended a cautious approach.Footnote ⁹⁴ The template for the sober-minded Evangelical response was offered at the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in September by James McCosh, then professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen's College Belfast and later president of the College of New Jersey. McCosh argued that it was natural that strong feelings produced certain bodily effects and that the prostrations were a physiological response to the intensity of sorrow for sin, the temperament of the individual and (writing as a Scotsman) the emotional character of the Irish. ‘My position here is, that the work may be one of genuine spiritual feeling, and yet may be attended with bodily excitement, especially among persons not disciplined to restrain the expression of their feelings.’ He went on to state ‘that no bodily state is an evidence of an operation of the Spirit of God’.Footnote ⁹⁵ McCosh reflected the opinion of clergy supporters of the revival that it was ultimately the conduct of the converts, as determined by the teaching of the Bible, that would verify their conversions.

IV

For supporters, the practical results of the revival in the transformation of individual and social behaviour were crucial in verifying the authenticity of the movement. A contributor to the Missionary Herald of the Presbyterian Church in December 1859 was in no doubt that ‘Tested by its fruits, the Irish revival dreads no opposition. Tested by facts, the opposition to it dwindles into insignificance and contempt.’Footnote ⁹⁶ The revival was said to have affected thousands of people across Ulster. It promoted a greater level of personal and corporate devotion, increased church membership and the number of applicants for the ministry, promoted lay involvement and church extension, and increased Christian liberality, interest in mission and evangelism. Millennial themes were also notable. For instance, Gibson asked the annual meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in September 1860 whether the revival was ‘the commencement of a mighty wave of life, that shall sweep on in a swelling majesty, till it has laved the shores of every continent and island of the sea, and carried, as in a spring-tide of salvation, the healing waters of salvation all over the earth?’Footnote ⁹⁷ Yet assessing the impact of the revival is not easy, especially as there was a significant difference between short-term and long-term results, and between intended and unintended consequences. Moreover, the reports of the State of Religion committee in the 1860s often lamented the declension in spiritual life. For example, the 1862 report stated, ‘For it is a fact that cannot be denied, that since that year we have not been making spiritual progress. We seem rather to have gone backward.’Footnote ⁹⁸

In terms of numbers, supporters claimed that 100,000 conversions was a reasonable estimate. On the basis of returns made to him, Gibson recorded that 10,636 persons had been added to Presbyterian communion rolls, while Church of Ireland and other denominations also claimed increased membership.Footnote ⁹⁹ The lack of statistics for the two largest Protestant denominations – the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church – means that assessing the numerical impact of the revival is difficult, but it is clear from contemporary accounts that the majority of converts already had some previous connection with organised Protestant religion and that conversions of the godless were rare.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Moreover, there was a reticence amongst ministers about quantifying the number of converts. Richard Smyth of First Derry was ‘not prepared to endorse all that has been said about the actual number of conversions’ as ‘nothing is to be gained by exaggeration’. Smyth reckoned that there was not more than ‘a thousand converts in the whole city’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Observers in Belfast such as the Revd William Johnston of Townsend Street had a similar attitude about the impact of the revival on a town of 120,000 comprised of a significant proportion of Catholics and ‘especially of that class which, in our great towns and cities, so largely contributes to swell the records of vice and crime’.Footnote ¹⁰² Three years after the revival, the Report on the State of Religion submitted to the General Assembly stated, ‘although the number of persons who seemed to have been savingly impressed was unusually large, it nevertheless bore but a very small proportion to the entire population’. Furthermore, ‘in many cases convictions of sin never advanced to conversion’ and ‘even when there was a real work of saving grace, it was wrought in persons who still remained subject to many infirmities and inconsistencies’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the medium term, the revival led to the growth of smaller Protestant denominations, at the expense of mainstream Churches, which demanded a more visible commitment from their members. The census records for Ulster show that the number of persons in the ‘Other’ category, which included Baptists, Independents and Brethren assemblies, rose from 20,443 in 1861 to 35,098 a decade later, while the number of Presbyterian declined by more than 26,000.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

