I

The most fundamental objection which the P.C.I. opponents of the revival had to the movement was their view that the spectacular aspect of the awakening was completely bogus. They totally rejected the authenticity of the supposed miracles, trances, stigmata and visions that occurred in 1859, and they repudiated any suggestion that the prostrations and convulsions were the work of the Holy Spirit. This viewpoint was the opposite of what many revival supporters believed. While not equating prostration with conversion, the report of the Ahoghill Presbytery to the Synod of Ballymena and Coleraine claimed that, ‘The Spirit has descended in power’ leading to ‘the convulsing of the whole frame’ and ‘complete prostration of strength’.Footnote ¹⁷ Dr James Morgan, a revival-supporting Presbyterian, argued that the visible signs accompanying the movement were to be attributed to the Spirit of God, and that this was the only conclusion ‘rational and responsible beings’ could possibly come to.Footnote ¹⁸

The opponents agreed with staunch defenders of the revival that the prostrations were a crucial component in the movement.Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, prostrations were so conspicuous during 1859 that they served as a means of attracting tourists to the province.Footnote ²⁰ The physical phenomenon in the north of Ireland were also crucial to the appearance of similar manifestations in Scottish fishing villages such as Ferryden, as various laymen who had witnessed the Ulster revival desired similar manifestations in their own localities.Footnote ²¹ It was claimed, however, that comparatively few converts experienced prostration.Footnote ²² While it is fair to conclude that only a minority of revival converts underwent physical prostration this point does not serve to nullify the anti-revivalists’ objections, as their value lay in the attention and excitement that they generated.Footnote ²³

The anti-revivalists rejected James McCosh’s view that such manifestations were mere physiological accidents, which should be viewed as only a minor side-effect in a great work of God.Footnote ²⁴ McCosh’s position was the polar opposite of that of the Baptist medic Dr J. C. L. Carson, who said that the physical manifestations ‘were, in no sense of the word, mere accidents of the Revival. They were essentials, or God would not have sent them.’Footnote ²⁵ Where opponents parted company with the thorough-going revivalists was not on the prominence of the physical manifestations, but on the source and effects of such phenomena. They denied that the manifestations were the work of the Holy Spirit, as spreading credulity and irrationalism was not part of the Spirit’s work.Footnote ²⁶ Despite the forcefulness of their opposition to the movement, it is perhaps strange that both Nelson and Dobbin were content to trace the source of the manifestations to mere disease.Footnote ²⁷ William Hamilton, by way of contrast, did not embrace such medical explanations. For him, the prostrations were of supernatural origin, but were to be ascribed to Satan rather than to the Holy Spirit.Footnote ²⁸

Such was Hamilton’s zeal to deny the Holy Spirit any role in the prostrations that he appeared to go so far as to affirm that biblical examples of conviction of sin, which did not result in subsequent regeneration, were only the ‘natural effect of the truth on the unrenewed conscience’ rather than the Holy Spirit’s work.Footnote ²⁹ In so doing, he diverged from the teaching on common operations of the Spirit found in the Westminster Confession, the doctrinal standard accepted by P.C.I.Footnote ³⁰ Alternatively, McCosh had suggested that, ‘There may be bodily agitation which does not proceed from even a conviction of sin.’Footnote ³¹ Moreover, an ‘Orthodox Presbyterian’ and a Covenanter had argued that terror of conscience can sometimes be caused by the imagination, without it being a true conviction of sin.Footnote ³² Such explanations would have harmonised perfectly with Hamilton’s position that the prostrations were not the work of the Spirit, but without requiring Hamilton to deny that there were such things as non-saving operations.

The General Assembly of the P.C.I. officially warned ministers against ‘adopting any course of procedure whereby our people may be led to mistake bodily impressions, or even convictions of sin, for genuine conversion to God’.Footnote ³³ Nelson did not take such comments at face value, and believed that the prostrations were being promoted as a means of conversion. He thus feared that P.C.I. ministers were encouraging their ‘wretched dupes’ to treat relief from prostration as a declaration of divine pardon.Footnote ³⁴ One opponent was so alarmed that he compared the experiences of the revival converts with those of the founders of Mormonism. Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints in 1830, and Mormonism appealed to extra-biblical supernatural revelation and ongoing miracles as proof of its divine origin.Footnote ³⁵ Since both Mormonism and revivalism were often accompanied by miracles, visions and prostrations, the critic concluded that they were two eerily similar forms of corrupted Christianity. As far as anti-revivalists were concerned, the 1859 revival was just another of the fanatical movements that plagued the religious world during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁶

Supporters of the revival were not entirely agreed with respect to the manifestations. The ultra-revivalist Alexander McCann defended prophecies, dreams, stigmata, and visions as an integral part of the revival movement.Footnote ³⁷ Yet these markings were denounced as pernicious impostures by other revival supporters such as the Revd William Breakey of Lisburn.Footnote ³⁸ The revival had also produced notorious sleeping cases, in which a person’s bodily powers would be suspended, leading to a loss of sight, hearing, or speech, and to the person falling into a trance-like sleep. Sometimes the victim would predict when this experience would begin and end, prior to undergoing it.Footnote ³⁹ These aberrations were rejected even by revival supporters such as the Revd George Hay Shanks of First Boardmills, who claimed that such delusions were being used to make money.Footnote ⁴⁰ McCosh warned that these incidents should not be attributed to the Holy Spirit, as Hindus were capable of producing similar wonders. He believed that such things were nothing other than mesmerism; there was nothing miraculous about them, as people in such a state could anticipate and regulate their slumbers.Footnote ⁴¹

