–TWO–
A political revolution was effected in America through the agency, it is said, of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and J. Arnold; a bookseller, a farmer, and a horse-dealer. In Ireland a more difficult moral revolution was attempted, and in many instances effected, by a country clergyman, a Dublin curate, and a bookseller.
WARBURTON ET AL., City of Dublin1
The French Revolutionists … rising amidst the awful devastation which marked their progress, sought to involve in one common ruin every political edifice, which the wisdom of ages had erected in surrounding nations, and to introduce that anarchy, of which they had given so woeful an example. To accomplish their dire purpose, they laboured to snatch the Sacred Scriptures from the hands of man, and sent forward their heralds, the missionaries of their infidelity; thus when it is our anxious wish to establish civil order and political stability, is it not our wisest policy, deeply to infuse into the minds of our countrymen, by the early study of the Word of God, those happy principles … which incline every soul to be subject to the higher powers, and to submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake. Thus will Ireland be blessed with a wise and an understanding people, taught by the wholesome discipline of judicious instruction, that Liberty consists not in an unrestrained indulgence of unbridled desires, but in the prudent regulations of well digested, and equally well executed laws; at once protecting the meanest from oppression, and controlling the power of the most exalted.
Fourth Report of the HBS, 18142
Yet I do believe our savages resemble the mountains in which they live. Under a rugged surface there lurks a rich vein of ore, which one day may enrich the British empire.
JOHN JEBB3
RELIGIOUS REVIVAL IN THE CHURCH OF IRELAND
The decades that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution were remarkable throughout the British Isles for a massive swing towards social and political conservatism. Many contemporary observers believed that they had witnessed the collapse of civilized society as they knew it, and took refuge in a closer adherence to the teachings of Christianity, particularly those pertaining to individual morality and the maintenance of the social order.4 It was a perfect opportunity for the promoters of serious religion to assert their claims to moral leadership in social, political and ecclesiastical affairs, and they lacked neither the will nor the resources to exploit it. In a campaign that involved completely new methods of influencing and mobilizing public opinion, the moral reformers succeeded in imposing their own particular hegemony over social and political life. Under the leadership of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, the English, as Harold Perkin has claimed, ‘ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tenderminded, prudish and hypocritical’.5 The triumph of moral reform among the Protestant population in Ireland was no less pronounced. If anything, the process was intensified by the stark political implications of the turbulent 1790s and the passage of the Act of Union.
In the years immediately following the Union, the political mood in Ireland was characterized by a nervous calm that scarcely camouflaged the fears and animosities reanimated during the 1790s. Referring to the impact of the Orange outrages in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion, Peter Burrowes spoke of the ‘determined and desperate spirit of counteraction’ that had been aroused among Catholics of every description. If Catholic sentiment were to settle against the government at the commencement of the Union, he warned, the connection between the two countries would be ‘as unstable as the winds and waves upon which it must depend’.6 A similar mixture of guilt and fear caused many conscientious Protestants to embrace the belief that Christian morality afforded the soundest foundation for the regulation of human affairs, both public and private. The concept of ‘atonement’ was of particular importance in this context. Because it emphasized personal accountability, forgiveness, reconciliation and spiritual rebirth, it proved to be enormously attractive to those who were torn between the need to account for the vengeance and hatred unleashed during the 1790s and a concern for the safety of their own future.
Few exemplified this tradition of enlightened Christianity as powerfully as Whitley Stokes, whose passion for justice, freedom and the cause of his Catholic countrymen had taken him into radical circles in the early 1790s. By 1798 the extremism of the United Irishmen and the threat of expulsion from Trinity College combined to bring him back into the fold of the establishment. But he lost none of his faith in religion as the great motivating force behind social justice, political equality, and ultimate reconciliation between native and colonial in Ireland. He believed passionately that exposure to the moral precepts of the Gospel would lead both groups to realize how far they had strayed from the original teachings of Christ. Even if agreement in matters of religious belief were to be impossible, the basic Christian message of love and forgiveness might teach them to tolerate each other’s opinions with charity and indulgence. Stokes urged that Protestant ministers and Catholic priests alike rally to the standard and instruct their followers in the Christian faith. Of the Protestant clergymen, he believed that many ‘would hazard their lives for the diffusion of pure Christianity’, while Catholic priests might be prevailed upon both to preach in the vernacular and to make use of the scriptures in the Irish language.7
Among contemporary fellows of Trinity College, Whitley Stokes’s blend of political radicalism and religious enthusiasm was highly unusual. Most of his evangelical colleagues, though no less passionate in their desire to reform moral and religious standards, were staunchly on the side of the establishment during and after the crisis of the late eighteenth century. Throughout the 1790s the cause of moral reform and the evangelical spirit generally had gained strong momentum in Trinity College. Closely identified with those who were concerned with the security of the Church of Ireland, the reform ethos was especially popular among the fellows, who accounted for most of the teaching staff, and the majority of whom were in clerical orders. Galvanized by the outspoken defence of their Church by Bishop Woodward in the late 1780s, they were imbued with a new sense of responsibility regarding the mission of their Church in the rapidly changing world of the late eighteenth century.
In the general assault on Protestant ascendancy and privilege that had started in the 1780s, the Church of Ireland found its legitimacy called into question. Its apologists and defenders were solidly behind Bishop Woodward in their belief that the admission of Catholics to political equality would be followed by Catholic ascendancy, dissolution of the Church of Ireland and the downfall of the Protestant community. From the very beginning, therefore, the movement for reform in the Church of Ireland was driven by a deep-seated fear of Catholicism coupled with an adherence to episcopal orthodoxy, and by an abiding distaste for ‘enthusiasm’ that was tempered by an urgent need to improve religious life at every level of society. This last objective was in line with the trend emerging in England, where the newly acquired religiosity of the upper classes was driving episcopal reform in the shape of new church buildings, new livings and a general increase in the role of religion in society.
There were many areas of common ground between episcopal evangelicalism in the Dublin metropolitan area and its counterpart in London. The most important of these were the agencies through which the reform spirit was propagated—in the private sphere through personal and professional connections, and publicly through voluntary organizations. For example, many of those who went on to play leading roles in the evangelical movement in the early nineteenth century, were the direct products of an identifiable Trinity network composed of fellows, students, and graduates.8 Among the clergymen who held fellowships during this period, six went on to become bishops of the Church of Ireland and two out of this number, Charles Elrington of Meath and William Magee of Dublin, would earn lasting reputations as champions of renewal and expansion.9
The organization that became a rallying point for Trinity evangelicals and eventually became the flagship of the moral reform movement in the Church of Ireland was the Association for Discountenancing Vice (ADV). Its founders were the Rev. Singleton Harpur, Dr O’Connor of Castleknock, and a Dublin bookseller, William Watson of Capel Street. In 1788 Singleton Harpur had published a pamphlet on temperance in which he showed himself to be clearly in line with the new stridency of the movement for moral reform in England led by William Wilberforce and Hannah More.10 Wilberforce and his circle had succeeded in 1787 in persuading George III to issue a proclamation to improve piety and morality and to ‘discountenance and punish all manner of vice, profaneness and immorality, in all persons of whatsoever degree or quality within this our realm’. The proclamation was sent to every magistrate in the country and ordered to be read from every pulpit in the land four times a year. Shortly afterwards, Wilberforce founded the Proclamation Society for the Suppression of Vice, a voluntary organization dedicated to attacking every manifestation of vice and immorality in public life: drunkenness, cursing and swearing, immoral literature, prostitution, and the popular blood sports of the lower classes, such as cock-fighting and bear-baiting.11
The Association for Discountenancing Vice, more popularly known as the Dublin Association, was the Irish equivalent of the Proclamation Society.12 Its objectives regarding moral reform were, if anything, more all-embracing than its English progenitor, and, as its full name suggested, it stressed education as the most effective way to instill morality. Its explicit aim was, on the one hand, to check the spread of immorality and infidelity by promoting the type of scriptural education sanctioned by the Established Church, and, on the other, ‘to guard against the dangers of enthusiasm’—a clear indicator of the cautious and conservative road it planned to follow. During the 1790s the ADV pursued its campaign for moral reform on many different fronts. Among the sources of ‘immoral influence’ that came under immediate attack were many staple institutions of leisure and entertainment among the lower classes, including drinking, gambling and popular literature. Under pressure from the Association the Dublin lottery was suppressed and the sale of liquor on Sunday prohibited. Likewise, Sunday promenades at the Rotunda were forbidden, and steps were taken to substitute moral tracts of the kind made famous in England by Sarah Trimmer and Hannah More for the more colourful and often bawdy tales of pirates and highwaymen sold by pedlars and hawkers. As cheap moral tracts were not as yet being produced locally, the bookseller Watson imported an English edition of Hannah More’s tales and had them republished in Dublin. In 1795–6, 120,000 copies of these tracts were printed and distributed to the poor at reduced prices.13
It was to the upper middle classes and aristocracy, however, that the Association directed its strongest pitch for support. Again, in the fashion of Wilberforce and the Claphamites, the power and influence of ‘those who count’ was consciously sought out and extolled as the most important lever by which the principles of moral reform might be spread throughout the whole of society.14 As in England, the wealthy and powerful were urged to set the standard for manners and morality in the private sphere through exemplary conduct, and in public life and politics through philanthropy and legislative reform. The success of the ADV in winning the support of the influential and powerful in the metropolitan area was impressive. By 1795 the membership list had risen to 500 and the society could boast of the most powerful man in the country, the viceroy, as its president, and the archbishops of Armagh, Cashel, Dublin and Tuam as honorary members.15 The Association generally functioned as an umbrella group under whose auspices many different shades of opinion were accommodated, from the strictly orthodox viewpoint of the episcopal bench to the zeal and energy of committed evangelical clergymen like the Rev. Joseph Stopford and the Rev. Thomas Tighe. Intellectually, it was a clearing house for ideas and debates about how to improve religious life generally among the clergy and to upgrade church attendance and domestic piety among the laity. Ideas were disseminated through monthly meetings, printed pamphlets and personal correspondence, and especially through what was becoming the most vital of all forms of public address during this period, the sermon.