David W. Miller has suggested that the growth of these denominations was a consequence of working-class Presbyterians leaving an increasingly middle-class denomination.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This drift towards middle-class respectability is a symptom of a broader outcome of the revival that reinforced the relationship between Evangelical religion, economic prosperity and respectable behaviour. Two examples are instructive as they highlight the ambiguity and complexity of this process. First, supporters of the revival made much of the conversion of prostitutes. Though women were able to use the chaos of the revival for their own ends, these conversions ultimately reinforced the virtuous stereotype of women held by Evangelical men: ‘The revival heightened these qualities to a supernatural level. For those women outside the ideal feminine stereotype, such as working women and prostitutes, the revival restored them to respectability.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Second, stories of reclaimed drunkards, the conversion of landlords and the closing of public houses due to the lack of business litter both contemporary and subsequent accounts.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet any change in the consumption of alcohol must be related to broader changes within Ulster society. On the one hand, statistics of arrests for illegal distilling and spirit consumption had been on the decline since the mid-1850s owing to the significant increase in spirit duty and the decimation of illicit distilling by the Famine.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ On the other, by 1862 the Committee on Sabbath Observance and Temperance reported to the General Assembly that intemperance was as bad as ever, pointing as evidence to the 525 public houses in Belfast alone.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Ultimately, according to Myrtle Hill, the revival ‘helped to both consolidate and promote a religious sub-culture which linked evangelical virtues – frugality, temperance, Sabbatarianism and a Bible-based education – with the province's prosperity, and placed itself in opposition to Irish Catholicism which was associated with ignorance, sloth and economic depression’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

As suggested by Hill's comments, how the revival affected the relationships between Catholics and Protestants is another important issue but one fraught with problems. Gibson's claim that the number of Catholic converts amounted to ‘several hundred’ was hazy at best and it is clear that the revival made little impact upon the Catholic population in Ulster, none at all in southern Ireland and there was little or no effort made by the Protestant Churches to evangelise Catholics.Footnote ¹¹¹ Moreover, the reaction of Catholics to the revival was piecemeal. Cullen in private correspondence described it as ‘diabolical’ and other clergymen expressed their opposition in public, but the general response seems to have been a mixture of bemusement and apathy.Footnote ¹¹² A good example of the lack of impact on Catholics and the strong relationship forged between Evangelical religion and respectable behaviour was the Revd John Weir's description of his visit to the predominately Catholic town of Newry during the revival.

The revival may not have converted Catholics to Evangelical Christianity in any number, but one of the most remarked upon aspects of the revival at the time was the positive impact that it had upon the Twelfth of July when Protestants celebrated the victory of William over James ii at the battle of the Boyne in July 1690. The Revd William Magill of Dundrod, no friend of the local Orange lodge before 1859, reported that its regular gatherings had become prayer meetings, orange lilies had been swapped for Bibles and ‘the field’ had been transformed from a drunken throng into a religious event. ‘The name of the “glorious, pious, and immortal” William was not heard from a single lip; the Pope escaped his usual malediction; the publicans and sinners bit their lips in disappointment, for their “occupation” was gone.’ Since the Twelfth, Magill noted that ‘we have had no party strifes, no beating of drums, no “Punch dances”, no drunken revels – nothing to hurt or annoy the tenderest conscience’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ One of the prime examples of the salutary impact of the revival was the interface between the Protestant Sandy Row and the Catholic enclave of the Pound in central Belfast, scene of often intensive sectarian rioting. The Librarian of the Belfast Society reported that ‘Throughout the day none of the usual emblems of the Twelfth appeared, – no Orange garlands, nor arches flung over the streets. The only regret that I heard expressed was, that the past was so unlike the present.’Footnote ¹¹⁵

These observations were recorded by Gibson in a chapter in the Year of grace entitled ‘The revival and the Orangemen’ and reflected the opposition of most Presbyterians to the Orange Order in the mid-Victorian period.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is important to note that Gibson was both a staunch Evangelical and a political Liberal. He was a founder of the Banner of Ulster newspaper in June 1842 ‘to advance the interests of the Presbyterian Church’, which became, along with the Londonderry Standard, the mouthpiece for politically Liberal opinion amongst Presbyterians in the north of Ireland, especially in terms of land reform.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Consequently, Gibson's chapter may be read in a political sense. His introductory comments made a distinction between the essential principles of the Glorious Revolution, which he and his fellow Presbyterians wholly supported, and how these were marked by lower-class Anglicans associated with the Orange Order: ‘Glorious in itself as was the achievement of William of Orange in breaking the iron dominion of a Papal despot, and in erecting constitutional liberty on its ruins, that illustrious name had with the unthinking multitude become a synonyme with ignorant bravado, and with unreasoning hostility both to the system and the abettors of Romanism.’ Gibson noted that Orangeism was not universally prevalent in Ulster in 1859 and had been in decline in recent years owing, in general, to the spread of knowledge and, specifically, to the Party Processions Act of 1850. The Orange system was ‘on the wane; and never has it received such a fatal blow as since, within the last few months, the Spirit from on high descended on the community of Ulster’. For Gibson, the revival was God's way of telling Orangemen and the Tories that their triumphalism and ascendancy would soon come to an end: ‘The Orangemen of Ulster have been lately taught a solemn lesson in the revival; who will not hope and pray that it may never pass out of their remembrance?’Footnote ¹¹⁸