Perhaps even more discomforting for the revivalists than the comparison with Mormons and other extremists, was the analogy drawn between the miracles of the revival and those of Roman Catholicism.Footnote ⁴² This concern was no idle fear, because the nineteenth century had witnessed some high profile conversions from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, including that of the former evangelical Anglican, John Henry Newman.Footnote ⁴³ Nelson argued that the conversions narrated in The year of grace and other revivalist tracts should not be thought of as any more genuine than those induced by similar credulity.Footnote ⁴⁴

It is not difficult to understand why the anti-revivalists were fundamentally opposed to these spectacular aspects of the revival, since they believed that God’s former ways of revealing himself – through miracles, visions, and dreams – had ‘now ceased’ with the closure of the biblical canon.Footnote ⁴⁵ The emphasis of the revival was hardly in line with this confessional viewpoint.Footnote ⁴⁶ One example highlights that some revivalists did recognise the existence of new revelations of the Spirit during the awakening. At Monreagh, County Donegal on 26 June 1859, the Revd Andrew Long recorded that a young women addressed the congregation ‘in an unearthly voice’, while ‘heavenly light … had been imparted to her mind’.Footnote ⁴⁷ If she imparted a supernatural utterance, of heavenly origin, then this must have been viewed as an extra-biblical revelation from God. Dobbin rejected all such excitement as nothing short of mysticism, since it was not based on scripture but on pretended further revelations.Footnote ⁴⁸ For anti-revivalists, what the addiction of the Presbyterian multitudes to such credulity had served to reveal was the lamentable ignorance of P.C.I. members with respect to scriptural knowledge and confessional doctrine.Footnote ⁴⁹

Aside from theological and spiritual reasons for rejecting the manifestations, the anti-revivalists were fearful of the physical effects of such excitement. Moderate supporters of the revival such as Seaver and McCosh saw no great incongruence in a spiritual work having physical effects.Footnote ⁵⁰ Dobbin countered this view by arguing that the defence of such convulsions was indicative of a dualistic worldview that pitted the spiritual and material in opposition to one another. He reasoned that if the Holy Spirit delights in convulsing the body and deranging the mind, then he was a different deity to the God who created the material world, since his influence was apparently unsuited to the physical and mental constitution that God gave to man. In Dobbin’s view, the defenders of revival extravagance had not harmonised the physical and material, but had succumbed to the ancient Marcionite and Manichaean heresies.Footnote ⁵¹

The Presbyterian anti-revivalists found the defences of the prostrations to be unpersuasive. First, they saw little consistency in the position of revivalist ministers who defended the prostrations yet rejected the stigmata as a delusion. Purportedly supernatural marks had appeared on women’s bodies in some revival districts, with William Breakey claiming that 2,000 people flocked to visit one girl with the effect that they were ‘becoming fanatics’.Footnote ⁵² Anti-revivalists such as Nelson considered these men to be in an impossible position, because having accepted prostrations as the work of the Spirit it was illogical to dismiss other physical manifestations such as markings on the body.Footnote ⁵³

Nelson also highlighted how the supporters of the movement could not even agree on whether the prostrations were the antecedence of the work (Morgan) or the consequence of it (McCosh).Footnote ⁵⁴ McCosh’s paper worked on the assumption that since the revival began in Connor ‘without much or any bodily agitation’ then the physical affections should be viewed as something unfortunate which arose out of the movement, but was not absolutely germane to it.Footnote ⁵⁵ While Andrew Holmes has also claimed that the revival’s origins can be traced to gradual and unostentatious conversions which took place long before the excitement of 1859 was at its height, it is important to explicitly distinguish between preparation for the revival and the awakening’s commencement on the public stage as a mass movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ When the revival burst onto the scene at Ahoghill on 14 March 1859, prostrations and other forms of excitement were a vital element of the phenomena.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus anti-revivalists could claim that since the physical affections were so essential to the existence and dissemination of the awakening, McCosh’s argument was based on a faulty premise.Footnote ⁵⁸

Revivalist defences of the spectacular aspects of the movement as a repetition of the Day of Pentecost and explanations of the prostrations as analogous to the conversion of St Paul failed to convince these opponents.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hamilton argued that Paul’s conversion was unique, since he had seen the risen Christ; it was not meant to be a typical pattern for people being brought to saving faith under the ordinary means of grace. He also rejected the notion that the convictions of the Philippian jailor or the multitudes at Pentecost corresponded with the violent strikings of 1859.Footnote ⁶⁰ And since much of what took place at Pentecost was never to be repeated, it was wrong for revivalists to see an almost one-for-one correlation between this event and the Ulster revival.Footnote ⁶¹ Hamilton also argued that his thesis was substantiated by his claim that the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost was on believers, while the supposed outpouring of 1859 was upon the unconverted.Footnote ⁶²

The excited scenes of the revival hardly conformed to the stereotype of sober Ulster Presbyterians; instead they appeared to be highly aberrant. Hugh Hanna basically admitted this point, confessing that, ‘although God’s present mode of awakening many souls is strange and startling, the way is God’s, and I believe it to be right’.Footnote ⁶³ The Presbyterian adversaries agreed that the public mind had been aroused as a result of the counterfeit miracles and spectacular prostrations. But since they denied the legitimacy of such phenomena their outright opposition to the movement was understandable. Dobbin was later to observe that, in the years following the revival, many P.C.I. ministers expressed their disapproval of all such extravagances. However, it was too little too late as the people had been led astray into fanaticism.Footnote ⁶⁴