Radiating from the capital city, the reform spirit was carried to the provinces by clergymen who had absorbed the message of renewal and reform during their student days at Trinity. Many of these individuals would function as driving forces behind Church reform on a local or provincial basis, and they would also continue to maintain their communication with the Association in Dublin as well as with each other. The clearest example of the links that were fostered between the advocates of spiritual and moral reform in Dublin and the provinces is that afforded by the Rev. Peter Roe and the Ossory Clerical Association (OCA). Ossory was unique among Irish dioceses at this time for its concentration of reform-minded clergymen. Before his transfer to Meath in 1798, Bishop Thomas Lewis O’Beirne had initiated regular meetings for his diocesan clergy in the hope of improving their knowledge of the scriptures and their duties of office. Upon O’Beirne’s departure, however, this custom was brought to an end. The clergymen responsible for beginning anew were Peter Roe and Hans Hamilton, a son of Bishop Hugh Hamilton, O’Beirne’s successor.16 Hans Hamilton is credited with the inspiration for the new plan, the idea having occurred to him as he was riding home one night from a meeting concerned with agricultural improvement. If people could convene to advance the cause of agriculture, it seemed to him logical that spiritual husbandry, or the care of souls, could be advanced in the same manner.17 This story is reminiscent of the experience of the great English abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson, who was overtaken by a similar flash of inspiration as he was riding from Cambridge to London in 1787, and who went on to become one of the most important propagandists in the campaign to arouse public opinion against the slave trade. Experiences of this kind typified the capacity of evangelicals to utilize spiritual inspiration as a means to pursue practical and often very political and material ends.
Hans Hamilton’s suggestion of holding meetings on a regular basis was welcomed by the Rev. Robert Shaw of Fiddown, who had complained that when he first settled in the diocese in the early 1790s ‘he did not know a brother minister whom he could invite to join with him in prayer’. Within a short period the Rev. Edward Pidgeon, rector of St Mary’s in Kilkenny, was persuaded to join Hamilton and Shaw in their evangelical beliefs and objectives.18 By the time Roe was appointed as his curate in 1799, Pidgeon was already a committed advocate, though undoubtedly the arrival of a young clergyman fresh from the metropolis and imbued with the activist ethos of the Trinity establishment was an enormous boost to morale. These four clergymen—Roe, Shaw, Hamilton and Pidgeon—formed the nucleus of the OCA, formally instituted in 1800, and they went on to enlist other clergymen from different parts of the county. The OCA was never very large, amounting to no more than fifteen or sixteen members in 1804. In characteristic evangelical fashion, however, this collective wielded an influence that belied its small membership.
The first aim of the OCA was to foster the improvement of spiritual and pastoral care among the clergy and piety and religious practice among the laity. The approval of the local bishop, Dr Hugh Hamilton, was a distinct advantage, as episcopal support for the idea of a revival within the Established Church at this time was not something that could always be relied upon. At a time when sympathy for the evangelical insistence on the Bible as the fundamental source of spiritual and moral authority could well be construed as a threat to episcopal power, Hamilton judiciously remained within the boundaries of orthodoxy on all matters of Church policy. His personal sympathies, however, are revealed by the fact that his five sons and two daughters were all identified with the evangelical movement, and by the tolerance and approval he showed to the clerical association of which his son Hans was a founder. Hamilton had no objection to the groups’ convening once a month for a public meeting in Kilkenny town. In fact, he tacitly approved of the practice and considered the evangelicals to be the most efficient and progressive of the diocesan clergy.19
The monthly conferences on spiritual and pastoral care proved to be a most satisfactory vehicle for stimulating the enthusiasm of the members of the Association. Besides liturgy and doctrine, the more practical question of spreading the revivalist spirit throughout the country was addressed. An entry taken from the minute book of 1802 indicates the kinds of matters discussed:
October 6th, 1802.—Had a long conversation arising from prayer-meetings in awakening the unconcerned and in building up ‘in our most holy faith’ those who have begun to see the value of salvation. Several testimonies were borne to the excellent effects produced by them in all those parishes where they have been adopted; and it is the opinion of this association that speedy and effectual means ought to be used to introduce and establish prayer-meetings in our respective parishes; and also to insist on the great necessity of family prayer and on the expediency of adopting it universally.20
While the doctrine of justification by faith was the principal tenet of evangelical Protestantism, the emphasis on the interdependency of faith and good works was no less marked. Visiting the sick, the poor and the imprisoned, collecting funds to provide food and clothing for the needy, and supporting an institution for the relief of destitute females were among the regular duties of Peter Roe’s ministry in Kilkenny. The effectiveness of his combined spiritual and temporal campaign was almost immediately evident in the increase in attendance at church on Sundays and holy days, in the numbers presenting themselves for the sacraments of communion and confirmation, and above all in the interest shown in prayer-meetings, lectures on the interpretation of the Bible and catechism classes for children. The commitment to active catechizing and preaching was the outstanding feature that set the Ossory reformers apart from their fellow ministers of the Established Church. Not only did they organize sermons, lectures and discussions in their own districts, but they also exchanged visits with each other for much the same purposes, and eventually extended these visits into preaching tours of the adjoining counties.21
During the early years of the century the preaching tour, previously the hallmark of Methodists and Independent evangelicals, now began to be a regular feature of clerical life in the Church of Ireland. In this area, as in many others, the OCA was clearly in the forefront. Roe was an active itinerant in his native Kilkenny and also in the counties of Waterford, Cork and Tipperary. On a tour conducted in March 1804, during which he visited Thomastown, Ross, Waterford, Fiddown and Piltown, he was pleased to note that ‘religion is spreading fast and the ministers increasing in number’.22 He was also a frequent visitor to the capital, where his ability as a preacher made an enormous impact, as witnessed by his biographer:
The interest excited by his preaching was of the most extraordinary description, and only exceeded by that called forth by Dean Kirwan. Bride’s Church used to be crowded to such excess that the very windows were filled even outside and not one spot in the whole church left unoccupied. St. Peter’s Church also, and St. Catherine were likewise overflowing. When he was in Dublin, his father’s servant was obliged constantly to stand the whole day in the hall to answer the never-ceasing inquiries of where he was to preach.23
The delivery of charity sermons on behalf of such institutions as the Royal Hospital School and the Meath Hospital became a regular feature of Roe’s visits to the capital. By the time he preached his last such sermon in 1837, it was estimated that the total sum collected over the years had amounted to £7300.24 His frequent visits to Dublin strengthened his acquaintance with the advocates of religious revival and moral reform, many of whom he had known since his student days. Of these, the most influential undoubtedly were the Rev. Benjamin William Mathias and James Digges La Touche. Like Roe, these men were young (in their mid-twenties), dedicated evangelicals, and firm in their commitment to the Church of Ireland. In character and outlook they likewise represented the manner and form that Irish episcopal evangelicalism was beginning to assume.
Mathias had been orphaned at an early age and had imbibed his religious principles from the man who had taken him as a ward, a Presbyterian minister named Dr Benjamin McDowell, who was known as ‘an earnest advocate of the Calvinistic theology’.25
Between 1791 and 1796 Mathias attended Trinity College, where his evangelical beliefs were strengthened but his institutional preference was channelled away from Dissent and towards the Church of Ireland. In 1798 he was ordained and took up an appointment in Rathfriland, County Down, and served as curate to the Rev. Thomas Tighe of Drumgooland where his commitment to evangelicalism was further reinforced. He returned to Dublin in 1805 to assume a position as chaplain to the Bethesda, which he held until 1835, when he was obliged to retire because of ill health. Throughout this period Mathias dominated the evangelical movement in the capital and was considered by many to have rendered more service to the ministry of the Church of Ireland than the professor of divinity in Trinity College. Preaching was his forte and the source of his great popularity and influence:
His voice, his appearance, his fluid address, his deep fervour, and the excellence of his matter all contributed to promote his popularity; and at length not a few of the elite of the metropolis became his constant auditors. Students of Trinity College, lawyers, physicians, gentry and nobility, as well as many of the humbler classes flocked to the Bethesda.26
Mathias’s popularity was a measure of how the evangelical spirit was moving from the fringe to the centre of religious life in the Church of Ireland. Originally the victim of censure and disapproval by both the archbishop of Dublin, who refused to allow him to preach in any licenced churches, and the provost of Trinity, who commanded students not to attend his sermons, Mathias went on to enjoy undisputed popularity in the 1820s as a leader of the most vital reform movement ever experienced by the Established Church.
Among the lay community, the involvement of several members of the La Touche family in the moral reform movement provides an equally illuminating picture of the ascendancy of the evangelical ethos. The La Touches were among the most famous of the Huguenot families who had set down roots in Ireland after the Williamite wars. By the end of the eighteenth century they were one of the most socially prominent families in Dublin with several townhouses in fashionable residential areas such as St Stephen’s Green and Ely Place, and substantial properties in land and mining throughout the provinces.27 Like the Guinness family they were a highly visible presence in the capital city’s many charitable and philanthropic enterprises.
