I

Before dealing with McIlwaine's critique of the revival, some background information is essential. He was born in Dublin on 9 July 1807, and lived until August 1885.Footnote ⁹ He was the son-in-law of a Belfast merchant, James Wilson. His wife, Jane, was a devoted Sunday school teacher at St George's.Footnote ¹⁰ They married in February 1837, and she subsequently bore fourteen children.Footnote ¹¹ McIlwaine came from a long line of Anglicans, tracing his roots back to William Bedell, the early seventeenth-century bishop of Kilmore.Footnote ¹² It was alleged that his father's side of the family was Presbyterian, and that William was baptised by a Presbyterian minister. Subsequent to his father's death, while William was an infant, his mother was thought to have returned to the Anglican fold.Footnote ¹³ After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been a skilled student in divinity, he began as a deacon of the Church of Ireland in 1833 and became a priest in 1835.Footnote ¹⁴ The established Church was experiencing a period of Evangelical renewal during McIlwaine's youth: so much so, that S. P. Kerr even argued that in the seventy years between 1800 and 1870, the Evangelicals ‘took a firm hold (strangle hold?) on the Established Church’.Footnote ¹⁵ Evangelicalism in Belfast Anglicanism was boosted by Bishop Richard Mant's appointment of Thomas Drew to the perpetual curacy of Christ's Church in 1833.Footnote ¹⁶ This appears to have paved the way for McIlwaine's appointment as rector of St George's in 1836, where he gained a reputation for being a ‘strongly pronounced Evangelical’.Footnote ¹⁷

A popular assumption among subsequent Evangelicals is that anyone who opposed or criticised the 1859 revival was either heterodox or a religious formalist.Footnote ¹⁸ This supposition is possibly a result of an uncritical reading of contemporary propaganda against the revival's critics. For instance, when the revival was at its height in Belfast during July, the Northern Whig reported that McIlwaine's sermon warning against certain aspects of the movement had been misrepresented by revivalists who were unwilling to listen to any criticism of the awakening.Footnote ¹⁹ An extreme lay-revivalist, Alexander McCann of Lisburn, was so unimpressed by McIlwaine's criticism that he accused him of being ‘unfit to … spiritually direct the minds of God's creatures’.Footnote ²⁰ The clearest evidence that McIlwaine had been misunderstood was to be found when the Evangelical Alliance met in Belfast in late September 1859. Although he had been present at the Alliance's inaugural meeting in 1846 and was joint-secretary of the Belfast branch of the organisation (alongside Professor William Gibson), this did not spare him from the ire of certain members of the audience.Footnote ²¹ When McIlwaine publicly expressed his unease about the revival's physical excesses he was heckled by the crowd, some of whom asked, ‘Are you converted yourself?’, while others dogmatically asserted, ‘You are not of the Church of God!’Footnote ²² In other words, he was anathematised as an enemy of Christ.Footnote ²³ According to the report in the Londonderry Standard, moreover, he ‘was right lustily “hissed,” and he left the meeting amidst a repetition of this order of benedictions’.Footnote ²⁴

McIlwaine himself informs us that, during 1859, one was expected to accept everything that went on in the movement as a work of the Holy Spirit ‘under pain of being unchristianized and publicly prayed for as heathens’.Footnote ²⁵ Although this claim is overblown, both he and Isaac Nelson maintained that revivalists were urged to pray for their conversion.Footnote ²⁶ It would, however, appear that McIlwaine was exaggerating the extent of the opposition that he faced. The accounts of the Alliance's meeting in the Northern Whig and the Belfast Daily Mercury tell us that he was only heckled by individual voices in the crowd; the whole gathering was not baying for his blood.Footnote ²⁷ The very next day McIlwaine addressed the Alliance on ‘The Romish Hierarchy and National Education’, denouncing any educational alliance with Roman Catholics and demanding that youths be educated in ‘the saving truths of the gospel’. Considering that this address was received with ‘loud applause’ by the same audience that he had addressed the previous day, it would appear that McIlwaine was not quite the martyr he imagined himself to be.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless, when declining an invitation to attend another meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in Belfast in 1875, McIlwaine referred to this incident and to the failure of the clergy to rebuke the crowd's conduct (with the exception of the Revd Daniel McAfee, a deceased Methodist), as reason for not attending.Footnote ²⁹ Obviously, his experience in 1859 had left a lasting impression.

David W. Miller has observed that ‘[t]here can hardly be a more slippery term in the entire history of religion than “Evangelical”’.Footnote ³⁰ However David Bebbington's definition of Evangelicalism might be argued to be the best available.Footnote ³¹ He has identified four characteristics which help to define Evangelicalism in this era: conversionism, activism, biblicism and crucicentrism.Footnote ³² McIlwaine's involvement with the Evangelical Alliance, the Parochial Church Association, the Belfast Parochial Mission, his open-air preaching on behalf of the latter organisation, and support for evangelism and philanthrophy more generally, is indicative of conversionism and activism.Footnote ³³ It is also clear that he adhered to the biblicism of Evangelicalism. He called upon his parishioners to judge 1859 ‘as our good old fathers of the Reformation would – by the Word of God’.Footnote ³⁴ McIlwaine claimed that he examined the movement in light of ‘the Sacred Scriptures, the written Word of God … my only guide and standard in the case’.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, McIlwaine also shared the Evangelical emphasis on Christ's death. In 1861 he wrote in response to attacks on the Evangelical view of the atonement by two Belfast Unitarian ministers, the Revd J. Scott Porter and Dr Henry Montgomery.Footnote ³⁶ McIlwaine not only described Unitarians as ‘false guides’, ‘deluded’, ‘unfaithful teachers’, but he affirmed that ‘The DEATH of Christ and the events immediately connected therewith are admittedly, the central facts of Christianity; while the doctrine of the ATONEMENT, based, as it is upon these, is the central truth of the Gospel.’Footnote ³⁷