Evidence in favour of Dobbin’s argument is perhaps found in the orderly revival associated with D. L. Moody in 1874, when P.C.I. ministers determined not to repeat the errors of 1859.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Witness basically conceded the argument to the opponents of 1859 when it counselled, ‘All swooning and hysterical prostrations should be utterly discountenanced. The Spirit’s work upon the heart may produce deep distress and poignant sorrow and intense anxiety, but never unconsciousness.’Footnote ⁶⁶

II

The Presbyterian anti-revivalists also had serious doctrinal reasons for opposing the revival. They feared that the revival promoted a Methodist–Arminian view of a Christian’s assurance of salvation.Footnote ⁶⁷ The doctrine of assurance is concerned with how one can be subjectively certain that one is really saved.Footnote ⁶⁸ In opposition to what they considered to be Methodist notions, the opponents of 1859 did not believe that assurance was essential to saving faith.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the context of the 1859 revival in Scotland, David Bebbington has observed that this view of assurance not being of the essence of faith was adhered to by most evangelical Calvinists.Footnote ⁷⁰ Anti-revivalists rejected the concept allegedly promoted by Henry Grattan Guinness, an itinerant evangelist involved in 1859, that, ‘A Christian is a man who knows his sins are pardoned’. Footnote ⁷¹ Such a view meant that if a person was unsure about his redemption, he could not be a Christian. Dobbin carried this opposition to such an extreme that he basically denied the possibility of infallible assurance; notwithstanding the Westminster Confession’s assertion that such infallible assurance was obtainable.Footnote ⁷²

Anti-revivalists also claimed that the revival had promoted a view of assurance which asserted that the Holy Spirit immediately witnessed to a Christian that he was truly saved, rather than doing so gradually and mediately through the Bible. Revivalist theories of assurance were thus condemned by Presbyterian anti-revivalists as undermining the sufficiency of the scriptures.Footnote ⁷³ They warned that immediate assurance would logically demand that one possess an infallible revelation independent of scripture, which would then leave Protestants with no basis to oppose Roman Catholicism and abandon them to the mercy of extremist sects such as the Mormons.Footnote ⁷⁴

The anti-revivalists insisted that genuine assurance must be based on the rational evidence that only a holy life produced. Since new converts lacked the necessary time to develop Christian graces, they had no right to infallible assurance.Footnote ⁷⁵ They consequently censured revivalist views of assurance as Antinomian, because they implied that a person could have assurance without holiness.Footnote ⁷⁶ Anti-revivalists argued that to permit young converts to think that they could obtain immediate, infallible assurance, in absence of rational evidence, was to leave them in danger of self-deception and to give them a false hope of salvation.Footnote ⁷⁷

Aside from the assurance question, other revival practices were not congruent with Calvinist dogma. For instance, at Ahoghill in March 1859, the chief speaker claimed to be commissioned to impart the Holy Spirit to sinners, ‘inviting them to come forward and receive the Spirit of adoption’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This practice was hardly consistent with the Calvinistic view of regeneration, though it could be argued that the teaching and practices of lay-preachers should not be viewed as characteristic of the conduct of P.C.I. ministers.

During and after the revival the P.C.I. seemed increasingly willing to tolerate practices which were at odds with its confessional standards. It was with some justification that Dobbin, playing on words that the leading Presbyterian minister Henry Cooke had once used against the Church of Ireland, concluded that the P.C.I. was in danger of ‘possessing “a Calvinist creed and an Arminian clergy”’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Various clerical Presbyterian historians have argued that, subsequent to the revival, the P.C.I.’s Calvinism was downgraded in the interests of its evangelicalism.Footnote ⁸⁰ This correlated with the trend among evangelical Calvinists in the mid to late nineteenth-century to downplay the importance of Reformed orthodoxy in the interests of greater evangelical unity.Footnote ⁸¹ It was thus little wonder that anti-revivalists considered revivalism to be inconsistent with Calvinism, something which was even recognised by both Reformed and anti-Calvinist onlookers at the time.Footnote ⁸²

An interlocking issue with the doctrine of assurance was that of conversion itself. The anti-revivalists frowned upon the concept of an instantaneous conversion that was connected with the revival.Footnote ⁸³ This point draws attention to an important intra-mural debate between nineteenth-century evangelicals. Whereas Methodists viewed conversion as a sudden experience,Footnote ⁸⁴ others, including Dobbin’s mentor David McKee, tended to look upon conversion as a gradual affair.Footnote ⁸⁵ Anti-revivalists concurred with the latter view and regarded the notion of instantaneous conversion that had been popularised during 1859 to be at variance with scripture and the Westminster Standards.Footnote ⁸⁶

Although Finneyite methods, such as the use of anxious benches or inquiry rooms and other new measures,Footnote ⁸⁷ were generally not employed during the revival, the tendency of the revivalists to engage in declaring professed converts to be saved was deeply offensive to the Presbyterian opponents.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hamilton thought this practice was unwise, because, since only God can judge the heart, no one can affirm whether or not another person is definitely a true Christian.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such over-confident assertions on the part of revival supporters were out of step with Presbyterian ecclesiology, which viewed the church as a visible society of those who profess the Christian religion, not a gathering of the regenerate.Footnote ⁹⁰

