–THREE–

The Mission to the Catholic Population

Ye British disciples of Him who came to seek and to save that which was lost, hear the cries of perishing souls, souls whose misery is the more affecting in proportion to their own ignorance of its true nature! A Nation; a brave, grateful and most interesting Nation; a Nation attached to you by the ties of strongest interest and closest relationship, now calls for your aid. Reflect that the great majority of your brethren in Ireland are still the vassals of papal tyranny, and languishing in the lowest intellectual debasement. If any bosom is not warmed by pure benevolence, let it call in the calculations of interest, and contemplate the terrible consequences of continued neglect … Providence provides great and powerful instruments of good. They lie at your hand. It is yours to grasp them, and fly to the glorious work, with the patriotism of Britons and the compassion of Christians.

An Address … on the Moral and Religious State of Ireland (1805)¹

Your Grace [Charles Brodrick] has, doubtless, seen the bishop’s [Dr Mant of Killaloe] charge, breathing theological warfare against the papists. To the National School System he is clearly looking as an instrument of proselytism: and I fear he may involve the South of Ireland in flames, and at the same time stop any quiet progress that has been making towards our unsuspected influence over the minds of our Roman Catholic population … I wish people would have the discretion, and the modesty to acquaint themselves with the circumstances of this country, before they practise upon it. Of all sorts of quackery, theological quackery is the most desperate and deadly.

JOHN JEBB²

THE METHODIST EXAMPLE

The conversion of the Catholic Irish to the Protestant faith, as previously noted, was not a high priority on the evangelical agenda of the late eighteenth century. The opinion popular in the eighteenth century was that Catholics, once raised to the same level of education and civilization as Protestants, would transfer their religious allegiance to the reformed faith and be absorbed into the existing social and political order. Between 1800 and 1820, however, this attitude was drastically altered in favour of the belief that a fully fledged missionary offensive was needed to bring Catholics into the fold. The dynamism that accompanied this shift was symptomatic of the coalescence of the many different tributaries feeding into the evangelical mainstream in Britain as well as in Ireland. Whether it was directed at the heathen in foreign lands or at Jews and Catholics at home, the Protestant crusade of the early nineteenth century was a pan-evangelical affair, and the pattern that emerged in England, where the pace was set by Methodists and evangelicals of the Independent churches, was followed in Ireland almost to the letter.

During the tumultuous last decade of the eighteenth century there was a marked increase in the religious activity of Ireland’s Protestant community at every social level. There was more itinerant preaching, higher rates of church attendance, and more serious interest in clerical reform than had ever been the case previously. The reform-minded element in the Church of Ireland manifested itself through clerical associations and especially through the ADV. But it was on the fringes occupied by Methodists and Nonconformists that the really dynamic activity was taking place. In each case external influence (from Wales and Scotland in particular) can be readily pointed to as a determining factor.

By the 1790s Methodism had established itself as a permanent presence in the Irish religious landscape. Up to this time it had won its followers mainly from the Protestant population, although it was always clear that the leadership also considered Catholics as being equally within the fold and in need of redemption. Methodist circuit riders preached to crowds without much regard for their religious composition, however, and no specific measures were taken to cater exclusively to Catholics. This situation changed in 1799 when a mission to the native population was begun. After the death of John Wesley in 1791, the Methodist body as a whole had become much more missionary-minded and joined in the growing fervour among evangelicals in Britain to bring Christianity to foreign lands. The cause of the foreign missions was especially dear to Dr Thomas Coke, president of the Methodist Conference in London, and the redemption of Ireland even more so. Under Coke’s direction a nationwide mission to the Catholic population was begun in 1799 and greatly expanded over the following twenty years.

The man chosen by the Methodist Conference as its chief itinerant missionary in Ireland was Gideon Ouseley, whose experience as a circuit rider and fluency in the native language were ideally suited to the demands of the job. His two associates, James McQuigg and Charles Graham, were likewise proficient in Irish. McQuigg was a scholarly figure whose health soon failed under the strenuous exertions of circuit preaching, but Graham, ‘the Apostle of Kerry’, went on to become famous, along with Ouseley, as a ‘cavalry preacher’ or ‘black cap’, so called after the close-fitting skull-caps they wore to protect their heads from stones and brickbats.³

By 1816 there were twenty-one missionaries working from fourteen stations throughout the country, twelve of whom were able to preach in Irish. The mission was financed and administered by the Wesleyan Missionary Committee in London, to which the preachers submitted quarterly accounts of their experiences and progress.⁴ These detailed and sometimes exhaustive letters are important not only for their information on the state of the country and the mentality of the people, but equally for what they reveal about the purpose of the Methodist mission and the attitude of the preachers, and above all for their effect in influencing the opinion of the leaders of the Methodist movement in England on the Irish question and Roman Catholicism generally.