McIlwaine claimed that his critique of the 1859 revival was carried out in the interests of Protestant theology.Footnote ³⁸ Yet it is difficult fully to ascertain what exactly he meant by orthodox Protestantism. On the one hand his complaint about ‘[t]he dry orthodoxy of the supralapsarian school, which abounds in Ulster’ leads us to believe that McIlwaine was opposed to high forms of Calvinism.Footnote ³⁹ Conversely, McIlwaine expressed his differences with those ‘professors of the Arminian system’.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is thus probable that, at the time of the revival, McIlwaine was a moderate Calvinist or moderate Augustinian; though precisely how moderate is not certain. He clearly identified himself with the Reformed tradition, even embracing covenant or federal theology.Footnote ⁴¹ Unlike more thoroughgoing Calvinists, McIlwaine held that Christ's atonement was universal in scope.Footnote ⁴² McIlwaine believed that the moderation of Anglican doctrine had been a crucial component in saving the Church of Ireland from much of the fanaticism that was on display in other communions during 1859. He said that ‘the opposite wildness and extravagance of view and opinion, with their concomitant absurdity and indecency of conduct’ were ‘directly traceable to the distorted religious creeds’ of supralapsarians or to ‘the absence of all consistently rational and scriptural creed[s]’ among the Arminians. The practical results of such aberrant theologies, as manifested by Ulster revivalism, caused McIlwaine to exclaim, ‘Thank God for the Established Church’.Footnote ⁴³ In some ways this was a strange claim to make, because the Westminster Standards of Presbyterianism and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism are quite similar confessions.Footnote ⁴⁴ Moreover, it should be pointed out that supralapsarianism, while tolerated by the Westminster Confession, was never given formal confessional status.Footnote ⁴⁵ Notwithstanding these points, it is clear that McIlwaine viewed himself as an exponent of orthodox Protestant theology. Furthermore, a key Protestant doctrine is that of justification by faith alone. In his critique of 1859, McIlwaine claimed that justification by faith was a ‘cardinal truth’ and the ‘doctrine which has ever been proclaimed as fundamental in the faith of all Protestants’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Since this is probably the dogma that most clearly distinguishes Protestantism from Roman Catholicism, McIlwaine's belief in it constitutes substantial evidence that he was criticising the revival from an orthodox Protestant point of view. The evidence, therefore, would appear to suggest that, as an orthodox Evangelical divine, McIlwaine was offering an internal evaluation of the awakening when he made his critiques. This confirms Alan Acheson's judgment that the ‘men who set their faces against the abuses unleashed in 1859 were no less Evangelical … than their fellows’.Footnote ⁴⁷

II

McIlwaine was denounced in the Banner of Ulster as a ‘Sadducean scoffer’ and as ‘one of the most rabid of the enemies of the revivals’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This conclusion was not true, however. Broadly speaking, the Evangelicals who critiqued the movement can be put into two categories, hard-line opponents and moderate critics. The former included Isaac Nelson and William Hamilton. These Presbyterian ministers saw nothing good about the revival. Hamilton, despite the charitable tone of his book, went so far as to ascribe 1859 to the work of Satan: ‘the movement is of the Evil One … It is essentially and fundamentally evil’.Footnote ⁴⁹ McIlwaine, on the other hand, preferred a more nuanced approach. Like Hamilton, he believed that Satan was at work in 1859, but thought that this was a counter-work to the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing sinners to Christ. Instead of dismissing the revival completely, McIlwaine, and his fellow Anglicans E. A. Stopford and Edward Hincks, claimed that ministers were bound to separate ‘the precious from the vile – the true work from the counterfeit’.Footnote ⁵⁰ He endeavoured to do this by distinguishing between genuine revival or awakening on the one hand, and revivalism on the other.Footnote ⁵¹ In a sermon preached in St George's parish in July 1859, McIlwaine helpfully identified what he saw as good in the revival:

Thus he was pleased by the increase of Gospel preaching, family worship, evangelistic activity and genuine conversions to Christ which took place in 1859, as well as the positive effects that these developments had upon society. McIlwaine was delighted by increased Sabbath observance, especially as he had often preached against Belfast's Sabbath profanation.Footnote ⁵³ Hence the forsaking of such sin was viewed as a major spiritual advance. Consequently, in January 1860 he argued that to deny genuine revival had taken place, not only in Ulster but also in Europe and America, would be dangerous and ungrateful.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the light of these facts, it is important to keep in mind that when he made his criticisms, McIlwaine was attacking what he saw as revivalism, not the revival movement as a whole. For McIlwaine, the revival was a work of God, while revivalism was the work of Satan, ‘the Enemy, who is always going about ready to destroy everything good’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Since 1859 was a mixture of both, it was neither to be completely rejected nor uncritically accepted. He believed that if the ministers who oversaw the work of 1859 had shown sufficient discernment between these two things, then ‘the work of God's good Spirit’ would not have been marred by ‘accompaniments [of] a very marked contrast to all that is really spiritual’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Notwithstanding this criticism of the revivalist ministers, McIlwaine was at least prepared to concede that they were often ‘good men’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This stands in stark contrast to Isaac Nelson, who, when denouncing the revivalist John Macnaughtan, said ‘you deserve to be treated with something more than contempt’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, in comparison with Nelson and Hamilton, McIlwaine was a moderate. McIlwaine did, none the less, accept many of Nelson's arguments. When attending a lecture by Nelson at Donegall Street in December 1863 on the American Civil War, McIlwaine claimed that ‘He and Mr Nelson differed in many points, but they were entirely at one about a movement which had taken place some place here some time ago.’Footnote ⁵⁹ This reference to the revival may indicate that McIlwaine moved much closer to the hard-line anti-revivalist position as time progressed. Conversely, when declining the invitation to the Evangelical Alliance's Belfast meeting in 1875, McIlwaine did appear to concede that there were some genuine ‘spiritual manifestations’ in 1859.Footnote ⁶⁰ Thus McIlwaine does not seem ever to have embraced the view that 1859 was a total delusion.

III

So why did McIlwaine oppose revivalism? First, he was opposed to the prostrations, the hysterical physical manifestations that supposedly accompanied the conviction of sin, which frequently occurred in areas affected by the revival. E. P. Thompson has described scenes that accompanied Methodist revivals, such as swooning, groaning and falling into paroxysms, as a form of ‘emotional violence’.Footnote ⁶¹ McIlwaine had a similar view of 1859's peculiar manifestations. Although he accepted that some of those who had been physically stricken were eventually converted, he denied that prostration was part of the saving work of God's Spirit. In answer to the objection that the Apostle Paul was struck blind on the road to Damascus, McIlwaine repudiated the notion that this corresponded to the prostrations of 1859, as the former was a strictly miraculous event, involving the call to office of the last Apostle. Instead, McIlwaine was convinced that the prostrations associated with Ulster revivalism were so far removed from Christianity that they would even ‘disgrace the very orgies of heathenism’.Footnote ⁶² However, McIlwaine was careful to qualify this by denying that revivalism's prostrations were exactly the same thing as pure paganism, as ‘the words uttered, the visions alleged to be seen, and even the hallucinations which confessedly existed, were all of a Christian type’.Footnote ⁶³ And he even conceded that some beneficial spiritual and moral effects resulted from them; yet this would appear inconsistent with his claim that revivalism, of which prostration was a significant factor, was a counter-work of Satan, and that the strikings in Belfast meeting-houses were unlikely to issue ‘in spiritual, saving conversion to God, on a scale of unparalleled magnitude’.Footnote ⁶⁴

McIlwaine was also suspicious of the prostrations because they disproportionately affected the lower classes, the ignorant and uneducated, and over-worked factory girls, while the upper class and educated seemed almost immune from being struck.Footnote ⁶⁵ He argued that a true spiritual awakening should transcend class barriers, something that revivalism had failed to do.Footnote ⁶⁶ McIlwaine was not arguing as a social elitist, but as one who was opposed to the exploitation of the lower classes for religious ends. Thus he asked why revivalists did not ‘collect the gentry, and the better educated, and the wealthier’ into crowded meetings in order to produce physical manifestations?Footnote ⁶⁷ McIlwaine's implication seems to be that the irrationalism of revivalism only attracted those without the necessary learning and discretion to see through its absurdities.Footnote ⁶⁸ A problem with McIlwaine's analysis was that revivalism's physical manifestations were often defended by educated ministers. Therefore he had to get beyond these arguments and answer the revivalists' defences. Dr James Morgan, minister of Fisherwick Presbyterian, Belfast, argued that ‘the Spirit of God has been pleased to give outward signs of His presence and power among men’ by means of the prostrations.Footnote ⁶⁹ In response McIlwaine highlighted the illegitimacy of his appeal to the miraculous works of God in the Old and New Testaments. He argued that these could not serve as a justification for the physical manifestations of Ulster revivalism, as these things were not the same.Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, he particularly took issue with revivalists who argued that 1859 was a repetition of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, believing that this was an entirely unique event which could no more be repeated than Christ's incarnation or the creation of the world.Footnote ⁷¹