Some of the revival converts understood this implication more clearly than their ministers. As various supporters of the revival among the Moray Firth fishing villages in Scotland also concluded, Presbyterian order was deemed to be incongruent with revivalist piety.Footnote ⁹¹ Hence many of them left the P.C.I. for groupings such as the Baptists and Plymouth Brethren, who strove for an entirely regenerate church membership.Footnote ⁹² Little wonder the Revd Thomas Witherow, a revival supporter, complained that while ‘other ministers are using every means to persuade sinners to be Christians … the mission of these men seems to reach no higher than to turn Christians into Anabaptists’.Footnote ⁹³

In the final analysis, the Presbyterian anti-revivalists saw the movement as entirely at odds with the doctrinal standards of the P.C.I. Hamilton, in particular, went into some detail to expose the revival’s unconfessional nature. He argued that the movement contradicted the Westminster Confession and Larger Catechism in relation to the sufficiency of scripture, the means of grace, humility, sanctification, effectual calling, justification, saving faith, repentance, good works, religious worship, and the role of ordained ministers.Footnote ⁹⁴ Covenanters complained, and Wesleyan Methodists rejoiced, that 1859 had led to the undermining of orthodox Calvinist soteriology, even among those who professed to maintain it.Footnote ⁹⁵

III

The anti-revivalists also had ecclesiastical reasons for opposing 1859, being concerned about the revival’s impact on matters relating to church order and worship. First, they believed that the revival had produced a spurious unity among professing Christians which downplayed serious differences between the Protestant denominations in terms of doctrine, liturgy, and polity. Second, they feared the revival’s influence in the area of worship. Third, they also objected to preaching by male lay-converts and by females.

An argument in favour of the revival was that it was conducive to greater unity among the Protestant denominations.Footnote ⁹⁶ Evidence of this thesis was the attendance of clergy and laity at union prayer meetings, which were conducted by ministers of differing denominations.Footnote ⁹⁷ The meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in Belfast in September 1859 could arguably be seen as the high point of revival unity, since this was symbolic of broad based evangelicalism uniting to celebrate the year of grace.Footnote ⁹⁸

The opponents, however, looked upon the Christian unity of the revival as counterfeit. An anonymous writer rejected the legitimacy of the type of union which the Evangelical Alliance advocated. In this view, there could be no true union between systems that were intrinsically opposed to one another, such as Presbytery and Prelacy or Calvinism and Arminianism.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hamilton regarded union between Arminians and Calvinists as absurd, because an Arminian must logically conclude that ‘Calvinism leads souls to hell’ owing to its emphasis on predestination.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

For Presbyterian anti-revivalists, a revival of true religion must involve the forsaking of erroneous principles and subsequent unity with those who hold the correct position. By sanctioning such ecclesiastical relativism, and censuring those who did not approve as being guilty of harbouring a party spirit, opponents of 1859 believed that revivalists were truncating scripture and hindering the duty of speaking the truth on controversial questions.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nelson took particular offence at Gibson’s insinuation that debates surrounding Calvinism and Arminianism within Ulster Presbyterianism were evidence of icy formality. He viewed this comment as libellous upon the P.C.I. and a ‘sneer at some of the most fundamental and vital Bible truths which bear on the question of Reconciliation and Atonement’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Dr John Edgar, a moderate Presbyterian supporter of the revival, asserted that God honoured the means of his own appointment in 1859.Footnote ¹⁰³ By way of contrast, the P.C.I. anti-revivalists and Covenanters viewed the modes of worship associated with the movement as being at variance with the regulative principle of worship, which forbade anything in Divine worship that lacked biblical sanction.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nelson also saw the revival as a threat to exclusive psalm-singing in the P.C.I., owing to the use of non-biblical hymns during and after the awakening.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Although Edgar and Cooke supported the conservative position on psalmody, various revivalists were promoters of hymnody.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In 1859 the P.C.I.’s official position was that, ‘The metrical version of the Psalms of David used in Scotland and by this Church is the only psalmody authorized by the General Assembly’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This position meant that only the book of Psalms could be used in the praise of God, to the exclusion of all hymns of human composition as they were not commanded in scripture to be used in worship. Although the P.C.I. accepted total psalmody as part of the union between the Synod of Ulster and the Seceders (which in 1840 had brought the two together to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland), the 1859 revival gave impetus to the use of uninspired hymns in worship.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This development was hardly surprising, as Charles Seaver noted that ‘[m]illions of little books of hymns’ were sold during the awakening, and, presumably, some of these fell into Presbyterian hands.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Moody’s revival in 1874–5 also served to fuel the desire for hymns that had been nurtured during 1859.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The tide of hymns could not be turned back, and so, after a long controversy in the General Assembly, a motion to prepare a hymn book was accepted in 1896 and the book was published in 1898.Footnote ¹¹¹ After the revival, the P.C.I. seems to have been following a general trend among transatlantic Presbyterians towards hymnody.Footnote ¹¹²