Gibson's hopes were not to be realised. The revival may have had a positive impact on the Twelfth in 1859, but in the long run it did not erase rough behaviour and unconsciously succeeded in heightening Protestant self-confidence and sectarian tensions. It has been claimed, though not demonstrated, that the public nature of the revival ‘embodied and in many ways accelerated the processes of sectarian polarisation’ in Belfast by forcing working-class Catholics to define themselves against Evangelical religion.Footnote ¹¹⁹ More tangibly, Catherine Hirst has noted that between 1856 and 1875 the number of Orange Lodges in the town rose from forty-two to 147; by that year, twenty of those lodges were located in Sandy Row where a large Orange Hall had been erected in 1868. Moreover, between 1851 and 1886 the Twelfth was the scene of serious sectarian rioting on eighteen separate occasions in the town.Footnote ¹²⁰ Ultimately, the 1859 revival was a Protestant revival for a Protestant people and played an important role in shaping religious identities in mid-Victorian Ulster. Yet it is important to note that anti-Catholicism was not confined to Ulster Protestants. The meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in September was dominated by the revival as well as the statement of the Catholic hierarchy on higher education. The Alliance unanimously agreed a resolution that condemned the hierarchy's statement as ‘another illustration of the grasping spirit of the Papacy, and of its fixed determination to regain, if possible, its ancient ascendancy in the British kingdom’. They believed that ‘the required concession cannot be made but greatly to the injury of our national Protestantism, and its earnest hope that it will meet with the united opposition of the whole Protestant community of the realm’.Footnote ¹²¹ British and Irish Evangelicals were united against the spread of Catholicism in national life and the 1860s witnessed a flurry of interest in the state of Catholicism.Footnote ¹²² Presbyterians in Ireland were horrified at the steady growth of Ritualism in the established Church, which they interpreted as Catholicism in all but name, while anti-Catholic themes grew more belligerent and urgent as the threat of a ‘Rome Rule’ parliament for Ireland.

The political implications of the revival may have been implicit, but its impact upon the mood and priorities of Evangelical Protestantism are more easily traced but no less important or surprising. Two aspects are worth highlighting – the development of organised revivalism and the spread of the language and rhetoric of religious experience. In terms of the former, 1859 became the iconic revival for British and Irish Evangelicals.Footnote ¹²³ It provided the necessary context for the revivalism of Moody and Sankey whose homely sermons and lively hymns appealed to the mood of the times. Despite criticisms from some quarters, their campaigns in the urban centres of Belfast, Derry and Dublin in 1874 were given official endorsement by the General Assembly and supported by many individual ministers.Footnote ¹²⁴ They did so because the Moody revivals were, according to a Free Church contemporary, ‘a model of middle-class respectability and religious order’, contained ‘no physical manifestations of any kind’, and appealed ‘not to the poor and ignorant’, but to those who had some previous connection with the Churches.Footnote ¹²⁵ The move to organised revivalism was a clear response to the controversies associated with the Year of grace. With a palpable sense of relief, the State of Religion committee noted in 1875 that there was ‘nothing of the extravagance and eccentricity which accompanied the movement of 1859’.Footnote ¹²⁶