By the turn of the century, the dynamic influence of evangelical morality was easily distinguishable in the opinions of John David La Touche, who confessed that he was ‘willing to spend and be spent in the service of the Lord’, even if it meant becoming a preacher of the gospel, on behalf of the spiritual and temporal welfare of his friends and relatives and mankind in general.28 Clearly an Enlightenment-inspired advocate of social reform, by his own admission he had made the transition from deism to ‘true religion’ as a result of conversations with Methodist friends.29 It was his youthful nephew, however, in whom the impulse for reforming zeal found its clearest expression. James Digges La Touche was a student at Trinity College between 1803 and 1808, during which time he became a regular worshipper at the Bethesda and involved himself in the founding and running of new organizations such as the Sunday School Society and the Hibernian Bible Society (HBS).30 In his private life his conscience was dominated by the struggle between the vanities and pleasures of the world and the demands of religion and morality, preoccupations he revealed and discussed in a remarkable series of letters written between 1808 and 1810 to his dearest friend and confidant, John Synge. Like many contemporaries who expressed the passions of the age through a religious idiom, La Touche was an ardent Romantic. He professed to love poetry (particularly Cowper), astronomy and the intimacy of close friendships.31 His friendship with Synge was especially prized because, as he claimed: ‘let the world think as it may, there is no stronger bond which cements friendships than joining to their other coincident affections that of fellow warriors in Christ’.32
This sense of a shared identity based upon allegiance to a common cause was a particular characteristic of the first generation of Irish evangelicals. Cutting across the boundaries of class, gender and denominational allegiance, it united people from all walks of life—laymen in business and the professions, clergymen, landlords, women, and politicians—into a cohesive movement aimed at effecting the transformation of society, which they believed was their gospel-based directive. Though he never wavered in his loyalty to the Church of Ireland, James Digges La Touche was at all times willing to cooperate with Nonconformists in order to further the evangelical cause. In later years his biographer and fellow evangelical, the Rev. William Urwick, described him as a man ‘who, had he lived on the south side of London instead of the south side of Dublin’, would have ‘belonged to that party in the Church of England which of late has been called the Clapham Sect’.33 Contrary to the impression given by his biographer, however, La Touche was not an isolated figure in Dublin, but part of a group of activists who made up the high command of the evangelical movement and dictated its character and progress throughout the first part of the nineteenth century.
AGENTS AND AGENCIES OF MORAL REFORM
From about 1805 onwards, Irish evangelicalism began to assume the character of an identifiable movement with explicit social and political aims. Voluntary societies organized on a national basis and designed to cater to special-interest areas such as Bible distribution or Sunday Schools provided the backbone of the system, and these were accompanied by a myriad of smaller, more local or experimental efforts, with such objectives as prison reform, the education of the deaf and dumb and the relief of destitute widows. The massive growth of private philanthropy heralded the involvement of the lay community on a large scale, and it also contributed to a growing spirit of goodwill and cooperation between evangelicals of the Church of Ireland and the Methodists and Independents. From the nature of the work undertaken by the voluntary societies, and the character of the men who provided the leadership and organizational skills necessary for their operation, it is possible to identify lay evangelicals as a distinct community and to mark the progress and eventual ascendancy of their particular views on religion, society and politics. By tracing the careers of a group of the most influential of these evangelical laymen, I shall attempt to show how their outlook and way of life, and their complementary and often interconnected efforts in the cause of moral reform, all contributed to the growth of an effective evangelical party whose influence in Ireland paralleled that of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect in England.
James Digges La Touche was the eldest son of William George Digges La Touche, one of the chief partners in the family’s banking firm. A diligent and serious student, following his graduation from Trinity College he assumed his father’s position as chief partner in the bank. He actively supported many of the new evangelical interdenominational concerns, particularly those connected with popular education. He was instrumental in launching the Hibernian Bible Society (HBS) in 1806 and was chiefly responsible for the founding of the Sunday School Society for Ireland in 1809. The accounts of almost all the evangelical societies were handled by his bank, and he gave liberally of his energy and his wealth in the cause of education and moral reform. Much of the success of the Sunday School Society in its formative years was attributed to his energy and dedication. In the opinion of his biographer, the Congregationalist minister Rev. William Urwick, ‘the service rendered by him as a “layman” to the cause of scriptural education in his native land could hardly have been exceeded’.34 After his untimely death in 1827 the Society that he had done so much to promote became a permanent appendage of the Church of Ireland in much the same manner as the Sunday School Union in Britain.
John Synge was the intimate friend and confidant of the young La Touche, and like him hailed from one of the most prominent gentry families of County Wicklow. A great-uncle of John Millington Synge, in his own lifetime he was known as ‘Pestalozzi John’ because of his admiration for the educational philosophy of the Swiss educator Heinrich Pestalozzi and his efforts to introduce Pestalozzian methods to Ireland. Following an extended visit to Pestalozzi’s famous institute in Yverdon in 1815, Synge returned to Ireland and set up a system of experimental schools at Roundwood, County Wicklow. The ‘Roundwood experiment’ included a printing press that produced textbooks for use in the schools as well as accounts of Synge’s experiences on the Continent. The ‘Pestalozzi method’ of instruction advocated by Synge was deemed more suitable than either the Bell or Lancastrian models then in vogue in England. It was adopted for use in a model school set up by the influential Viscount de Vesci in Abbeyleix and recommended for adoption by the Kildare Place Society (KPS), whose schools had spread across the entire country by the 1820s. Synge’s preoccupation with ‘serious religion’ took him into the more extreme wing of Irish evangelicalism that was centred on the Powerscourt family and led by Theodosia Howard, Viscountess Powerscourt. In the 1820s, under the leadership of John Nelson Darby, this group separated from the Church of Ireland and went on to form the splinter group known as the Plymouth Brethren. Synge was a prominent member of the group and eventually moved to the English West Country where the Brethren were particularly concentrated.35
Charles Edward Orpen was the youngest son of a Church of Ireland clergyman of Dungourney in West Cork. He was first introduced to vital religion as a way of life through the preaching of the Rev. John Quarry of Lower Shandon in Cork city, considered by many as one of the brightest stars of the revival in the Church of Ireland. A qualified medical doctor, Orpen was a prototypical evangelical in his unwavering commitment to use his skills in the service of God and humanity. Like his contemporaries he was deeply interested in the education of the poor. While recovering from a bout of typhoid fever in 1816 he used his time to give lessons to a deaf and dumb child, and from this point on made the education of the deaf and dumb his particular concern. He started a school for this purpose in Dublin in 1816 and three years later founded the Claremount Institute for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, which enjoyed the distinction of being the first school of its kind in the British Isles. In 1817–18 he toured the Continent with his brother and made a point of visiting every educational institution he knew of, spending three months with Pestalozzi in Yverdon. Even more than John Synge, he was overawed by the influence of the famous educator, and he thought that the simplicity of the Pestalozzian method was ideal for use in the education of the handicapped. Orpen was also a leading figure in the wing of the evangelical movement that took up the cause of educating the Catholic Irish in their native language, becoming in the process a passionate and outspoken defender of Irish language and culture. Widely respected for his integrity and patriotism by people on both sides of the religious divide, he is easily distinguishable as a harbinger of the cultural nationalism of Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s.36
Henry Joseph Monck Mason, a barrister and antiquarian, graduated from Trinity College as a gold medal winner in 1798. He never practised law but was appointed chief librarian at King’s Inns in 1815. He made a reputation as a champion of prison reform, but the guiding passion of his life was the culture and language of ancient Ireland. A friend of the poet Thomas Moore at Trinity during the 1790s, he went on to become a member of the short-lived Iberno-Celtic Society (founded 1810) dedicated to promoting Celtic literature. Monck Mason was also a close friend of the English poet, Robert Southey, and espoused the same brand of conservative nationalism as the Lake poets. He combined his passion for the Irish language and his evangelical commitments by founding the Irish Society for the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language (commonly known as the Irish Society) in 1818. A jealous partisan of Protestant ascendancy, he probably did more than any of his contemporaries to advance the theory that the Church of Ireland claimed legitimate descent from the ancient Celtic Church that had split with Rome in 684 ad and was thus considered as having set a precedent for the Church of England in the sixteenth century.37 Monck Mason was an active member of the Royal Irish Academy and his bigotry notwithstanding, his legacy in the area of Celtic studies is beyond question. He was the chief force behind the setting up of the Bedell scholarship and premiums for the study of Irish at Trinity College and was also instrumental in establishing the first professorship of Irish there in 1844.38
Thomas Langlois Lefroy was the eldest son of Anthony Lefroy of Carrai-glass, County Longford, a Trinity-educated barrister who enjoyed a lengthy and very public career in law and politics and typified the moral reformer in public life.39 There was hardly an organization on whose committee his name did not appear. He was involved with the running of KPS from its foundation in 1811 and sat on the original committee of the Hibernian Church Missionary Society in 1814, becoming a vice-president of the same Society in 1822; he was a life member of the Sunday School Society for Ireland, and of the Irish Auxiliary to the Jews Society. He was also a life member and vice-president of the Irish Society and the founder of its appendage, the Scripture Readers’ Society, in 1822. As a judge on the Munster circuit in the 1820s, his experiences left an enduring impression of the need for the moral improvement of the peasantry. He was mortified by their disdain for law and the authority of the courts (which he contrasted unfavourably with the attitude of the common people of England), and their adoration of his personal nemesis on the circuit, Daniel O’Connell. A lifelong foe of O’Connell and Catholic claims generally, he was part of the Orange plutocracy that dominated the legal profession, and that Lord Cloncurry (during the uproar over the use of the Bible in the schools of the KPS in 1819) with merciless accuracy described as ‘professional fanatics who in that day were in the habit of seeking, through Protestantism and piety, a ready road to the bench’.40 Lefroy was indeed appointed to the bench at King’s Inns in 1819. He became an MP as a member for Trinity College in 1831 and continued his career in law and politics well into his old age. He died in 1869 at the age of ninety-three, having resigned his position as lord chief justice of the Queen’s Bench only three years earlier.41
The most visible element uniting this group of men was the homogeneity of their backgrounds and their public occupations. All were Trinity-educated professionals of landed or upper-middle-class backgrounds, possessed of that self-conscious awareness of having been called upon to answer to the demands of ‘true Christianity’ that was the hallmark of the saved Christian. In the first instance this required an admission that man was born a sinner, and could be redeemed only through faith in the atoning death of Christ. Redemption was attained through a process of regeneration or conversion in which the true Christian would be ‘born again’ in his awareness of the infinite gift of God’s mercy. Such conversion often followed an experience that jolted the individual into a sense of his own mortality, such as the death of a beloved friend or family member or a life-threatening illness. Providence was also a key element in the evangelical’s awareness of his place in the world. The timing of one’s life on earth was understood to have been dictated by divine will or ‘providence’ in order to fulfil the Creator’s designs for the human race. Once these designs were established, the test of the true Christian was an unwavering commitment to their realization, regardless of obstacles and setbacks. This is what lay behind the relentless dedication of the evangelicals in whatever cause they chose to espouse, what Roger Anstey (in accounting for the persistence of the evangelical leadership of the movement to abolish slavery) has described as the ‘sheer dogged determination in the task to which they unfailingly believed God had called them’.42
The regenerate Christian could never rest content in the knowledge that he was saved, but was forever obliged to question his conscience regarding his behaviour in order to be accountable on the Day of Judgment. Commitment to the ideals of evangelical Christianity therefore involved not only intense self-examination and self-criticism, but also a sense that one had to account for one’s time, energy, and whatever gifts of intellect or personality one happened to be endowed with. Accountability was not simply an individual or personal affair, as the typical evangelical felt obliged not only to answer for himself but for his neighbour and indeed society at large. Evangelicals in consequence tended to be extremely hard-working, introspective and emotional at one level, and heavily involved in public life and politics at the other. They believed that if mankind in general could be brought, through a process of ‘willing submission’, to live according to the great principles of Christianity, that peace and harmony would universally prevail. It was their duty to work towards this end by promoting the Christian way of life through example and conviction and, above all, through leading ‘useful’ lives dedicated to the welfare of mankind and the glory of God. This was as true for those members of the evangelical community in Dublin whose careers I have used for representative purposes as it was for their fellow travellers in Clapham Common.