For the anti-revivalists one of the most flagrant attacks on purity of worship was that of preaching by the laity, young converts, and even children.Footnote ¹¹³ The importance of the converts in spreading the movement was frankly admitted by the Ahoghill Presbytery in its report to the Synod of Ballymena and Coleraine acknowledging that ‘the chief and honoured agents in the work are the converted themselves’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Although there was a dispute about this at the General Assembly in 1859, with the Revd J. B. Wilson of Albert Street congregation denying the proposition that the revival was primarily the work of lay-converts, Henry Cooke’s apology for the practice of lay-preaching would suggest that it was comparatively widespread. If it had not been there would have been little need to defend it.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Paradoxically, Cooke was later to express to the Assembly his disapproval of youths conducting evangelistic preaching.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Little wonder an anti-revivalist complained, ‘never did the Doctor shew himself more supple and slippery than in reference to this Revival’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In light of these facts, Myrtle Hill correctly asserts that 1859 did not owe its origin to the work of professional revivalists, although they appeared as the revival gathered momentum; instead, it was chiefly spread by lay-converts.Footnote ¹¹⁸

By supporting the revival, yet claiming to only be in favour of the employment of biblical means, Nelson complained that Edgar was being inconsistent because the revival was largely spread by converts preaching.Footnote ¹¹⁹ For opponents, the employment of such means was further evidence that the P.C.I. was drifting into Methodist fanaticism and moving away from scripture and its confessional standards, which prohibited the employment of the laity in preaching.Footnote ¹²⁰ McCosh, Seaver, and John Rodgers had also expressed grave concerns about the converts’ preaching. Rodgers even informed the General Assembly that converts had been guilty of spreading heresy.Footnote ¹²¹ It is also noteworthy that the 1860 General Assembly passed a resolution urging that only those who adhered to the Westminster standards be employed to conduct prayer-meetings, which would suggest that error was propagated at revival gatherings.Footnote ¹²² Consequently, Hamilton was at pains to point out that biblical teaching on the ministry required preachers to be trained, licensed, and ordained by the church, something that the converts were not. One anonymous Presbyterian opponent pointed out that if such ‘miraculously-endowed preachers’ be accepted as valid, then that would have negated the need for collegiate study.Footnote ¹²³ Since converts were novices in the faith, Hamilton concluded that they were peculiarly prone to pride, and there was no more sure way to foster such conceit than to employ them in leading religious exercises.Footnote ¹²⁴

In the long-term, both Nelson and Hamilton believed that the employment of lay-agency would undermine the ministerial office and lead to anti-clericalism. They surmised that the popular perception in Ulster was that there would not have been a revival if preaching had been left to ministers.Footnote ¹²⁵ Seaver tried to counter this claim by arguing that ‘the ministerial office was never more highly honoured’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Dobbin claimed to know from personal experience that this was not the case, as nearly all his congregation had forsaken him on one occasion to hear women preach within his parish.Footnote ¹²⁷

Moreover, it is surely not without significance that one of the leading convert preachers of 1859, Jeremiah Meneely, left the P.C.I. and became a Brethren evangelist.Footnote ¹²⁸ He must have recognised that the anti-clericalism of the Brethren was more conducive to revivalist methods than the polity of Presbyterianism. Since uneducated lay-men could now preach with such success, then what need was there for a separate ministry?Footnote ¹²⁹ It is thus easy to see why Janice Holmes suggests that the prominence of such lay-initiative in religious activity served to challenge ideas of religious propriety and threatened the leadership of the clergy. Although it must also be kept in mind that the triumph of the laity was a temporary phenomenon and the clergy quickly reasserted themselves after the revival.Footnote ¹³⁰

Perhaps even more offensive to the anti-revivalists was preaching by women. The practice of women preaching had been largely confined to Methodism in the eighteenth century, though by 1803 it had largely stopped in Ireland. During the revival women found the enthusiasm and chaos liberating, as their opportunities for preaching dramatically increased.Footnote ¹³¹ Hamilton asserted that the biblical prohibition on women teaching continued to be mandatory and that women who presumed to preach were acting contrary to the ‘gentleness and modesty’ of the role that scripture and society had prescribed for them.Footnote ¹³²

One especially notorious example of a woman preaching during the revival was that of a woman from Dundrod who marched around the district exhorting people to repent. When her minister, the Revd William Magill, asked her to desist, she rebuked him and he ‘fell into the rear and became one of her followers’.Footnote ¹³³ Tommy Toye had also permitted a young girl to address an audience in his church, and believed that this had resulted in many conversions.Footnote ¹³⁴ By acquiescing in such irregularities, the clergymen were conferring legitimacy upon these activities.Footnote ¹³⁵ Anti-revivalists believed that these incidents, along with scenes of female prostration, were deeply degrading to women. These females were considered to be the victims of naïve clerics who had abandoned common-sense.Footnote ¹³⁶

IV

Anti-revivalists were also concerned about the effects of revivalism on morality. While it would be tempting to assume that these concerns related to sexual morality, which to some extent they did, the anti-revivalists were critical of much else besides. Indeed, it was argued at the time that the stigmata and convulsions were themselves immoral as they constituted a form of profanity.Footnote ¹³⁷ Even some of the prayers associated with revivalism were considered profane.Footnote ¹³⁸ A supporter of Nelson complained of having been informed by participants that the revival prayer-meetings often degenerated into ‘Praying-matches’, which were a competition among the young men as to ‘who could make the nicest prayer – the young girls meanwhile listening and admiring!’Footnote ¹³⁹ It is difficult to assess how typical such behaviour was of the revival prayer-meetings, since we do not possess a minute record of what took place in many of these gatherings.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