McIlwaine also emphasised a discrepancy between the arguments of Morgan and his fellow Presbyterian Dr James McCosh, professor of logic and metaphysics at Queen's College, Belfast. While Morgan claimed that the prostrations were the work of the Holy Spirit, McCosh maintained that they were merely physiological accidents, which were only ‘incidental evils’.Footnote ⁷² McIlwaine recognised that these perspectives could not be harmonised. If Morgan were right, then the prostrations should be encouraged as an essential part of the movement, not looked upon as a mere accident. Against McCosh, McIlwaine pointed to a ‘Report on the state of Religion’, drawn up by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in July 1859. This said that ‘[t]hese spiritual emotions have been accompanied in a very large number of cases, by physical impressions, producing bodily infirmity’.Footnote ⁷³ Thus McIlwaine surmised that the general consensus was that prostrations were not ‘accounted as a mere accident, but as a prominent and essential part of the movement’. This led him to conclude that, without the prostrations, revivalism would never have gained the prominence that it did.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, it was thanks to the efforts of the converts from the greater Ballymena area that revivalism came to Belfast. The result of this was that physical seizures reached epidemic proportions throughout the summer months. McIlwaine partly attributed this to the ills of industrialisation and urbanisation, while he claimed the revival was much less objectionable in certain rural areas due to the prevalence of biblical instruction.Footnote ⁷⁵ There was also an economic aspect to this, as he claimed that railway companies and hoteliers were profiting from the religious tourism that the revival wonders had generated.Footnote ⁷⁶ By July 1860 McIlwaine could confidently affirm that, since the prostrations had ceased, so had the spread of revivalism.Footnote ⁷⁷ So, without the prostrations, revivalism was dead. Thus the physical affections, far from being incidental, were fundamental to the movement.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, it would be wrong to conclude that McIlwaine went as far as Isaac Nelson, who argued that ‘had there been no falling down, no convulsion, no fainting, there would have been no revival’.Footnote ⁷⁹ This is because McIlwaine was writing within a theoretical framework which distinguished between revival and revivalism, whereas Nelson had conflated the two.

Related to his critique of prostrations was McIlwaine's view that the supposedly miraculous aspects of the revival were a dangerous delusion.Footnote ⁸⁰ He adopted a cessationist approach to the miraculous, believing that such things ended with the completion of Scripture. Failure to recognise this fact would lead the Church into various heresies, such as ‘the delusions of Romanism, the drivellings of Irvingism, and the abominations of Mormonism’.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, he observed that unthinking multitudes preferred the miraculous to Scripture.Footnote ⁸² McIlwaine perceived the inconsistency of some Protestants who claimed the Bible as their sole and absolute authority while regarding stigmata, visions and dreams as authoritative signs of the Almighty's approval.Footnote ⁸³ In light of their infatuation with such superstitions, Ulster Protestants had no right to mock similar practices among Roman Catholics; they had indulged in ‘infinitely worse absurdities and more transparent impostures’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Janice Holmes is therefore correct when she claims that critics viewed revivalist Protestants as ‘giving into popery rather than fighting against it’.Footnote ⁸⁵

McIlwaine does provide an interesting rationale for explaining why Ulster Presbyterians were so prone to credulity and physical manifestations. A Primitive Methodist minister, the Revd Samuel Nicholson, chided McIlwaine for his apparent ignorance of the excitement accompanying earlier revivals, including those involving Scottish Presbyterians in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is clear, however, that McIlwaine had heard of such movements. Thus he claimed that 1859 was part of a long tradition of credulity within Scottish Presbyterianism, and that there was a very close connection between the physical manifestations of 1859 and similar incidents which occurred during the Sixmilewater revival of 1625.Footnote ⁸⁷ McIlwaine traced the addiction to credulity from the early Scottish Presbyterian divines and the New England Puritans to the Scots-Irish in Ulster in 1859.Footnote ⁸⁸ Even though he claimed that many Anglican clerics stood apart from revivalist folly, it would be wrong to conclude that McIlwaine was simply scoring points against his Presbyterian rivals. First, he recognised that the early Presbyterians who operated in Ulster discouraged the excesses of fanatics.Footnote ⁸⁹ Second, he chided some of his fellow Anglican clergy for supporting revivalism's delusions.Footnote ⁹⁰ And it should be remembered that some clergymen in his own diocese, such as the Revd Charles Seaver and the Revd Theophilus Campbell, were very strong supporters of 1859.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus the Banner of Ulster's conclusion that he was motivated simply by denominational rivalry was a crude caricature of his position.Footnote ⁹² None the less, McIlwaine did feel confident enough to assert that Anglicans were much less implicated in fanaticism than the Presbyterians.Footnote ⁹³ It would appear that this argument was partly racial, because in October 1860 McIlwaine predicted that the revival in England would be more restrained owing to the prevalence of Saxons over Celts in that country.Footnote ⁹⁴

McIlwaine believed that the fostering of revivalist credulity would provoke divine judgement, and had already resulted in diseases, hysteria, epilepsy and insanity during the revival.Footnote ⁹⁵ By September 1859 he knew of one young woman who had been reduced to ‘raving insanity’ as a result of exposure to revivalist excesses. Additionally, he believed that religious insanity, or theomania, had resulted in no fewer than fifty people needing to be institutionalised due to mental disease caused by revivalism.Footnote ⁹⁶ His views had hardened even further by October 1860, as McIlwaine now believed that insanity had spread, especially among women, ‘to an extent which it is really fearful to even contemplate’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although he claimed that William Gibson had denied this, McIlwaine argued that he had witnessed people who had been influenced by revivalism who were now suffering from the most awful afflictions.Footnote ⁹⁸ In order to back this up, he referred to the 1860 reports of the four main District Lunatic Asylums in Ulster, and deduced that ‘Religious Excitement’ was often the cause of insanity among the inmates.Footnote ⁹⁹ He also cited a medic, Dr Howden, to demonstrate that revivalist preaching on hell and immediate assurance, and the tendency of converts to deprive themselves of sleep and food, often culminated in an ‘attack of most violent mania’ and to other mental illnesses such as melancholy (depression).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, he concurred with his fellow Anglican, E. A. Stopford, archdeacon of Meath, that the physical affections were often the product of hysteria.Footnote ¹⁰¹ McIlwaine believed that they could be cured by natural, providentially appointed medical means, not by singing over the person, which was the treatment prescribed by some revivalists.Footnote ¹⁰² For instance, John Macnaughtan claimed that the two best remedies for prostrations were the singing of Psalms and prayer.Footnote ¹⁰³ McIlwaine had seen this sort of thing for himself at the Botanic Gardens' prayer meeting in June 1859, where he was one of the ministers in attendance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For McIlwaine, all this was evidence that revivalism was not of the Holy Spirit, as it was not the Spirit's work to deprive people of their mental faculties.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In light of this, one can see why Janice Holmes concludes that revivalism ‘gloried in the abandonment of rationality’ and why McIlwaine viewed the decline of reason with genuine alarm.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His analysis seems to reflect an Enlightement emphasis upon reason and order, as opposed to the emotionalism of Romanticism that was influencing some Victorian Evangelicals.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ McIlwaine, on the other hand, may also have been influenced by a different outcome of Romanticism later in his career.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