One of the major differences separating the ‘vital religion’ of the evangelical revival from the rational Christianity or Deism that had dominated religious outlook in the eighteenth century was the admission of passion into the religious experience. Evangelicalism, after all, professed to be ‘religion of the heart’ and its appeal was first and foremost to the emotions. The heart was seen as the true source of all that was natural and sincere in humanity, and evangelicals considered the cultivation of a ‘good heart’ as a far more worthy objective than high intellectual achievement. Heartfelt sincerity employed in the relief of human misery was also a powerful means of attracting converts to the fold. A Dublin Catholic who had converted to Methodism in 1773 after hearing John Wesley preach admitted that ‘what endeared him still more to me was seeing him stop to kiss a little child that stood on the stairs’.43
The emotional intensity that lay at the heart of the evangelical religious experience was carried over into every aspect of life. The expression of tenderness in human relations was a standard feature of the domestic life of evangelicals, and in this they were advocates of the cult of sensibility as much as the most ardent disciple of Rousseau.44 In many other areas of cultural expression and political aspiration it is possible to see the evangelical movement as the stream that absorbed the ideals of the late Enlightenment in the British Isles. The emphasis on virtue, sincerity and truth, the importance of expressing heartfelt emotions, the wholehearted desire for a new moral order and the impassioned commitment to achieve it through such pragmatic means as education and social and political reform—these constituted the psychological and social demands of the evangelical blueprint for the ideal society. In many respects it was the expression through a religious medium of what Rousseau and his disciples had called for in secular language. Indeed, some evangelicals like John Synge and Charles Edward Orpen went directly to the source of the continental Enlightenment for inspiration as well as practical methodology. Predictably they ran into trouble when they were faced with reconciling the Rousseau-inspired educational philosophy of Pestalozzi with the demands of an educational experiment centred on Christian teaching.45
The common objective shared by followers of the evangelical movement and the Enlightenment was to provide a system of belief and code of conduct that could accommodate the needs and aspirations of the individual in a mass society. The ‘willing submission’ to divine authority that formed the basis of a society governed on Christian principles was similar in many ways to the theory of the ‘general will’ formulated by Rousseau. Both systems aspired to accommodate the individual, whatever his rank or station, within the corporate whole, and both underlined education as the most vital instrument through which individuals would be prepared for membership in the new moral order. But while the extremities of the French Revolution had the effect of severely undermining the ideals of the secular Enlightenment on the Continent, they strengthened the hand of the moral reformers in the British Isles, particularly from the point of view of calling the upper classes to account for their lack of morals and ignorance of religion. Besides, secular philosophy suffered for being just that—the product of man’s attempts to provide his own understanding of the world and its ways—whereas teachings rooted in a system of religious belief based upon the written word were enormously more powerful and effective, especially during a time of great change and uncertainty. To be sure, there were contemporary interpretations of Christianity that professed to instruct people in the demands of the new moral order. William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Preofessed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797) became the behaviour manual of evangelicals for most of the nineteenth century. Hannah More’s tales taught the poor how to be satisfied with their situation in life and how to behave towards their social superiors. But it was the true source of the word, the Bible, that no one who called themselves a Christian could be without. The Bible was not only the chief source from which evangelicals drew their instruction and inspiration, it was equally powerful as an icon and symbol of the righteousness and superiority of the Protestant way of life. Not surprisingly, the dynamic with which the evangelical movement ‘took off’ within the religious establishments of both Britain and Ireland in the decade between 1795 and 1805 was characterized chiefly through the demand for the mass availability of the Bible.
The initial demand for the widespread production of bibles arose in connection with the Sunday School movement, which had been underway since the 1780s, and the rise of the foreign missionary societies in the 1790s. During this period two trends had combined to make British evangelicals conscious of their responsibility to convert the heathen or non-Christian peoples of the world. One was the knowledge of and interest in such people that had resulted from the enormous popularity of Captain Cook’s Voyages in the 1780s,46 and the scandal associated with the East India Company that was brought to light by the famous trial of Warren Hastings that had dragged on from 1788 to 1795. The second was the upsurge in millenarian expectation arising from the political upheavals of the time. The alarming events in France and especially the attack on the Catholic Church and the papacy caused many evangelicals to believe that the thousand-year reign of the Saints was at hand, which would be followed by the Second Coming of Christ. Certain conditions needed to be fulfilled before this would come to pass. For the Baptist preacher William Carey, the most important of these conditions was the conversion of the heathens? Carey’s famous An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians To Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen (1792) was the manifesto that initiated the modern Protestant missionary movement in the British Isles.47 In the same year the Baptist Missionary Society was founded, followed three years later by the London Missionary Society, another Dissenting organization that, although based in London, was heavily Scottish in character and influence and reflected the ‘common sense’ school of the Scottish Enlightenment. These two societies’ first experiences of missionary operations in India and Africa were marked by mutual support and cooperation. ‘Pan-evangelicalism’ or the coming together of evangelicals of different denominations on certain basic points of theology was a feature of the 1790s and prepared the ground for the cooperation and mutual support that governed interdenominational relations after the turn of the century.48
The Clapham Sect in particular were very favourably disposed to the work of the Baptists and Nonconformists in the foreign missions, and followed their example in 1799 with the founding of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), which quickly became a major force in the overseas missions. With far more access to funds and manpower than its predecessors, the CMS quickly took the lead and made the foreign missions and the conversion of the heathen a national cause in the early years of the new century. It was partly in response to the demand for bibles raised by these societies and partly because the Religious Tract Society (an Anglican body founded in 1799 to provide religious reading material for the domestic market) had drawn attention to the need for Bible distribution on the home front that the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was founded in 1804. The interdenominational character of the BFBS had been formulated well before its foundation and was responsible for the enormous success it enjoyed both at home and abroad.49 Although it was directed almost exclusively by members of the Clapham Sect, including William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Zachary Macaulay, Charles Grant and Sir John Shore (Lord Teignmouth), membership of the BFBS was open to people of every denomination, and its bibles were made available to Christians of every persuasion, including Catholics. The Bible Society was the quintessential expression of evangelical ecumenism and its auxiliaries and associations were soon to be found all over the British Isles and eventually all over the globe. Its basic objectives were twofold: to provide bibles in foreign languages wherever the ground had been cultivated for this purpose, and to supply the home market wherever the demand existed, whether it was in Sunday schools or the other innumerable philanthropic societies, or for distribution to the public through its own network of auxiliaries.