There were serious concerns about the impact of the revival on family life. Hamilton believed that the revival had led to parents neglecting the godly instruction of children. Rather than relying on Sabbath schools to do the work for them, Hamilton said that parents, and especially fathers, were to ensure that their children were instructed in family worship, which normally consisted of prayer, praise, catechising, and Bible reading.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As far as he was concerned, 1859 could not be considered as genuine owing to the neglect of this duty, and reasoned that its continual neglect would issue in divine judgment.Footnote ¹⁴² Yet revival supporters and various church courts were keen to stress the positive impact which 1859 had on family worship.Footnote ¹⁴³ Even the Revd William McIlwaine, an Anglican critic of the movement, recognised that the revival had led to an increase in family worship.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Thus Hamilton’s objection appears to be at odds with the evidence. He does, however, point to the nature of protracted revival meetings as being incongruent with healthy family life and worship. Revival meetings sometimes went on to midnight and beyond – with one meeting in Toye’s congregation lasting until 5 a.m.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Hamilton alleged that this practice was not conducive to having family members present for worship in the home, and this point was also made in the 1863 General Assembly’s report on the state of religion.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Moreover, Hamilton claimed that the pride of stricken converts was creating disharmony among Christian families, alluding to one case of a daughter who had been prostrated and who subsequently thought that the rest of the family should look up to her, while her parents and siblings were thought of as unconverted since they had never experienced the sensation of prostration followed by pardon.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Nelson likewise complained that the revival excitement was often a pretext for child rebellion, referring to the account of the Revd George Hay Shanks, minister of First Boardmills, concerning parents scolding their children for attending too many prayer-meetings and being out late at night.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Hamilton also believed that the revival failed to promote a harmony of interests in the workplace, as prostrations were leaving people unfit for labour. This meant that employers had to bear with employees who were out at late-night revival meetings, ignoring the employer’s right to expect an adequate day’s labour by not resting themselves sufficiently. Hamilton alleged that if an employer was to dismiss the work-shy revivalists, he faced having to bear the odium of being considered far worse than a heathen.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Unlike the 1857–8 American revival and the revival in Aberdeen, the Ulster awakening led to the disruption of ordinary business.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ For example, the Ballymena Observer reported on disruption to industrial work in a spinning factory at Raceview and at Ballygarvey bleachworks owing to revival fervour.Footnote ¹⁵¹ At Coleraine, business in the town was partially suspended following the revival’s arrival in the locality.Footnote ¹⁵² None of this surprised Hamilton, as the revival caused people to forsake the duties of their particular calling, either through prostration or through being employed as religious instructors.Footnote ¹⁵³

Reflecting the Calvinistic emphasis on vocation, Hamilton believed that such conduct was contrary to biblical piety, as ‘men most honour the Lord’ by being ‘useful to society’ in their own station of life.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Revivalism, by endlessly multiplying religious meetings, would eventually result in ordinary business being set aside. For instance, John Rogers stated before the General Assembly that young men could not be found for the work of harvesting owing to the revival meetings.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Such idleness demonstrated to Hamilton that revivalism was in direct opposition to scriptural morality, which enjoined on Christians the duty of engaging in honest work as part of the fourth commandment.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Moreover, the Protestant work ethic asserted that the neglect of ordinary work was the forerunner of more gross forms of sin.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Thus it is probable that anti-revivalists saw a connection between the multiplication of revivalist meetings and revivalist immorality. It is interesting that when discussing Moody’s revivalism in 1874, the Witness admitted the protracted and late-night meetings of 1859 had been a mistake.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This concession reveals that even pro-revival Presbyterians were willing to partially accept this criticism of 1859.

Hamilton also feared that revivalism was promoting the sin of self-murder through over-exertion in religious work. This danger was especially real for ministers, who had been slavishly overworked during the excitement of 1859.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Seaver observed that ‘Ministers everywhere sank under the exhaustion of their blessed duties’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Hamilton viewed this development as a plot by Satan to attack ministers’ health, and he believed that the sacrifices demanded by revival zealots went beyond what was commanded by God.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Consequently, the sickness and mental derangement that had resulted from such servile labours would only serve to weaken the minister’s influence in the long term. The classic example of what Hamilton was warning against is the sad case of the Revd Alexander Pollock of Second Ballyeaston congregation, who died prematurely at 42 as a result of over-exertion during the revival.Footnote ¹⁶²

The revival does appear to have had a negative impact upon mental health. It is worth remembering that Gibson did not deny that the revival had increased insanity, admitting that eight people in the Belfast Asylum were influenced by the revival. He even confessed that he was surprised that it did not lead to more lunacy.Footnote ¹⁶³ William Craig, a revival-supporting divinity student from Ahoghill, admitted that some of those affected by the revival were subsequently mentally deranged. He stated that, ‘There are three or four persons in this locality who have not got better from their conviction, and are raving maniacs as yet … They seem to answer the description of those given in the New Testament as possessed of devils.’Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Other sources reveal that the revival’s bodily and mental agitations even resulted in the death of the victims.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Perhaps the most controversial claim that Nelson made with respect to revivalist morality was that the 1859 revival had led to increased fornication and illegitimacy.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ He was not the only one to have these suspicions, because in a report to the London committee of the pro-revival Irish Evangelical Society in 1861 it was observed that the moral conduct of the convert-preachers was cause for grave concern.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Nelson thought these examples of scandalous sin were enough to dispel any talk about the positive effects of the revival upon social morality, refusing even to catalogue the long list of transgressions that had followed in the wake of revival excitement. This scandal came as no surprise, as he thought that there was a close link between orthodoxy and morality, and, likewise, between heterodoxy and immorality.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