He also criticised the practice of young converts – including children – being employed to spread the revival.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Reflecting the Apostle Paul's view that those who teach should not be recent converts (1 Timothy iii.6), McIlwaine considered it to be unwise to hold them up as trophies of grace.Footnote ¹¹⁰ His point was that new converts, like young plants, were not meant to be given the exposure which belongs to those of greater experience. Being put in such a position would only serve to injure them in the long term; instead they needed to keep a low profile until they were more mature. It was thus not a good sign that revivalism had been spread throughout Ulster by young male and female converts, and it seemed to perpetuate a state of mind among the ignorant that without the converts' participation there could be no revival.Footnote ¹¹¹ Since revivalist ministers such as Tommy Toye and Hugh Hanna had often encouraged the converts' preaching, McIlwaine would not have concurred with John Carson's view that the movement received ‘wise guidance and careful direction’.Footnote ¹¹² Instead, McIlwaine believed that revivalism was fostering pride among its supposed converts. He was especially appalled by the sight of converts performing private devotions in public. As this indicated an ostentation which was inconsistent with Christian humility, he complained that such things ‘are not the fruits I should expect to see resulting from the good Spirit's work’.Footnote ¹¹³ Notwithstanding his support for lay activism through the Parochial Church Association, McIlwaine had long been opposed to laymen performing the duties of ordained clergy. He believed that such practices had brought disgrace to other religious communities, which reflected his own commitment to Anglican ecclesiology.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Related to his fears concerning the role of young converts was McIlwaine's observation that 1859, as with Whitefield's revivalism, had resulted in many spurious conversions.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Writing in July 1860, after the excitement of the previous year had died down, McIlwaine argued that many of the converts had returned to their old sins. He rebuked the revivalist leaders who had failed to take heed of his warnings relating to the role of young converts when the revival was at its height.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even at the time McIlwaine had feared that many so-called converts were credulous and self-deceived, and subsequent events had only served to confirm his diagnosis.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Moreover, he had observed that revivalists, particularly the revival-supporting press, had a tendency grossly to exaggerate the revival's positive effects, noting that various supposed converts from Romanism and Socinianism had returned to their former dogmas.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This supports Myrtle Hill's claim that ‘[t]he number of Roman Catholic converts was not large though … a good deal of publicity was given to them’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Additionally, McIlwaine argued that reports of public houses closing in Belfast were often fictional.Footnote ¹²⁰ While he recognised that drunkenness in Belfast had initially decreased as a result of the revival, McIlwaine judged that this was simply ‘one form of excitement temporarily expelling another’.Footnote ¹²¹ By December 1859 McIlwaine could assert that not a single public house in Belfast had closed in the previous twelve months. As for reports about the conversion of Belfast prostitutes, he pointed out that a matter of days after being stricken several of these women went back to their old trade. Despite the testimony of the occasional judge or magistrate to the beneficial social effects of revivalism, he had concluded that the end of the movement was in the best interests of Belfast's moral well-being.Footnote ¹²² This primary evidence lends weight to Hill's conclusion that ‘[t]he conversion of prostitutes, drunks and gamblers received a degree of attention out of proportion to their actual number’, and that while the revival movement ‘may have had an immediate impact in some localties, long term behavioural trends do not seem to have been affected’.Footnote ¹²³

Eric Hobsbawm has observed that revivalism was the chief means of furthering sectarianism.Footnote ¹²⁴ McIlwaine also believed that revivalism was being used by the sects (schismatic and separatist denominations) for the purposes of proselytising people to their peculiar groupings. He was particularly irked by the conversion of one insane girl to an anti-paedobaptist sect. Moreover McIlwaine singles out one sect for a particularly strong denunciation, comparing it to Mormonism.Footnote ¹²⁵ This probably refers to the Plymouth Brethren, as McIlwaine loathed their expansion after the revival.Footnote ¹²⁶ It should be remembered that when the Brethren movement emerged in Dublin around 1825 it largely consisted of separatists from the Church of Ireland.Footnote ¹²⁷ McIlwaine may well have feared that the emergence of Brethrenism in Ulster would lead to similar schism. Furthermore, Brethrenism's anti-clericalism, dispensationalism, doctrinal aberrance and contempt for the historic Church caused the movement to be viewed as heretical by Anglicans and Presbyterians.Footnote ¹²⁸