The demand for bibles in Ireland was accelerated by developments similar to those described above. Initially raised in connection with Sunday schools in the late 1780s, it was voiced even more emphatically in the 1790s by the ADV.50 In 1800 the ADV directed an appeal to ‘Irish absentees and particularly to the proprietors of landed estates who answered to that description’, describing the Bible as:
The irrefragible manifestation of God’s will to His rational creatures, [a quality which] raises it, with respect to practical efficacy, infinitely above all that ever came from the pen of man, and makes it a means of working on the public mind, of such invaluable importance as to render it doubtful whether they who neglect to give it the utmost possible circulation are more impious and impolitic, more insensitive to their own interest, or more ungrateful to their God.51
This bears the unmistakable stamp of Wilberforce’s Practical View, which was at this time beginning to make its influence felt in Ireland.52 The dangers inherent in the mass propagation of secular political philosophy, or ‘infidelity’ as professed Christians preferred to call it, were underscored by Peter Roe in 1799, in tones that were soon to become familiar throughout the country:
Be always on your guard against unbelievers. Nothing can prove their depravity more than their circulating, among the weak and half-learned, multitudes of their books, the principles of which destroy their comforts and happiness; and, while affecting to pity the humble and poor, strike at the best and sometimes, alas, their only refuge and consolation amidst the distresses and afflictions of the world—THE BIBLE.53
It was Peter Roe’s comrade-in-arms in the OCA, the Rev. Robert Shaw of Fiddown, County Kilkenny, who functioned as liaison between the Irish evangelicals and the leaders of the movement in England. During the 1798 Rebellion he had been active as a magistrate in his native county and had suffered a physical breakdown because of his exertions. When he was medically advised to cease parochial duties and to spend a period of time in travel, he used the opportunity to visit England in order to investigate tracts and bibles for the Irish market.54 He had already established contact with the CMS through its secretary, Josiah Pratt, but had cautioned somewhat apologetically that it was unlikely that Ireland would be able to contribute much to the cause of the foreign missions as it was the custom of the country to ‘promise much and never pay up’, but more especially because of the enormous want at home:
… for here we have no poor rates, and the poor have been so miserably neglected with respect to education, schools of industry etc. that the active clergy here have been obliged to apply themselves first to these purposes, and find that all the money they can make is insufficient to carry them on in any satisfactory manner … when I look around me here I feel much inclined to say ‘come over help us’ as the Indian might.55
This appeal was prescient. The connections Shaw established ensured that Ireland was kept informed about developments in the foreign missions and, more importantly, that the evangelical circle in London was made aware of the existence and needs of their Irish colleagues.56
In the early years of the century Shaw continued to operate independently as a collector of bibles and tracts for distribution in Ireland. Travelling from town to town by horse and cart and collecting bibles along the way, he returned to Ireland whenever his store was abundant and deposited his acquisitions in rural post offices. The postmasters, being Protestant, could be relied upon to see to it that they were properly disposed of. Between 1800 and 1810 Shaw made this pilgrimage annually and is said to have been responsible for the introduction of almost 100,000 copies of the scriptures to Ireland.57 He attended meetings in London whenever the opportunity afforded and was present at the founding of the BFBS. His colleagues in the OCA were also in contact with evangelical leaders in London and kept them informed of developments in Ireland. In 1804 Peter Roe was advising Josiah Pratt to have the existence and background of the OCA mentioned in the Christian Observer, the organ of the evangelical wing of the Church of England. He also assured Pratt that the Association would contribute its mite to the cause of the foreign missions.58 A year later another member of the OCA, Rev. George Carr, professed that the interest of the Association in the work of both the CMS and the BFBS was greater than ever, and they wished to know how they might transfer funds collected in Ireland. He recommended that they set up an account with the La Touche bank in Dublin and suggested that John David La Touche would probably be an active supporter. Carr suggested that it would be a highly edifying experience for Ireland if a representation was sent over by the CMS, as the spirit of the revival was spreading rapidly in the Church of Ireland ‘and a spirit of love and zeal increasing among many of our clergy’.59
It was several years before the CMS applied itself to the task of organizing an Irish auxiliary, however, and the cause of the foreign missions would never achieve the kind of popular support in Ireland that it enjoyed in Britain. But rapid strides were made in the direction of establishing a national Bible society on the model of the BFBS. The organizers included Peter Roe, B.W. Mathias and James Digges La Touche, and the Dublin Bible Society, as it was initially known, was set up in 1806 as an Irish auxiliary of the BFBS.60 By 1808, however, the bishops of Dublin, Kildare, Derry, Limerick and Cork had come out in support of the Society and the committee recommended ‘that one extensive institution pervading the whole country, having one grand fund, and acting on one plan, would contribute more to the general circulation of the scriptures in Ireland than the partial efforts of individuals or even of local and isolated societies’.61 Thus the Hibernian Bible Society came into being. From the beginning it was the largest and most prestigious of the Irish evangelical societies, fulfilling the same role as the BFBS in meeting the needs of different denominational elements within Irish evangelicalism. Its purpose was to provide bibles and tracts wherever they were needed, whether for use in schools, for sale to the public, or for gratuitous distribution. In structure it was modelled on the BFBS, but while there were strong connections between the two organizations, the operations of the HBS were confined strictly to the Irish sphere. The demands of the domestic mission were so great that there was nothing left to contribute to foreign endeavours. This situation ensured that the relationship between the HBS and the BFBS remained, as one commentator put it, ‘one of dependence or at best mutual goodwill’.62 This assessment is confirmed by the frequency with which donations of bibles to Ireland, free or at greatly reduced prices, are noted in the annual reports of the BFBS.
The HBS adopted the organizational model established by the CMS and BFBS, based on a network of branches and auxiliaries scattered throughout the provinces ‘in order to render a wider circulation of the scriptures more easily attainable by means of a systematic division of labour’.63 Where possible, the county associations or auxiliaries were located in cities or county towns and had under their immediate control the subordinate branches of the surrounding area. The associations were under the direction of local managers, who maintained close links with central headquarters in Dublin in order to ensure an adequate supply of material for distribution, to report on progress, and to contribute any surplus funds for use in the extension of the system. Free distribution of tracts and bibles was not permitted in the first instance, but those members with sufficient means could purchase various quantities and then distribute them without charge. This appears to have been a common practice, as was the sale of bibles to children attending scripture schools, with the payment often collected in installments.
The growth of the HBS reflected the fortunes of the Irish evangelical movement in general. There was a steady increase from the time of its foundation up to about 1820, followed by a period of intense activity and rapid expansion that lasted throughout the 1820s. In 1822 the Society had a total of 147 contributory institutions, and by 1834 this number had risen to 630.64 During the early days, however, the growth rate was modest. In the year 1812/13 there were still only eight associated institutions in the country, but in the following year this number increased to thirty-five after a preaching tour by three representatives from the CMS, Josiah Pratt and his colleagues Rev. Jowett and Wilson. This tour was part of a massive campaign launched in 1813 by the CMS to muster popular support for its mission in India, following the decision by parliament to allow missionaries to work freely there. The campaign for ‘missions to India’ sparked off a general revitalization of missionary endeavours of every kind throughout the British Isles, and events in Ireland were part of an overall pattern. Certainly, the BFBS expanded its domestic operations on an unprecedented scale, especially in extending its home mission, prompting the Christian Observer to comment that it was witnessing ‘one of the great epochs in the history of religion’.65 The rise of the Bible societies and the evangelical ethos in general was especially visible among the aristocracy. The earl of Bristol, at an anniversary meeting of the Suffolk Auxiliary of the BFBS in 1815, probably expressed the sentiments of the majority of his fellow Bible society supporters when he declared that
in an age when the most tremendous revolution ever known had desolated the fairest portion of the world and shaken to its foundations the whole fabric of civil society, mankind, roused by the awful vicissitudes of the scene, had risen superior to the paltry objects of worldly anxiety and taken refuge in the consolations of Christianity.66
In Ireland, however, the combined efforts of evangelicals, whether they were Methodist, Dissenting or Church of Ireland, were no longer directed against the infidelity of revolutionary France but focused instead on extending the moral reformation to the native Catholic population. This explains in part why, with the exception of the HBS, all of the major societies founded between 1805 and 1825 were in one way or another connected with popular education.
The evangelization of the Catholic Irish did not initially assume the apocalyptic urgency that characterized evangelical thinking with regard to the heathens and the Jews, whose conversion was considered a necessary prelude to the millennium. Guilt and an abiding sense of fear for the security of the kingdom during the Napoleonic Wars appear to have been the sentiments that informed evangelical opinion on the Catholic question on both sides of the Irish Sea during the early years of the nineteenth century. English evangelicals were generally quite sympathetic to Catholic claims, and prominent members of the Clapham Sect, including William Wilberforce and Charles Grant, actually favoured outright Emancipation.67 As the following extract from the Christian Observer in 1814 suggests, their main concern was for national security, in the face of the threat posed by Napoleon, as opposed to specific anti-Catholic bias:
Our own security as a nation is far more intimately blessed with the moral and religious improvement of the Irish, and with their advancement in civil light, than many would suppose. And if we do not attach them to our cause by benefit of the strong bonds of affection, they will prove, it is feared a sword in the hands of our enemy which will pierce us to the heart.68
In Ireland this blend of paternalistic benevolence and political calculation was espoused not only by committed evangelicals, such as Peter Roe and his colleagues in the OCA, but equally by many who supported moral and spiritual reform but who would not have subscribed to the independent tendencies and interdenominational activities of the more passionate revivalists. Indeed, by the first decade of the new century it was clear that the Church of Ireland had embarked on its own version of a revival and that while it drew from the example and competitive challenge of the Independents, it was resolved to plough its own furrow. This trend was most apparent in the appointment of able and ambitious men to episcopal office and their determination to provide sound leadership for both spiritual renewal and the expansion of the Church’s role in national affairs.
Among the new breed of Church of Ireland reformers were the archbishop of Cashel, Charles Brodrick, and his lifelong correspondent Rev. John Jebb of Abingdon Glebe, who would succeed to the bishopric of Limerick in 1819. Both were fervent supporters of a moral crusade directed exclusively by the Church of Ireland that aimed to embrace the Catholic population. In the outline of a sermon that was being prepared for the ADV in 1802, Jebb addressed the task of ‘bringing over’ the Catholics to the side of the establishment in a genuine spirit of Christian charity. If the Protestant establishment, particularly the landholders and the clergymen of the Church of Ireland, could be persuaded to conduct their lives according to the Biblical directive, he believed that their benevolence and sincerity would induce the Catholic poor to receive the Bible ‘without suspicion of any sinister view’. The latter would quickly learn to establish the difference between those who would ‘hold them in, like brute beasts, with bit and bridle’ and those who would ‘draw them with the cords of a man, with the bonds of love’. The result would be a country where scripture would ‘rule the life and regulate the heart, preparing the way for the glorious time when Christ’s kingdom of universal piety shall be established on earth, and for the still more glorious consummation of all things in heaven’.69
In the case of both Jebb and Brodrick, there was more than a hint of sympathy for the condition of the Catholic poor and a corresponding criticism of the callousness of the landlord class.70 But they were keenly aware that if the economic and political order were restructured to accommodate the grievances of the Catholics, the Church of Ireland would be the first institution to be sacrificed. Jebb was in favour of a system of national education that would be financed in part by government funds and directed by ministers of the Established Church.71 As early as 1800 this idea was being actively promoted by the ADV (Jebb and Brodrick were both ardent supporters of the organization), which conducted a national survey to investigate how such a system might be implemented and the likelihood of its success among the Catholic population. This was not the first instance in which the education of the Catholic Irish had been addressed by the Protestant establishment, but it did represent a new departure in addressing this challenge in the spirit of the dedication and pragmatic innovation of the evangelical revival. As such it inaugurated a period of intense activity and bitter disputation over the control of popular education that inevitably spilled over into the political arena.
THE GRAND DESIGN
If there was an idea to which everyone in Ireland regardless of class, creed, or ethnic background could subscribe in the traumatic years following 1798, it was the desirability of providing for the education of the Catholic poor. In England during the 1790s, the fear of revolution had merged with the rationalism of the Enlightenment to produce a virtual orthodoxy on the need for the education of the lower classes.72 In Ireland this opinion had an even older pedigree, going back to the 1780s, and it was enhanced by a tradition of state support for education that dated from the time of Henry VIII. Evangelical supporters of popular education in Ireland kept up the tradition and were equally insistent on the need for government money to finance their schools. This was to have profound implications for both their initial successes and their ultimate failure.