In the eyes of Nelson’s critics, however, his charges lacked evidence. Writing in 1909, the Revd R. T. Simpson of Second Dungannon asserted that Nelson based some of his allegations on stories that people had told him, but Simpson alleged that Nelson never properly investigated these claims.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ And J. T. Carson critiqued Nelson for not supplying the names of his authorities or consistently mentioning the localities where the sexual immorality was supposed to have taken place.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Certainly, Nelson’s case would have been easier to verify had such information been supplied, as his allegations could have been subjected to more minute inquiry. The evangelical historian J. E. Orr pointed out that the question of illegitimate births cannot be conclusively determined since the registration of births, deaths and marriages only began in 1864.Footnote ¹⁷¹ While there is some evidence of fornication associated with the revival, and it may be that case the certain features of the movement could have served to undermine Christian standards of sexual behaviour, it is not possible to prove that there is a direct link between prostrations, late night meetings, and sexual transgressions.Footnote ¹⁷²

The anti-revivalists believed that they had grounds for questioning the moral fruit of the revival owing to the harshness of the treatment which the revival’s critics received.Footnote ¹⁷³ Nelson claimed that, during the revival, to even question whether the prostrations were a work of God’s Spirit left one open to the charge of being unregenerate.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ To substantiate this assertion, he appealed to the Revd Robert Knox’s claim that revival opponents were anti-evangelical, and there were also examples of Hanna and Gibson denouncing anti-revivalists as either unconverted or aligned with Satan.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Even moderate critics and revival supporters had been condemned in the most ferocious terms when they dissented from some aspects of the movement, with men such as McCosh being anathematised by Alexander McCann.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ No matter how mildly a minister expressed his dissent from aspects of 1859, Hamilton asserted that he was subjected to a persecuting zeal similar to that of the prelates who oppressed the seventeenth-century Covenanters.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

In light of this opposition, it is not surprising Dobbin concluded that revivalist ministers compensated for their weak theological understanding by ‘exhibiting powers of denunciation of a very high order’. Dobbin knew what he was talking about, since the Revd Robert Crawford had apparently accused him of preaching ‘darkness and spiritual death’ alongside ‘a cold frigid Unitarian morality’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ During the height of revival excitement, moreover, Dobbin had apparently been denounced as an unbeliever for suggesting that the converts were equating emotional excitement with immediate assurance.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ The fierceness of these denunciations meant that standing against the revival was an almost impossible task; such was the hold that it had over people’s minds.

The anti-revivalists were also unmoved by what were considered the positive moral side effects of the revival, such as the large attendance at revival meetings and church services, increased temperance and liberality, and claims that converts had forsaken gross sins.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Owing to the unbiblical excitement on display at revival meetings, Nelson believed that those who went to such gatherings were comparable to pilgrims going to see the Madonna. It was dangerous for Protestants to appeal to numbers, because if ‘crowds of ignorant devotees demonstrate the existence of God’s presence on earth in the conversion of men, then can no denomination compete for a moment with the Church of Rome’.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Nelson contended that the argument concerning increased attendance at revival meetings was at variance with the Shorter Catechism’s teaching on the means of grace that God used for the salvation of the elect, as these were not the sole means employed at revivalist gatherings.Footnote ¹⁸² In response to the claim that 1859 had been productive of deep religious feeling, Hamilton argued that the deep religious feelings of the Jesuits could be sincere, yet wrong, there was no reason to think that the spurious devotion of revivalism was anything different.Footnote ¹⁸³ Hamilton also claimed that there was nothing in scripture to support the view that multiplying church buildings was necessarily a good sign, as the Jews in Christ’s day far outstripped Ulster Presbyterians when it came to building meeting-houses. He employed similar reasoning to invalidate the argument that 1859 had promoted increased liberality among the people. Hamilton reminded revivalists that few had given more than Herod, and yet few had been more ungodly than him.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

As for the claim that 1859 had diminished drunkenness and promoted abstinence from alcohol, Hamilton was not in the slightest bit impressed.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Since wine was pronounced a blessing in scripture, he feared that the temperance movement was promoting a false morality. He warned that, ‘It is certain that drunkards will not inherit the kingdom; but it does not follow that every “total abstinence” man will’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Both Nelson and Hamilton denied that the forsaking of a few notorious sins, such as drunkenness, blasphemy, and so on constituted infallible evidence that someone was a real Christian.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Hamilton cautioned against putting too much weight on merely outward morality, as there were plenty of people in P.C.I. churches who were neither drunkards nor swearers, but were not real Christians.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Furthermore, he pointed out that the scribes and Pharisees were as outwardly moral as any revival convert, ‘and yet they were a generation of vipers, that could not escape the damnation of hell’.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

Hamilton could be accused of falling into a corrosive cynicism with regard to the moral reformation of the revival converts. Yet this objection overlooks the theoretical framework within which Hamilton was writing. Throughout his book, Hamilton made it clear that he did not regard the movement as a genuine work of God. Therefore, it is not surprising that he looked upon the outward fruits of the revival with suspicion. It must also be remembered that the vast majority of revival converts were not drunkards or prostitutes; instead, they were those with a church connection.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ So even if Hamilton was being too sceptical, this cynicism would not undermine his whole thesis respecting the revival as the conversion of the grossly immoral was only a minor aspect of the movement.