The unequivocal aim of the Methodist Irish-speaking mission was to launch a frontal assault on what was considered the chief source of the ignorance, superstition and bigotry of the native Irish, namely the Catholic religion and the influence of the priests. The impact of the 1798 Rebellion was undoubtedly a factor in rekindling fears of the persecuting and intolerant tendencies of Catholics and in strengthening Methodist loyalty to the king and the rule of law. Throughout the Methodist community around the turn of the century there was a pervasive sense that providence had decreed the hour and the opportunity for moral regeneration and spiritual rebirth, and this was particularly true among those involved in the mission to the Irish Catholics. As David Hempton has observed, the commitment and enthusiasm that the Methodists involved in the Irish mission brought to their particular vocation showed strong parallels with secular Romanticism:

There is the existence of a ‘deluded’ and morally corrupt people to whom the Gospel must be taken as the only means of true enlightenment. There is a strong feeling of divine fervour inasmuch as ‘divine providence’ provided the opportunity. There is the appeal of grand heroic adventure to those who have ‘entered upon one of the most arduous undertakings that have been attempted since the primitive times’.⁵

During his early years on the circuit Charles Graham spoke repeatedly of how Catholics listened to his preaching ‘with flowing tears and throbbing breasts’, and gave the clear impression that the prospects for conversion looked very positive. Writing from the northern circuit in 1803, he described one incident of remarkable tolerance and generosity:

I find the Catholics are ready to hear us in every public place and many of them bathed in tears … In the market of Stuartstown [sic] we could hardly restrain the poor Catholics from making a public collection. We told them we made no collections. They answered they would not put us to the trouble of making it, they would make it themselves. Nor did they seem pleased we would not accept it for they said we were worthy of it.⁶

Such displays of the traditional courtesy that the Irish peasantry were famous for made a strong impression on men who were already passionately disposed to believe in the natural goodness of mankind. Gideon Ouseley’s sympathies may be illustrated by his description of the native Irish as a

smart, keen, intelligent [race], and when not exasperated and inflamed by their clergy and by such as they deem to know is fit to be done, they are a generous, kind, good-natured people and rather inclined to be pious and to respect religion more than any of the other orders, if not perverted and corrupted, which alas is easily done.⁷

Sympathy of this kind, coupled with the austerity of their lives and the hazards of working in all weather conditions and in the most desolate and isolated regions of the country, made the Irish-speaking Methodist preachers highly unusual figures in the countryside in the early years of the century. Many of their reports suggest that they were a novelty to which the uneducated peasantry responded with curiosity and enthusiasm, not knowing which denomination they represented or even their class or national origin. William Cornwall described a scene in 1817 in Ballina, County Mayo, where, greatly respected by all present, he led the neighbours in prayer at the house of a woman whose son had drowned that morning. As he left, the mother enquired, ‘Are you one of the servants of God?’—which he took to mean a Catholic priest—and fell on her knees, praying that God might prosper and speed him.⁸

The ability to preach in Irish was another feature of the Methodist mission that ‘seldom [failed] to draw their attention’, as the veteran preacher and fluent-Irish speaker James Bell reported from Castlewellan, County Down, in 1818.⁹ His evidence was supported by William Cornwall, working at the opposite end of the country in County Clare, who reported that Catholics in the village of Cross ‘were so convinced of the truth of the doctrine I advanced that they raised their responsive voices all round, exclaiming, “is fíor sin, is fíor sin”’ (that’s true, that’s true).¹⁰ Cornwall, whose circuit covered the counties of Galway, Mayo and Clare, was a man whose already ardent religious spirit was intensified by the romantic scenery of the west and the innocence and enthusiasm of the local population. Describing a scene in 1819 in Connemara, where people had come for miles across moors and mountains to hear him preach in Irish, he confessed:

When I beheld them coming down the side of a mountain and wading barelegged through the flood, I was moved with compassion towards them and did not regret my coming to seek after them … were they once convinced of the truth as it is in Jesus, they would be as firm as a rock. This observation has been borne out by Catholics already converted.¹¹

In reality the number of converts was never very large. The reports make incessant references to the opposition of the Catholic priests who chastised their flocks merely for listening to open-air sermons and threatened with damnation anyone who refused to deliver up the bibles and testaments distributed for free by the preachers.¹² Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the Catholic clergy or hierarchy ever took concerted action, even at the diocesan or parish level, to shield their flocks from Methodist preachers. Certainly, they were not considered as great a danger as the various societies involved with Bible-based education that began to proliferate around this time. The reasons are not difficult to find. Itinerant open-air preaching modelled on the system that had proved so successful in England was totally unsuited to conditions in Ireland, certainly in areas where the population was predominantly Catholic. Designed to revive religious consciousness rather than to bring about formal adhesion to a church, it was virtually useless unless reinforced by a network of scripture schools and the active involvement of local organizers. Methodist missionaries relied on little besides the ardour of their preaching as a means of attracting followers, although as early as 1806 they were already thinking in terms of a national system of Sunday schools. As had happened with so many of the innovations for which they had been responsible, such as preaching in the Irish language, the Sunday School movement was developed to a far greater degree by other denominations with more power and resources at their disposal.