Like Isaac Nelson, McIlwaine was also concerned about Ulster revivalism's links with the American revival of 1857–8. Both men blamed William Gibson for importing revivalism to Ulster as a result of his visit to the United States in 1858.Footnote ¹²⁹ McIlwaine was not entirely convinced that the American awakening was a work of God. First, he was suspicious on account of the ‘national delinquency’ of the United States which had apparently financially ruined various British and Irish firms by means of breaches of commercial faith and the non-payment of just debts.Footnote ¹³⁰ This refers to the financial crisis in America which had been brewing throughout the economic boom during the 1850s, when Americans had developed a national predilection for speculations such as get-rich-quick schemes. This culminated in the collapse of various banks, businesses and the stock-market in late 1857. The resulting economic stagnation, scarce money and unemployment extended well into the subsequent year.Footnote ¹³¹ Since the revival in the United States had apparently not caused the Americans to repent of their economic sins against Britain and Ireland, McIlwaine remained sceptical as to its genuineness. Yet the American sin which most concerned McIlwaine was the continuing countenance given to chattel slavery. He complained that ‘throughout the whole of that alleged national revival in religion I looked in vain for any national acknowledgment of this national transgression’.Footnote ¹³² McIlwaine questioned how the revival could be a genuine work of God when those involved in it did not even recognise such an obvious sin as that of holding men in unlawful bondage. Such was the desperation of the Americans to cover up their national iniquity, he alleged, that they even forbade the Irish delegates from making any reference to the subject while in the USA. In light of this, McIlwaine thought that British Christians should be careful before using it as a model for a revival of religion in their own land.Footnote ¹³³ Such concerns relating to American revivalism's links with slavery reflect the antislavery sentiments of British Evangelicals in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³⁴ Moreover, they reveal the deep suspicions that existed between British and American Evangelicals as a result of the Americans' failure adequately to deal with Negro slavery. His problems with American revivalism cannot be reduced to economics and slavery, however. The physical manifestations of 1859 reminded McIlwaine too much of the convulsions that had accompanied the Kentucky revival at the turn of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³⁵ Richard Carwardine has concluded that the unrestrained emotionalism of this revival alienated many in the wider Evangelical world, hence McIlwaine was not unique in this respect.Footnote ¹³⁶ It should be noted, however, that the 1857–8 revival was largely free of such physical manifestations, so McIlwaine may have overemphasised the similarities between the revivals in America and Ulster.Footnote ¹³⁷

McIlwaine called for the results of 1859 to be brought to the bar of Scripture, reason, history and experience.Footnote ¹³⁸ Having preached the Gospel for nearly a quarter of a century at St George's, McIlwaine had ‘seen the fruits’ of his preaching, but was cautious ‘not to boast of what God has wrought’ lest he judge prematurely. In light of this, McIlwaine cautioned against rashly declaring 1859 to be wholly a good thing.Footnote ¹³⁹ Despite the generally moderate nature of his critique, McIlwaine sent a chilling warning to Evangelicals by highlighting that the long-term fruit of earlier revival movements, on both sides of the Atlantic, had often been in heresy and worldliness.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Hence they should not be surprised if the Ulster revival turned out to be a similar failure. Certainly by October 1860 McIlwaine believed that he had adequate grounds to question the genuineness of much of what had gone on the previous year. Along with Nelson, he was highly critical of Gibson's official account of 1859, The year of grace, declaring it to be ‘unscripturally chronicled’. He argued that the revivalists who appealed to the ‘assize calendars and petty sessions lists’ for 1859 no longer made the same appeals in 1860, the reason being that a vast proportion of the crime that had emerged in Ulster society was ‘directly traceable to that wretched excitement which lately passed under the name of religion’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In other words, in agreement with Nelson, McIlwaine claimed that revivalism had actually led to an increase in immorality.Footnote ¹⁴² He sought to substantiate this assertion by highlighting the rise in the rate of illegitimate pregnancy in the wake of the revival. And he controversially alleged that ‘the parties concerned have been either Revivalists themselves, or their victims’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Although this point is difficult to corroborate, McIlwaine argued that the pregnancies were a result of the protracted meetings and midnight assemblies held in revivalist gatherings in Belfast. At these meetings, the proprieties of life, the distinctions of sex and age, and appropriate decorum were abandoned. As a result of appropriate female modesty and propriety between the sexes being laid aside, McIlwaine surmised, revivalism had led to gross moral degradation. Such was the extent of Belfast's depravity in the year following the revival that, McIlwaine concluded, ‘in this locality vice, of the lowest and most revolting forms, has never, in the memory of any man living, been so prevalent’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