Historically, education in Ireland differed greatly from the system that had developed in England. The difference can best be explained by the hopes and fears of the colonial administration that governed its progress. Since the sixteenth century, education had taken its place in Ireland alongside religion as a key area through which the social cleavage between native and colonial could be maintained, and also as an avenue whereby those of the native Irish who desired it, and possessed the necessary means, might rid themselves of the trappings of their native culture and assume those of the colonial power. As a result, education came to play a critical role in the social and political framework of the country, a role that had no equivalent in contemporary England.
The distinguishing feature of the Irish system was the allocation of government aid. Ever since the time of Henry VIII the government had enacted legislation that provided for the establishment of schools, and state subsidies were allocated for their continuing support. The three types of institutions brought into being in this manner were known as ‘parish’, ‘diocesan’, and ‘royal’ schools, and together they catered for the children of the nobility and the middle classes.73 English and Protestant in orientation, these schools complemented the concurrent attempt to suppress the native culture and the Catholic religion. The education of Catholics did not become a serious issue for the government until the end of the eighteenth century, despite the exhortations of individuals like the Rev. Hugh Boulter, the Protestant archbishop of Armagh, who had advised the government in a petition in 1730 that the only way in which the native Irish might be civilized would be
that a sufficient number of English Protestant schools be erected and established, wherein the children of the Irish natives might be instructed in the English tongue and the fundamental principles of true religion, to both of which they are generally great strangers.74
This appeal was repeated by the founders of the Charter Schools, and government aid was provided when the Society was incorporated by an act of the Irish legislature in 1733. An annual subsidy begun in 1745, averaged £11,850 by the last decade of the century.75 And yet the Charter Schools had little to show for their efforts because of the inertia of the managers and the general hostility of the Catholic population to the overtly proselytizing character of the schools. When the education of Catholics was again considered, it was in a markedly different climate of opinion.
The decade of the 1780s, which witnessed the flowering of the Patriot parliament and the implementation of relief measures for Catholics, also saw a reconsideration of educational reform. Initiated by John Hely-Hutchinson, the liberal provost of Trinity College, the question was taken up by Thomas Orde, an MP both at Westminster (1780–90) and in Dublin (as a representative for Rathcormack, 1784–90), as well as chief secretary for Ireland under the duke of Rutland (1784–7).76 Orde’s proposals extended to the whole system then in operation in Ireland and included an appeal that the education of the peasantry be taken into account because, in his view, ‘all the violent and atrocious acts which have too often disgraced this nation’ were the results of a want of education, which in its turn produced a want of obedience to the law. His proposal was revolutionary in its implications and has rightly been described as a ‘touchstone in the evolution of the core of ideas from which the national system of education was eventually to be fashioned’. It achieved little in the immediate sense, except to act as a spur to a study conducted during the administration of Alleyne Fitzherbert, Orde’s successor as chief secretary, begun in 1788 and presented in 1791. Like its predecessor it called for novel and revolutionary changes in the system, but it was likewise consigned to the archives, partly because its findings, especially those concerning the Charter Schools, were too disturbing to be made public, and partly because parliament was at this time becoming absorbed in matters of greater urgency.77
The question of educating the Catholic Irish nevertheless intensified as a subject of serious debate throughout the 1790s. Around 1800 the ADV began to commission reports on the state of education among the poor, from the point of view of what was already being provided for and how the demand might effectively be exploited by moral reformers in clerical and political life, as well as by landed aristocrats. In a separate appeal to absentees among the latter group, the ‘vulgar Irish’ were described (no doubt in light of the atrocities of the Wexford rebellion) as
bloody and ferocious, retaining the habits and feelings of savages, devoid of lasting gratitude, and ready at the impulse of any groundless resentment to exercise the most unrelenting cruelty where shortly before they had proffered the most affectionate attachment.78
In what was to become one of the most popular slogans of the campaign it was stressed that the inhabitants of Wales and Scotland, who had once been as primitive and uncivilized as the Irish, had been made peaceful and industrious by virtue of their exposure to the scriptures.79 Clearly the duty of landlords was to foster the development of scripture-based education, such as was promoted by the ADV, among their tenants.
In the first flush of enthusiasm the ADV commissioners were optimistic about the prospect of success. The presence of popery was mentioned as the grand obstacle, but only insofar as it was connected with ignorance and not a source of animosity.80 Attention was drawn to the cooperation and goodwill that was known to exist between the rival denominations: Catholics often attended schools run by Protestants, and Protestant children were instructed in the catechism of the Church of England by Catholic masters when no other alternative was available to them.81 But what was emphasized as the most important indicator of future success was the insatiable demand for schooling among Catholics of every social class, and especially among the rural poor. The peasantry of the south and west, it was reported, despite their impoverished state and the fact that what was being imbibed was often ‘imperfect and objectionable’, were nevertheless managing to educate their children in far greater numbers than their more prosperous Protestant neighbours in the northern counties.82 What enabled them to do this were the so-called ‘hedge schools’: an informal (but no longer illegal) system devised by the poor to provide as best they could for their own education. In tandem with the spread of the market economy and the growth of population in the late eighteenth century, these schools had proliferated, causing every commentator of the Irish scene to marvel at the ‘thirst for knowledge’ exhibited even by the most wretched of the peasantry.83 The ADV committee described the system they saw in operation near Castleisland in County Kerry, where an itinerant master would open his school at the head of the ploughland under a ditch covered with heath and furze; to this abode the wretched inhabitants would send their naked, starving children to learn reading, writing and accounts. At the approach of winter the school would close and the master would be accommodated by local people.84 ‘If the habits of the people are now unfettered and irregular,’ they claimed, ‘they at the same time manifest a spirit of inquiry and enterprise, which, when well directed, would be found to furnish a powerful principle of national improvement.’ It was the decided opinion of the committee that the desire for education that prevailed to such an extraordinary degree afforded the government ‘the most favourable opportunity of effecting an important change in the manners of the lower classes’.85
The ADV was the first organization to encourage the attendance of Catholic children at schools where the scriptures formed the basis of instruction. When the Association was incorporated in 1801, it was awarded an annual stipend for educational purposes and began operations by attempting to reform and restructure the parish-school system. Provision had been made for these schools by statutes enacted during the reigns of Henry VIII and William III, but by 1800, except for a small number of schools conducted by the Established Church, they existed only on paper.86 What the ADV sought to achieve was the creation of a whole new system based on these ancient statutes. In the main, the projected scheme was closely based upon the work of Orde and of the commissioners, whose inquiry was reported on in 1791. It provided the basic design for a national system under the control of the Church of Ireland. The schools were to be open to all qualified applicants, regardless of their religion, but management was to remain strictly in the hands of the Church authorities. The leading object of the schools, as reported to a famous inquiry of 1825, was to provide ‘an extended system of catechetical instruction’ specifically suited to the requirements of the established religion.87 Only the authorized version of the Bible and the catechism of the Church of England were to be employed for such instruction. Catholic children, however, were exempted from attending catechism classes, although they were obliged to read the scriptures.88 Once the schools conformed to the main demands of the ADV, i.e. when the managers and teachers were of the established religion and the rules concerning the Bible and catechism were adhered to, the curriculum appears to have been devised by the individual schools and teachers.
All accounts agree that for the first two decades of the century, Catholic children attended these schools in almost the same numbers as Protestants. Although scriptural education was the avowed aim of the ADV in its attempted rehabilitation of the parish school system, it relied on enticements rather than on obligatory conditions to influence the religious inclinations of the pupils. It was assumed, correctly, that Catholic parents in some cases might conclude that the reading of the Protestant Bible was a small price for their children to pay in exchange for the three Rs. This was especially true when there was no opposition from the local priest, and when the conversion of Catholic children was not attempted. It was hoped or assumed by the directors of the system that exposure to the Bible without note or comment would go some way towards enlightening Catholic pupils about the spiritual darkness of the Church of Rome. This was the basic strategy of all the evangelical agencies involved with the education of the Catholic Irish. The principle of scriptural instruction was so firmly entrenched as the cornerstone of popular education that it eventually assumed an ideological dominance that held sway even with the promoters of a professedly nonsectarian system such as the KPS.