The second aspect of the legacy of 1859 was, in the medium term, to heighten further religious experience and personal holiness at the centre of Evangelical religiosity at the expense of a realisable social agenda and doctrinal clarity. Kathryn Long has noted that ‘the 1858 awakening simply had no substantive ethical message apart from the twin assumptions that individual regeneration would somehow help to bring about social reform and that there was power in prayer’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The same trend is evident amongst Presbyterian Evangelicals in Ulster. W. T. Latimer observed in 1902 that within the General Assembly ‘a party have sprung up who aim at bringing sinners to Christ, by exciting their emotions rather than by instructing their understandings’. Latimer claimed that 1859 ‘was produced by strong appeals to the emotions’ that had led to ‘a desire for modes of worship which excite the feelings’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Though Latimer was primarily concerned about the introduction of hymns and pipe organs, his comments reflect a clear trend amongst many Presbyterians and other Evangelical Protestants away from formal doctrine and towards pietistic spirituality. Key motifs of the movement included an identifiable conversion experience and the necessity of a subsequent ‘second blessing’ by which believers were filled with the Holy Spirit. This teaching is associated with the Keswick Convention in England and was promulgated in Ulster by the Portstewart Convention founded in 1914.Footnote ¹²⁹ It was these themes that would characterise the ethos of the mission halls that would have a significant impact on popular Evangelicalism in Ulster and provide some of the context for the revivalist campaigns of W. P. Nicholson in the 1920s.Footnote ¹³⁰

This move towards a more pietistic spirituality that emphasised the experience of personal conversion and holiness would have implications for the dominance of conservative Evangelicalism within the Presbyterian Church.Footnote ¹³¹ The language of experience was becoming central to theological scholarship as well as to popular Evangelicalism. Theologians increasingly saw religious experience as the essence of Christian faith and placed it at the centre of their inquiries, characterising the Bible as a record of the developing spiritual experience of humanity rather than as a manual of doctrine. Of course they understood experience in philosophical and psychological terms, but the use of the language of experience would prove important because it allowed some opinion-formers within the Presbyterian Church to adopt higher criticism and to be accused of promulgating so-called modernist theology. Those sympathetic to modernism could separate the text of Scripture from the spiritual experience to which it gave witness while the laity could retain their pietistic spirituality. It is significant that those figures most closely associated with modern biblical criticism within the Irish Presbyterian Church were also supporters of modern revivalism. David Smith and James Strahan, both professors at the Presbyterian Magee College, Derry, were ministers of the Free Church of Scotland. They happily linked the revivals of Moody with the rise of higher criticism in their homeland and sought revival in similar terms for Ireland. The most famous advocate of modern views was J. E. Davey who underwent a heresy trial in 1926–7. Davey had impeccable Evangelical credentials, and his overwhelming acquittal owed much to his self-confessed adherence to Evangelical spiritual experience of the type encouraged by the 1859 revival. He had written a biography of his father, Charles Davey, a well-known Presbyterian Evangelical and supporter of Moody.Footnote ¹³² More significantly, Davey declared during his trial that he had undergone a conversion experience at the age of nineteen and three years later had received the ‘second blessing’ at Keswick, which, he claimed, allowed him to embrace higher criticism.Footnote ¹³³ Davey was using the language of Evangelical experience to justify his embrace of higher critical methods. His understanding of experience was shaped by modern philosophy and psychology, but it sounded right to more conservative groups within the denomination who venerated 1859. Indeed, Davey offered a balanced account of the revival in his short history of the denomination published in 1940. He subjected the manifestations to a psychological interpretation and noted that ‘one cannot deny either the existence of such morbid manifestations or the actual positive, indeed amazingly valuable, work done for God in this memorable period’. He went on to state that ‘the positive achievement of the Revival, judged not merely by emotion and experience but by its fruits, was there for all to see and to give due thanks to God’.Footnote ¹³⁴

This article has sought to provide an overview of some of the approaches to the 1859 revival developed by historians of religion over the past thirty years. The cumulative effect has been to give a more rounded interpretation of the revival in its broader cultural context. It has demonstrated the significance of the revival in consolidating religious identities in Ireland. In religious terms the revival was the highpoint of Evangelical influence within Ulster Protestantism but also promoted an experiential approach to Christian faith that downplayed formal doctrine and a coherent social agenda, which allowed modern approaches to theology to gain acceptance. Scholars have sought to describe and explain 1859 using the methodology of professional historical scholarship and by interrogating the popular memory of those events. Generally speaking, this has been done on the assumption that scholars ought to take seriously how those involved in the revival described and explained what was happening to them and their communities ‘rather than with any assumption about what their beliefs and actions “really” meant’.Footnote ¹³⁵ The truth or otherwise of the claim that the revival was a direct response to the Holy Spirit is not a question that Irish historians have sought to answer. Whether they are necessarily equipped or mandated to do so are questions worthy of further consideration.