McIlwaine also believed that the revival had been the catalyst for some serious doctrinal aberrations. First, he argued that the excitement of Ulster revivalism had promoted ignorance of the facts of revealed Scripture. Owing to the miraculous aspects of 1859, the credulous had ‘not only confounded sight with faith, but actually given preference … to the former’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ McIlwaine, relying on Christ's words to doubting Thomas and the Apostle Peter, contended that Bible teaching was to be preferred to the evidences of the senses. Hence while a Christian should believe in Christ despite not having seen him in the flesh, revivalists had contradicted this principle by the boast of supposed converts to have literally seen the Lord.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ These ‘deluded victims of Revivalism’ had, in his view, totally undermined the authority of Scripture as the rule of faith by preferring visible sightings of Christ to the written word of God.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Perhaps most important, McIlwaine feared that the crucial doctrine of justification by faith alone was being undermined by mystical views of the blood of Christ. He particularly took issue with another Anglican cleric, who endorsed an account of a female praying for ‘as much of the blood of Christ as would fill the eye of a cambric needle’ in order that her sins would be washed away. This mystical conception of Christ's blood did not view biblical references to the blood of Christ as a metonym for his redemptive work; instead it implied that people were washed in the literal blood that Christ shed. It is probable that McIlwaine was concerned that this mystical view would cause people to look away from Christ's obedience as the ground of their acceptance with God, and instead rely on some mystical theory about literal blood being applied to them. He regarded this as an irrational distortion of the doctrine of justification, which represented ‘the grossness of materialistic Christianity which disgusts sober-minded men’, and he predicted that its adoption would bring reproach upon Evangelicals.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Related to this was his critique of the revivalist doctrine of conversion. As with many Evangelicals, McIlwaine believed that conversion was gradual and that its reality was to be tested by its fruits.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Revivalism, especially as exemplified by Gibson's accounts of supposed conversions in The year of grace, had practically denied both of these points by giving the impression that conversion was nearly always instantaneous and declared people to be saved prior to any evidence that they had repented.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Specifically, McIlwaine took issue with John Baillie's account of the conversion of numerous schoolboys. According to Baillie dozens of boys went out of a school-room, fell on their knees, and cried to God for mercy.Footnote ¹⁵¹ However, McIlwaine accused him of confusing these religious impressions with genuine conversion to Christ, and reminded him that he should now enquire as to what ultimate effect these emotional manifestations had actually had on the children in question before declaring them to be converts. McIlwaine issued this warning because he knew of a girls’ school where similar manifestations had taken place, yet the mistress had informed him that there was not ‘the slightest improvement in conduct in the case of a single girl’ that had been subject to physical manifestations. His implication was that the delusive views of conversion fostered by revivalism had resulted in many apparent conversions which quickly proved to be false. For this reason McIlwaine was deeply suspicious of any alleged conversions which might have arisen out of the excitement related to physical prostrations. Thus he urged that such converts should not be paraded as trophies, but be treated with extreme caution.Footnote ¹⁵² All this caused McIlwaine to be thankful that the balanced doctrine of the established Church gave no countenance either to the ‘dry orthodoxy’ of the supralapsarians or to the views of conversion and assurance of the Arminians.Footnote ¹⁵³ McIlwaine was arguing that the moderate Augustinianism of the Church of Ireland and its Thirty-Nine Articles avoided not only the high Calvinist errors concerning the impossibility of gaining a full assurance of one's salvation, but also the Arminian error that one must possess full assurance of salvation in order to be saved.

IV

In the long run McIlwaine's treatment at the Evangelical Alliance, and his concerns over the form of piety, liturgical confusion and ecclesiastical anarchy which 1859 appeared to have fostered, seems to have led him to re-evaluate his relationship with Evangelicalism.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Hugh Hanna was quick to flag up McIlwaine's move towards ‘High Churchism’ in 1863, warning that, although McIlwaine had not arrived where his trajectory was leading him, ‘it is by no means unlikely that Popery will soon develop itself … and that St George's in Belfast will rival the notoriety of St George's in the East [London]’.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ When giving a lecture at St George's on the various parties within the Church of Ireland in 1864, McIlwaine praised the work both of Evangelicals in the Church of England, including John Newton, Thomas Scott and William Romaine, and the founders of the Evangelical party in the Church of Ireland. By this stage, however, McIlwaine believed that ‘the Evangelical party was very much gone. He thought they might safely say that party had done a good work; but, so far as his experience went, he believed their work was done’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ McIlwaine seems to have thought that Evangelicalism, having revived the preaching of the Gospel within the Established Church, had now served its purpose and had been rendered redundant. In the same address, he specifically mentioned his treatment at the Evangelical Alliance meeting in Belfast as a factor in his move away from Evangelicalism and he denied that 1859 was the ‘Year of Grace’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Although McIlwaine confessed to having heartily joined in the Alliance's endeavours to promote a union of all Christian denominations, it was there that he had his eyes opened to the true state of Evangelicalism. He now appeared keen to identify himself simply as an Anglican, and sought to reconcile differences among the Low and High Church parties.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The tendency of other denominations to revivalist credulity made McIlwaine more zealous to promote Anglicanism as a via media between Romish and sectarian excesses.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Since he regarded Methodists and Presbyterians as chiefly implicated in revivalism, it is not surprising that he wished to distance himself from them in the years following 1859.