Outside of the immediate circle represented by the ADV and the Church of Ireland, the debate on popular education became a matter of national urgency in the early years of the nineteenth century. The anger and alienation of the peasantry following the bloody suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, and the impending prospect of Emancipation consequent upon the passing of the Union, caused every serious observer of the Irish scene to ponder the future with alarm. With his unerring sensitivity to the realities of Irish politics, Peter Burrowes went to the heart of the dilemma when he confessed that he
knew no case of modern times … more calculated to puzzle future statesmen than to account for the stability of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland since the Revolution. To continue it after the Union would be infinitely more difficult. Now that by a relaxation of the Penal Laws they [the Catholics] have been suffered to outgrow that bondage, and with republican France eager to avail itself of their discomforts, and wanting only some cement to keep their friends together, is it possible that the Catholics of Ireland can be permanently alienated and the two countries permanently united? [my emphasis]89
Education came to be seen not only as the most acceptable but also in many cases as the only possible solution. The bishop of Durham, writing to the new lord chancellor, Lord Redesdale, emphatically asserted that
till means are adopted to render education and its consequences, moral and industrious habits, more general among the lower class of Irish Catholics, till they are humanized, civilized, and Christianized, even in the erroneous opinions of their own Church, they will continue what they have been, thorns in the sides of both countries.90
The setting up of a statutory commission of inquiry on Irish education in 1806 is one measure of the importance the government placed on the issue. The commission sat for six years and produced no less than fourteen reports on the various educational institutions then operating in Ireland. In the Fourteenth Report the commissioners recommended State intervention in Irish education to a degree that had no historical precedent either in England or Ireland. A permanent body of education commissioners was established to administer an integrated system of education for the poor, including the building of schools, the professionalization of the teaching profession and the inspectorate, and the development of a suitable curriculum. This in itself was a revolutionary departure and pointed towards the future of educational developments in Ireland.91 Of equal importance was the emphasis the commissioners placed on the absolute necessity of respecting religious differences:
We conceive this to be of central importance in any new establishments for the education of the lower classes in Ireland, and we venture to express our unanimous opinion, that no such plan however wisely and unexceptionally contrived in other respects, can be carried into effectual execution in this country, unless it be explicitly avowed, and clearly understood, as its leading principle, that no attempt shall be made to influence or disturb the peculiar religious tenets of any sect or description of Christians.92
The board of education created in 1813, however, was not designed to cater for the massive effort needed to extend general education to the poor, but concerned itself exclusively with the state-aided schools already in existence. The organization that exploited the government’s promise to fund schools that operated according to the recommendations of the Fourteenth Report was the Society for the Education of the Poor in Ireland, otherwise known as the Kildare Place Society. As the most successful of all the educational agencies that operated in Ireland prior to the establishment of the National Board in 1831, the Society had an interesting pedigree that was rooted in the blending of Quaker philanthropy and the Sunday School movement dating from 1786. In that year a group of Dublin philanthropists that included Arthur Guinness, of the famous brewing family, and Samuel Bewley, a prominent businessman and spokesman for the Society of Friends, drew up plans for the foundation of a Sunday school in St Catherine’s parish. One of the first tasks undertaken by its committee was to compose a statement of purpose for distribution to parents who wished to send their children to the school. It was stated explicitly that after each class ‘children belonging to the Established Church were to be taken to divine service, and the Roman Catholic children, in charge of a discreet person, to their own place of worship’. The school was opened on 22 January 1786 and proved so popular that within a few years it could no longer accommodate the number of children who wished to attend. This situation led the directors, chief among them Samuel Bewley, to consider purchasing separate premises for the provision of a more general education for the children of Dublin’s poor. A building capable of accommodating 1500 children was erected in a place known as Crawley’s Yard, which was ever afterwards called School Street. The cost of the building was met by voluntary contributions, including ‘some large ones from Roman Catholics’ secured largely through Bewley’s initiatives. Catholic support may be explained by the express provision of the trustees that the premises ‘should not be occupied for any sectarian education’.93
The Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland was formally inaugurated in December of 1811. According to its First Report, its leading principle was ‘to afford the same advantages for education to all classes of professing Christians without interfering with the religious principles of any’.94 At the same time it was stated unequivocally that the scriptures without note or comment (as opposed to catechisms or books on religious controversy) should be used for religious instruction, ‘as all denominations of Christians profess that the Sacred Scriptures are the criterion by which they desire to have their peculiar tenets examined’.95 The Second Report, however, made it clear that the ambitions of the Society went far beyond the classroom. Discipline, cleanliness and industrious habits were all underlined as obvious benefits of a well-regulated educational system.96 The ideological content of the reading matter was seized upon as the most crucial instrument of change. The provision of reading material that would impart morality in public and private conduct became one of the Society’s immediate objectives and a special sub-committee eventually laid out plans for a Cheap Book Society with lending libraries in the main provincial centres.97
The all-embracing character of the Society’s aims were stipulated from the very beginning. What the directors had in mind was nothing less than a complete revolution in the mentalité of the Irish poor through the medium of education and popular literature. But this was no imposition from the top down, along the lines of what had been accomplished in Prussia, for example, during the previous century. By the time the KPS made its appearance, the revolution in popular education in Ireland was already in full spate. In a particularly revealing passage from its Second Report, the committee willingly acknowledged, albeit in a strongly pejorative tone, the influence of village or hedge schools and itinerant masters, which they claimed were general throughout the country:
for such education as has been objected to, under the idea of its leading to evil rather than to good, they are actually obtaining for themselves; and though we conceive it practicable to correct it, to check its progress appears impossible—it may be improved, but it cannot be impeded [my emphasis]98
The task facing the Society was therefore clearly perceived as the harnessing and redirecting of a popular movement that was considered haphazard, uncontrolled, and a potential threat to social and political stability. The enormity of the challenge demanded innovative, even revolutionary measures, and this accounts in part for its turbulent history over the following twenty years.
In its organizational structure and basic policy towards the sensitive question of religious differences, the KPS borrowed heavily from the recommendations set forth by the government commissioners in their Fourteenth Report. Teaching as a career was to be established on a modern professional basis with a training college, decent schoolhouses, regular salaries and an inspectorate. Curriculum needs were to be supplied by the books and primers produced by the Society itself, which would be careful to avoid any possible sources of controversy or insult to the Catholic religion. In theory it appeared that the Society was at this time poised to establish itself as the chief agency of the moral revolution that so many looked to as the salvation of the country.
There were two major obstacles that stood in the way of its ambitious programme, however. The first was the question of how the system would be funded. The second was the likely response from the Catholic poor, the object of the enterprise, or more particularly from the priesthood who oversaw their moral and spiritual affairs. The initial outlook of the Society’s directors was not optimistic. Like many others engaged in the business of philanthropy in Ireland, they found that it was the custom of the country to promise much and pay little, and that while the education of the poor had become ‘the subject of discussion among the enlightened, and even the theme of conversation among the fashionable’, there was ‘a lamentable apathy on the subject whenever such persons are invited to realize their theories and carry them into execution’.99
Because they adhered so closely to the commissioners’ recommendations, however, they were in a particularly strong position to petition for public funds, although even this strategy was not adopted without caution.100 This may have been the result of fears that such assistance would damage their reputation among Catholics. From the very beginning the Society was anxious to promote itself as a specifically Irish concern and vehemently resisted any attempts by the British and Foreign School Society to promote it as one of its auxiliaries.101 In 1816, however, the KPS successfully petitioned parliament for a grant of £10,000, which was increased substantially over the following ten years.102 This was what allowed it to make such rapid progress in constructing the rudiments of a truly national system of education in Ireland.
The question of Catholic support was even more complicated than that of securing government funds. Because of its sensitivity to sectarian differences, the KPS had issued a clear declaration of neutrality in religious affairs aimed at appeasing Catholic public opinion. Prominent laymen, notably Daniel O’Connell and some leading members of what was left of the old Catholic aristocracy, were invited to sit on the board of directors and were thus involved in policy-making at the highest level. Similarly, at the parish level the Society was always careful to consider local needs and prejudices when it came to the selection of teachers and school managers, who were often Catholic priests. Even so, it was uncertain whether the enterprise upon which the KPS had embarked would be perceived as an agency working in the national (i.e. mainly Catholic) interest or as a cloak for the imposition of a new moral order geared towards the maintenance of Protestant power and the English connection.
In the event, its chances of weathering the stormy waters of Irish political life in the early nineteenth century were lessened considerably by trends that were taking shape within the broader world of the international awakening. By the second decade of the new century the evangelization of the Catholic Irish had been added to the list of what needed to be accomplished in order to remake the world in God’s image, and the countryside was awash with missionary agents and itinerant preachers, all working towards this goal. In a period of intense social and political change this made for a highly inflammable situation. The KPS, with its carefully thought-out strategies and sensible objectives, would be the first major victim of the flames.
Notes
1. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, p. 886.
2. Fourth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1814), p. 13.
3. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 22 Oct. 1815 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/4).
4. Mark A. Noll, ‘Revolution and the rise of evangelical social influence in North Atlantic societies’ in Noll et al. (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies, pp. 113–36.
5. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, p. 280.
6. Peter Burrowes to Sir Laurence Parsons, 23 Oct. 1800 (PRONI, Rosse Papers, D/2/11).
7. Whitley Stokes, Projects for Establishing Internal Peace (Dublin 1799), pp. 44–8.
8. The Rev. Joseph Stopford, scion of a long-established clerical family and famous for his piety and charity, was well known as the spiritual benefactor of many of the younger generation of Trinity evangelicals. His best-known protégé was the Rev. Peter Roe of Kilkenny. Another case is that of Thomas Lefroy who was taken into the family of Peter Burrowes during his student days. Liechty, ‘Irish evangelicalism’, p. 149.
9. Ibid. pp. 165–6.
10. Rev. Singleton Harpur, A Sermon against the Excessive Use of Spiritous Liquors (Dublin 1788). The same clergyman was also the probable author of an anonymous pamphlet Observations on the Consequences of the Excessive Use of Spirituous Liquors and the Ruinous Policy of Permitting Distillation in this Country, also published in 1788. In both pieces the connection between improvements in manners and morals and the economic prosperity of the nation was strongly underlined.
11. Bradley, Call to Seriousness, pp. 95–7.
12. Hints on the Means of Forming a Plan for Advancing Religious Education, Addressed to the Members of the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Practice of Religion and Virtue (Dublin 1788). Several sources, including Warburton et al.’s City of Dublin, cite 1792 as the year in which the Association was founded, although the above pamphlet makes it clear that it existed in some fashion four years earlier.
13. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, pp. 887–91. For an account of Hannah More’s popularity in the 1790s see Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (London and New York 1997), pp. 136–8.
14. Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge 1961), p. 257.
15. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol. II, p. 87. Myrtle Hill, ‘Evangelicalism and the churches in Ulster society’, p. 112.
16. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 70.
17. Samuel Madden, Memoir of the Life of the Late Rev. Peter Roe (Dublin 1842), p. 64.
18. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 53.
19. Ibid. p. 72.
20. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 82.
21. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 75.
22. Ibid. p. 68.
23. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 144. The Rev. Walter Blake Kirwan was the most famous preacher of the ‘charity sermon’ in Dublin during the early nineteenth century. He was a native of Galway and a convert from Catholicism who had been educated at Douay. There is no evidence that he sympathized with the evangelical doctrine, but he nevertheless put his preaching skills at the disposal of institutions with strong evangelical affiliations like the Magdalen Asylum. For an account of his background and career, see Desmond Bowen, Souperism: Myth or Reality? A Study in Souperism (Cork 1970), pp. 31–3.
24. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 152.
25. W.D. Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Present Times, vol. II (London 1875), p. 382.
26. Ibid.
27. For an account of the background of the La Touche family and their extensive influence in banking and politics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see David Dickson and Richard English, ‘The La Touche dynasty’ in David Dickson (ed.), The Gorgeous Mask: Dublin 1700–1850 (Dublin 1987), pp. 17–29.