It is difficult to determine to what extent the anti-revivalists are correct in concluding that the movement had led to further moral degeneration. Although revival supporters boasted of the moral change wrought by the movement, David Hempton and Myrtle Hill’s research confirms that long-term behavioural trends in Ulster were not significantly affected by the awakening. Even if there was a decline in drunkenness as a result of the revival, it should be noted that the growing ideology of respectability had already been eroding such elements of popular culture. So, in the long term, it is hard to determine the revival’s influence in this area. The impact of the revival did not affect crime rates dramatically, which had already been on the decrease during the 1850s.Footnote ¹⁹¹

According to J. E. Orr’s research in the six counties which now comprise Northern Ireland, there were 636 cases of criminals being incarcerated in 1858; this figure fell to 475 in 1859 and to 456 in 1860. In 1861, however, it rose again to 593 incarcerations. Orr did not regard this evidence as fatal to the revival’s impact on morality. Thus he pointed to the large number of Roman Catholic convicts who were unaffected by the revival, arguing that for every three Protestants there were five Roman Catholics in jail.Footnote ¹⁹² Such analysis is called into question by looking at the Protestant town of Coleraine, which three years after the revival had returned to an extraordinarily high rate of crime and by 1865 ministers were heard deploring all kinds of wickedness in the town. None of the town’s brothels closed during the revival, and demand for their services grew in subsequent years.Footnote ¹⁹³ Hence the evidence would suggest that the revival’s impact on morality was often short-lived.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

V

As with J. D. Bratt’s summary of the objections to revivals in Antebellum America, the Ulster anti-revivalists would have agreed that its fanaticism and heresy was bad for the faith; its views of assurance were bad for the believer; its chaos and liturgical anarchy was bad for the church; and its morality was bad for society.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Whether or not their critiques were fully justified, the anti-revivalists’ arguments are worthy of greater consideration than they have previously been given. While one would think that the most severe censures of the revival would have come from those outside the P.C.I. this was generally not the case, as both Anglicans and Covenanters were much more restrained in their criticism.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Given the antagonism between the denominations, it appears odd that the most fervent critics of a movement which largely affected the P.C.I. should come from within that denomination itself. The answer to this paradox is possibly found in Nelson’s observation that ‘men are reviled and persecuted most bitterly by those with whom their opinions have most points of harmony’.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ The proximity of the P.C.I. anti-revivalists to revival enthusiasm, and the fact that they were opposing something endorsed by their General Assembly and the majority of their fellow ministers, probably made it difficult for them to have been dispassionate in their critiques.

The opposition of the anti-revivalists to 1859 is a reminder that there was an intellectually significant school of thought within the Irish Presbyterian Church that feared it was drifting into further accommodation with broad evangelicalism. In 1902 W. T. Latimer, who was the ‘epitome of presbyterian cantankerousness’,Footnote ¹⁹⁸ lamented that 1859 had led to an increasingly emotional form of worship and to the spread of sectarian denominations. He also complained of the emergence of a party within the P.C.I. who were as opposed to scholastic Reformed theology as the Non-Subscribers,Footnote ¹⁹⁹ while still holding to ‘a few doctrines of the Gospel as firmly as Calvin himself’.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Writing in 1940 the modernist theologian, Professor J. Ernest Davey, expressed the same point somewhat differently. Davey concluded that, as a result of 1859, the evangelistic interest of the P.C.I. superseded its philosophical commitment to Reformed orthodoxy, while it still remained Calvinistic in the abstract.Footnote ²⁰¹ While the anti-revivalists’ criticisms of the spectacular aspects of the movement were perhaps most significant at the time, especially owing to the attention that these phenomenon generated, the anti-revivalists’ comments on theological and liturgical issues possibly had greater long-term significance. And since earlier Scottish Presbyterian revivals had also witnessed physical manifestations, these phenomena do not appear to have posed a major long-term threat to Presbyterian theology and identity.Footnote ²⁰² The excited scenes of 1859 may not have been repeated, yet in other respects the movement has had a profound influence upon the shaping of Ulster Presbyterianism.

There were of course factors other than revivalism which contributed to the downgrade of Reformed orthodoxy within the P.C.I. For instance, pan-Protestantism was fostered by disestablishment and opposition to home rule (though even this co-belligerence was boosted by the revival).Footnote ²⁰³ Meanwhile the social conditions created by urbanisation may also have served the interests of greater inter-denominational co-operation. Broader cultural movements such as Romanticism influenced late nineteenth-century evangelicals, especially as manifested in holiness teaching as represented by the Keswick movement. David Bebbington’s observation that ‘many touched by Keswick were to move on in the years around the First World War towards a liberal form of Evangelicalism’ is not without significance for the P.C.I.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Other influences such as evolutionary science, Hegelianism, and modern psychology also appear to have shaped the theology of this era.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Nevertheless, the revival’s anti-confessional nature, liturgical innovations, evangelical ecumenism, and emphasis on experience over dogma cannot but have undermined the uniqueness of Presbyterian identity. In view of such considerations, it is not difficult to understand why these confessional Presbyterian anti-revivalists offered outright opposition to the movement.