The TV drama series about undertakers, Six Feet Under, started each episode with a death. In 2004, one such episode began with a number of inflatable women sex toys being released into the air after an accident. Seeing this, a woman, whose car's bumper sticker reads “I break for the rapture,” rushes ecstatically forward and is knocked down and killed by another car.

The notion that the return of Jesus will be accompanied by a rapture to the heavens of the true church is prevalent in American evangelical thinking today, but is of relatively recent origins. Along with some other ideas such as dispensationalism, it is traceable to John Nelson Darby (1800–1882). He is remembered of as the initiator of a religious movement that originally eschewed structure and specific identity, but that has generally come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren, though Darby's influence went far beyond this group. Born in England and spending much of his life in Britain, North America, and continental Europe, Darby's formative years were spent in Ireland where he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and became a curate in the Church of Ireland before broadening his views and practices beyond those of conventional religious structure. Donald Harman Akenson's book, Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016), examines the all-important Irish phase of Darby's career and situates it within the Irish evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century, though it is a puzzle as to why Darby's name is not included in the title of the book, whereas Daniel O'Connell, whose name is there, is only mentioned occasionally in the text.

The early nineteenth century was a time of intense evangelical fervor in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, the state church of the English-descended ruling class in Catholic Ireland. This was the time of the so-called “Second Reformation,” when concerted attempts were made to convert Catholics to Protestantism. Akenson's thesis is that the apocalyptic theories of Darby and his followers grew out of a sense at the end of the 1820s that this Second Reformation had failed. Yet strenuous efforts to convert Catholics continued in the 1830s and 1840s and even beyond that, and it would have been interesting to have had Professor Akenson give a view on this.

Akenson sets Darby not only in the context of Irish evangelicalism in general, but in that of south Dublin and County Wicklow, where Darby ministered, in particular. He sees a number of socio-economic conditions operating at the time in this area as being important, such as its exceptional prosperity because aristocratic families imported capital there to finance country seats within striking distance of the capital, Dublin. He links the evangelical fervor of the aristocrats of the area with one key charismatic figure within the Church of Ireland, the Rev. Robert Daly (1783–1872), though he rather irritatingly and repeatedly uses the term Dalyland for the area. Akenson takes us through the three stages of Darby's Irish life: education, Anglican ministry, and radical theology, the latter undertaken in conjunction with structured think-ins organized by Lady Powerscourt at her vast family estate in County Wicklow in the early 1830s.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the section in which Akenson deals with Darby's career as curate of Calary Bog in the mid-1820s, at a time when the call had gone out to Anglican clergy, from William Magee, Archbishop of Dublin, and others, to convert Catholics. Because the early Brethren were not interested in keeping records, the accounts of this time rely on Darby's own reminiscences from the 1860s. Akenson convincingly exposes these as misleading myths. He revises our understanding of key parts of the Darby story. Darby did not convert Catholics, as later accounts claimed, and his break with Archbishop Magee—an episode in a larger rejection of ecclesiastical authority on his part—was not because Magee was requiring putative Catholic converts to swear allegiance to the king, as Magee had never called for such a thing.

Among the reasons for reading this important and informative book is that it is not written in a modern conventional academic style. Instead of the asperity of tight argument there is the welcome garrulity of the no less learned after-dinner disquisition with brandy and cigars in the combination room of yester year. Akenson delights in regaling us with the lives of the aristocrats and clergy of the time. The occasional lapse is of no consequence, though it surprised me that he did not know that the Anglican communion, though it may have archbishops, does not have archdioceses. Still, Akenson can be sharp and his concluding judgement on Darby's free use of scripture is a pointed one: “With these tools, Darby was able to create an hallucinogenic, immensely confusing, deeply encoded, highly addictive vision of the end-times beginning with his employment of the then almost unknown concept of the secret-Rapture” (479).