28. Diary of John David La Touche, 1799–1800 (NLI, MS 3153), p. 11.
29. Diary of John David La Touche, ibid. p. 29; Mathias Joyce to Thomas Coke, 21 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74, no. 6).
30. William Urwick, Biographical Sketches of the Late James Digges La Touche (London 1868), p. 81.
31. A discussion of Cowper’s popularity among the religiously inclined is to be found in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago and London 1987).
32. James Digges La Touche to John Synge, 19 Nov. 1808 (TCD, La Touche–Synge Correspondence, MS 6180/4).
33. William Urwick, La Touche, pp. 222–3.
34. Ibid. pp. 53–4.
35. The most complete account of the career of John Synge is to be found in P. Clive Williams, ‘Pestalozzi John: A study of the life and educational work of John Synge, with special reference to the introduction and development of Pestalozzian ideas in Ireland and England’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin 1966).
36. Emma Le Fanu, The Life of the Rev. Charles Edward Herbert Orpen MD (London 1860). For a personal account of Orpen’s European travels and his stay with Pestalozzi see the Christian Examiner (Oct. 1828).
37. The purity of the Celtic church and its independence from Rome was a popular theme with supporters of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. See Angus Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (New York 1998), p. 30.
38. Sydney Lee and Leslie Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XII (London 1885–1901), pp. 1308–9.
39. He makes a brief appearance in English literary history as the young man with whom Jane Austen fell in love in the 1790s, though he eventually married the daughter of a County Wexford yeoman whom he met in Abergavenny in North Wales, where many Wexford Protestants had taken refuge during the Rebellion.
40. Valentine Browne Lawless, Personal Recollections of the Life and Times of Valentine, Lord Cloncurry (Dublin 1869), p. 376.
41. Thomas Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Thomas Lefroy, By His Son (Dublin 1871); Lee and Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XI, p. 845.
42. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (London 1975), p. 175.
43. A Short Account of the Late Mr. Mathias Joyce, Preacher of the Gospel for Thirty Years in Ireland. Written by Himself (Dublin 1808), p. 9.
44. The correspondence of the Rev. George Hamilton to his wife and daughters affords powerful evidence of the love and affection that characterized evangelical family relations. See George Hamilton to Harriet Hamilton, 20 July 1822 (PRONI, Johnston of Kilmore Papers, MS D.1728/7/18).
45. Charles Edward Orpen to J.H. Pestalozzi, 4 June 1818, and John Synge to J.H. Pestalozzi (1816–1818) Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, Pestalozzi Papers, MS 54 A/272; 55 A/365); Williams, ‘Pestalozzi John’, pp. 148–54.
46. For an account of the impact of Captain Cook’s descriptions of his adventures in the South Atlantic see Kathleen Wilson, ‘The island race: Captain Cook, Protestant evangelicalism and the construction of English national identity, 1760–1800’ in Claydon and McBride, Protestantism and National Identity, pp. 265–90.
47. Martin, Evangelicals United, pp. 40–1; D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London 1989), p. 62.
48. For an evaluation of the attitudes of Dissenting evangelicals to interdenominational cooperation see Deryck W. Lovegrove, ‘Unity and Separation: Contrasting elements in the thought and practice of Robert and James Alexander Haldane’ in Keith Robbins (ed.), Protestant Evangelicalsm: Britain, Ireland, Germany, and America c. 1750–1950, Essays in Honour of W.R. Ward (Oxford 1990), pp. 153–77.
49. P.R. Thomas, ‘The concept of an ecumenical Bible society movement, 1804–1832’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster 1980), pp. 5–26.
50. An Account of the Institution and Proceedings of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Practice and for Aiding and Assisting Sunday Schools in the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin 1788).
51. An Address to the Proprietors of Irish Estates Residing in Great Britain (Dublin 1800), p. 2.
52. In a letter to William Wilberforce written in 1799 or 1800, Peter Roe described the feeling he experienced on first reading the Practical View, which ‘told me more than I ever knew before; brought fully to my conviction the corruption and depravity of my nature, and my need of a redeemer; and proved to me that instead of knowing my duty as a minister of Christ’s gospel, I did not know it as a man. It put me on a train of thinking, and to it I may in a great measure attribute any degree of zeal I may possess’. According to his biographer, the letter was left in an unfinished state. Madden, Peter Roe, pp. 52–3.
53. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 35.
54. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 70; Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, p. 389.
55. Robert Shaw, Carrick-on-Suir, to Josiah Pratt, Secretary, Church Missionary Society, London, 4 April 1802 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 66).
56. Peter Roe to Josiah Pratt, 16 May 1804 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 22).
57. Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. II, p. 390.
58. Peter Roe to Josiah Pratt, 16 May 1804 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/2, no. 22).
59. George Carr to Josiah Pratt, 7 Jan. 1805 (CMS Archives, G/AC, 3/3, no. 84).
60. John Owen, The History of the Origin and First Ten Years of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London 1816), p. 104.
61. The Report of the Hibernian Society for the Year 1808, with a list of subscribers and benefactors (Dublin 1809), p. 7.
62. Acheson, ‘Evangelicals’, p. 66.
63. Hints for the Formation and Conducting of Auxiliary Societies and Associations of the Hibernian Bible Society (Dublin n.d.), p. 2.
64. William Canton, A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London 1804), p. 113.
65. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians, pp. 253–4.
66. Ibid.
67. This opinion was by no means unanimous, however. The famous abolitionist Granville Sharp believed that the Emancipation of Catholics would be ‘liberty of the sword’, and ‘The only mode of balancing the superiority of their numbers in Ireland, for the safety of the Irish Protestants, is surely to retain the constitutional limits of power in the hands of Protestants only: but, at the same time it is our duty as Christians to secure to the Romanists the free attainment of equal justice in the King’s Courts for the protection of their persons and property; and to treat them also with true Christian benevolence and kindness, as men and brethren, in every other respect except that of restraining their persecuting propensity, a restraint which is equally necessary for their peace, as well as our own.’ Granville Sharp to John Jebb, 26 March 1805 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/2).
68. Christian Observer (April 1814), 240.
69. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 26 July 1802 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/1).
70. In 1816, when the tithe question was once again a matter of national debate, Jebb penned a witty epigram in which he drew attention to the hypocrisy of landlords who colluded with the peasantry in opposing the payment of tithe: ‘What say the landlords in their grave debate: / “Taxes must be paid for rents are our estate / Taxes are fair, they feed the civil powers / Those persons guard property, and that is ours / But tithes—withhold,—resist them,—put them down / Tithes never brought our Worships half-acrown.” / Landlord and outlaw, thus, at length, proceed / And sordid selfishness theircommon creed / His worship prompts, and “Moonlight” deals the blow / And tithes, and Church, and pastor are laid low / But mark the strange event of human things / His worship gets the tithe, and “Captain Moonlight” swings.’ John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 12 June 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/5). For an account of Archbishop Brodrick’s attitudes as reflected in his personal correspondence see Deborah Jenkins, ‘The correspondence of Charles Brodrick (1761–1822), Archbishop of Cashel’, Irish Archives Bulletin (1979/80), 43–9. Dr Brodrick’s wife, Mary, was the daughter of Richard Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, and his writings reflect many of the preoccupations of his well-known father-in-law.
71. The opinions of Jebb and Brodrick on the role of education in building a Christian society clearly reflect the teaching of Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish theologian and moralist whose influence was in the ascendant during the early years of the century. For an account of Chalmers’ life and influence see Stewart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford 1982).
72. R.A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783–1852 (London 1969), pp. 359–62.
73. D.H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London 1970), pp. 20–9.
74. Quoted in ibid. p. 31.
75. Ibid. p. 32.
76. Ibid. p. 61.
77. Ibid. pp. 63–74.
78. An Address to the Proprietors of Irish Estates Residing in Great Britain (Dublin 1800), pp. 3–4.
79. Ibid. pp. 10–11.
80. Two Reports of the Committee of Education, Appointed by the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting Religion and Virtue, on the Dioceses of Clogher and Kilmore (Dublin 1800), p. 13.
81. Report of the Committee of Education, Appointed by the Association for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Knowledge and Practice of the Christian Religion (Dublin 1803), p. 15.
82. Ibid. p. 9.
83. One commentator who noted the extraordinary increase of schools throughout Ireland in the early years of the nineteenth century was emphatic in his opinion that material advancement was what lay behind the demand: ‘the education of youth is only a secondary object with most parents—many are induced more by custom and necessity to educate their children, than on account of any moral or scientific advantages that might arise … the acquisition of gain seems to be the ruling passion of the present day …’ Patrick Carolan, An Essay on the Present State of Schools in Ireland (Dublin 1806).
84. Report of the Committee of Education, p. 10.
85. Ibid. pp. 13–14.
86. James Joseph Sullivan, ‘The education of Irish Catholics, 1782–1831’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, Belfast 1959), pp. 252–7.
87. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), 400, XII, p. 34.
88. Ibid. p. 31.
89. Peter Burrowes to Laurence Parsons, 23 Oct. 1800 (PRONI, Rosse Papers, D/2/11).
90. Shute Barrington to Lord Redesdale, 8 June 1805 (PRONI, Redesdale Papers, T.3030/10/15/c.23).
91. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 77.
92. Quoted in ibid. pp. 77–8.
93. Warburton et al., City of Dublin, vol II, pp. 852–5.
94. Ibid. p. 872.
95. First Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1813), p. 3.
96. Second Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1814), p. 10.
97. Book Sub-Committee, 1815–40 (B.S.1–97). B.S.1 (Church of Ireland College of Education, Kildare Place Archives, box no. 13).
98. Second Report of the Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland (Dublin 1814), p. 12.
99. Ibid. p. 24.
100. Joseph Devonshire Jackson to Henry Monck Mason, 15 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/101).
101. Joseph Devonshire Jackson to Samuel Bewley, 16 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/102). Captain Harvey to Henry Monck Mason, 28 March 1815 (CICE/KPSA, CI/103).
102. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 86.