This did not mean that McIlwaine rejected orthodox Protestantism. Indeed in 1865 he entered into a controversy with the Roman Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, Dr Patrick Dorrian. This debate focused on issues relating to biblical inspiration and interpretation, in which McIlwaine defended the Protestant view that only the original biblical writers were immediately inspired; this did not apply to a translation of the biblical text.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Moreover, Dorrian was offended by McIlwaine's claim to belong to the ‘Catholic Church’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ This reflected the Protestant notion that they were reformers of the Catholic Church, while Rome was a sectarian grouping. Dorrian was also irked by McIlwaine's prayer that he ‘may be led to see’ his ‘true position, and come forth from the darkness into the glorious light and liberty of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ’. This basically implied that the bishop was not a real Christian.Footnote ¹⁶² McIlwaine did not regard the central debates between Protestants and Roman Catholics as internal arguments among fellow orthodox Christians. Furthermore, in 1868 he claimed that ‘the more he knew of Romanism the more he was dissatisfied with it’.Footnote ¹⁶³

None the less, McIlwaine's disgruntlement with revivalism and inter-denominational Evangelicalism perhaps explains why he seems to have moved in a more High Church direction. This can be seen in his opposition to prayer-book revision and his defence of the Athanasian Creed from attacks made by both Unitarians and Anglicans in the 1870s.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ McIlwaine's defence here included an assertion that the Church of Ireland's retention of the document in its formularies ‘may have been a means owned by God in preserving our communion so entirely free as it has remained until this day from the taint of Arianism’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ His expressions of regret for the Westminster Confession's failure to follow the Thirty-Nine Articles in explicitly endorsing the Athanasian Creed implied that Presbyterians were more prone to Socinianism than Anglicans.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Although emphasising the catholic nature of Anglicanism, he still identified with the English Reformation and strongly rejected popery.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Yet he also sought to distance himself from some of the opinions of the Calvinistic Reformers on the continent and from English Puritanism, something which his earlier High Church opponents had been keen to do as well.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This development in McIlwaine's thinking may be reflective of the influence of Romanticism and medievalism in the nineteenth century, which Nigel Yates contended had a significant impact on Anglican liturgy and architecture.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ In turn this may explain why McIlwaine introduced elements into worship which he had previously condemned as Romish innovations.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ McIlwaine also came to reject the type of ultra-Protestantism promoted by the Orange Order.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This was quite a transformation. In 1857 a Belfast resident magistrate complained that ‘Mr McIlwaine is a very zealous minister but he wants judgment and has made himself so unpopular with the Roman Catholic party by his eternal controversies’.Footnote ¹⁷²

Although McIlwaine may have been a higher churchman than some of the Low Church party in the Church of Ireland were comfortable with, he did not become an Anglo-Catholic.Footnote ¹⁷³ Frank Frankfort Moore argued that McIlwaine ‘was said to have High Church leanings, but there was nothing of the High Church ritual’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ S. R. McBride has claimed that the High Church element in Irish Anglicanism was very far removed from the Anglo-Catholicism of the Church of England, and that Irish High Churchmanship was not the polar opposite of Evangelicalism.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Perhaps the change in McIlwaine's outlook after 1859 is indicative of the difficult balancing act that Anglicans have always found themselves having to perform in their effort to tread a middle path between Rome and Geneva.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ It is also important to emphasise that McIlwaine did not become a theological liberal. At the diocesan synod of Down and Connor and Dromore in 1872 he bemoaned ‘the deplorable state of Protestantism in some parts of Germany where all Scriptural truth had been entirely cast overboard’ because of the influence of liberal theology.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ His obituary in the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette appears accurately to summarise the extent of McIlwaine's theological development. It says that after 1859 his views underwent considerable modification:

This seems to be confirmed by McIlwaine's letter refusing the invitation to attend the Evangelical Alliance conference in 1875, in which he makes no mention of any doctrinal differences between himself and the Evangelicals who supported this organisation.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ It appears that McIlwaine was scarred by the events of 1859; his subsequent actions are indicative of one who was psychologically damaged by the revivalist response to his critiques.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ It is therefore necessary to be wary of reducing McIlwaine's development after 1859 merely to theological factors.

In criticising the revivalist aspects of the 1859 awakening William McIlwaine did so from an Evangelical Protestant perspective, and not from a point of view sympathetic to Roman Catholicism or theological heterodoxy. Furthermore, in contrast with Nelson and Hamilton, McIlwaine was not an outright opponent of the revival but a moderate critic, at least initially. However, having evaluated the nature of his criticisms we might want to ask whether or not his distinction between revival and revivalism – in the context of the Ulster awakening – is really plausible. After all, McIlwaine observed that once the prostrations had ceased, so had the revival. If this is correct, then how can the supposedly positive aspects of the awakening be distinguished from revivalism?Footnote ¹⁸¹ This apparent tension in McIlwaine's thinking was still unresolved in 1874–5, when he offered stinging criticisms of the revivalism associated with D. L. Moody, describing it as ‘virtually a new, if not another gospel’ and denouncing its impact on ordinary work, on family worship, and its aberrant views of lay-preaching, the nature of conversion and the sacraments.Footnote ¹⁸² Although disagreeing with him about Moody, the Belfast Presbyterian Witness ‘rejoice[d] to find him still holding that to preach the Gospel is in effect to preach Christ’ and ‘that the Scriptures alone contain all that is necessary to salvation’. His opponents recognised that McIlwaine remained basically Evangelical in outlook, even if he had moved in a High Church direction.Footnote ¹⁸³ And, as in 1859, McIlwaine could not bring himself to deny that good had come from the Moody revival.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Perhaps this dualism is indicative of a long-term love-hate relationship with Evangelicalism which McIlwaine could never quite escape.