In the case of the Sunday School Society, it was the evangelical wing of the Church of Ireland represented by James Digges La Touche that took its inspiration from the Methodist example. His uncle, John David La Touche, who had been so deeply impressed by the dedication and piety of the Methodist community in Dublin in the 1790s, was in frequent contact with the close-knit circle of Church of Ireland reformers represented particularly by the Woodward–Brodrick family connection. In 1804 Mathias Joyce related to Dr Coke how he and ‘old John Pryce’ had spent an evening in the company of Dr Henry Woodward and his wife and Woodward’s ‘good friend’ John David La Touche:

Our conversation was truly edifying and Dr Woodward and his lady were so impressed with old John that she presented him with a ten pound note. A few nights later the Dr had John to drink tea with him and a rap was heard at the door … [it was] the Bishop of Cashel who had just arrived from Holyhead.¹³

This certainly represented a departure from the attitudes of the eighteenth century, when Methodists had been dismissed as religious enthusiasts and were often despised by the more aristocratic elements for lowering the tone of the Protestant religion in Ireland.¹⁴ And it was a sign of things to come. Increasingly, the circuit preachers found the provincial gentry willing to provide venues for their sermons and even to guarantee an audience. They were particularly welcome in garrison towns and in areas where it was feared that the poorer class of Protestants had lapsed into the habits and practices of their Catholic neighbours. In 1802 during a visit to County Clare, an Irish scholar named Lawrence Kean recounted how he was warmly received by a Colonel Burton who allowed him to preach to full audiences in the Session house and the barracks. As a result Kean enlisted fourteen new recruits for the Methodist cause.¹⁵ In 1806 William Hamilton reported a similarly enthusiastic response to Methodist initiatives in County Mayo:

These two years since, Brother Ouseley and I have made out a circuit in the Co. Mayo, which will hold two preachers, [we] have 30 members, many of whom are very happy in the Lord. Eighteen of those have been Papists, four of whom will be able to go out as missionaries next year. We have scattered those two years 1,000 testaments and about 400 bibles, and [have gained] about 40 subscribers for our magazine and sold these about £30 worth of our own books. We have also built a large preaching house and a good lodging for a preacher’s family. This country was very dark and full of superstition. Many of the Protestants used to perform penance at wells with their Papist neighbours and would be anointed by the priest at their death. The scene is now changed, to the very great satisfaction of the leading men of that country.¹⁶

The opposition of the Church of Ireland to the independent tendencies of the Methodists did not disappear overnight, however. In Donegal town in 1804, James Bell and William Hamilton were refused permission to preach in public by the local minister, who was a son of the bishop of Raphoe. ‘It was grievous to see people coming in from the country and the greater part of the town flocking’ the preachers lamented, adding that what helped to soothe their grief respecting the treatment they had received on this occasion was ‘the poor Roman Catholics [who] heard in their own tongue, and as Mr Hamilton preached next morning, about ten of them came to inquire what they should do to be saved’.¹⁷ Denominational rivalry was almost certainly at issue in this case, since east Donegal was heavily Protestant and formed part of the geographical fringe of the Ulster plantation so conducive to the growth of Methodism during this period.

Between 1780 and 1810 Irish Methodism increased its membership from 6109 to 26,323, with most of the growth occurring among the Protestant population in the counties of Armagh, Tyrone and Fermanagh.¹⁸ Such progress undoubtedly fuelled expectations that the mission to the Catholic population might yield equally fruitful results. Important representatives of public opinion in Ireland certainly thought that this was possible. In 1807 a leading advocate of moral reform and a prominent member of the County Wicklow gentry, William Parnell, expressed his opinion that ‘if the Catholic clergy were paid by the government, and if the practice and principle of religious restriction were abandoned, in the course of a few years a large portion of the Irish peasantry would be converted to Methodism’.¹⁹ The missionaries’ reports to the London headquarters overflowed with optimism of this kind, balanced by an equally stark and despairing picture of a people enslaved by the tyranny of Catholic priests. As the years advanced and the great struggle between the religious and the secular was played out on the Continent by Napoleon and his adversaries, Ireland began to occupy a position of remarkable importance in the minds of Methodist leaders in England. In a report to the Missionary Committee in 1806, Dr Coke described it as the most important mission in which the Methodists were engaged, if all the facts of the contemporary situation were taken into account:

Three millions of the people of this land are plunged in the deepest ignorance and superstition. The ten men who are employed in bearing the testimony of Jesus to this benighted people run the greatest hazards of any of our missionaries, and were it not for the universal protection they receive under God from the magistracy and military of the country, they must humanly speaking long ago have fallen victims to the violence of bigotry and superstition.²⁰

The tone of Dr Coke’s report was a signal that Methodist leadership in England was rapidly falling into line with the opinion of Tory conservatives, whose opposition to political reform was beginning to galvanize around the issue of Catholic Emancipation. This trend would become even more pronounced as the demand for Emancipation intensified. Prominent representatives like Joseph Butterworth and Joseph Allan used the correspondence of the Irish missionaries to influence parliament and inflame public opinion about the dangers of resurgent Catholicism.²¹ The net result was to bring Methodism to the forefront of the rising tide of conservatism and anti-Catholicism, far from its populist roots in the eighteenth century, and equally far from a genuine appraisal of the condition of the ‘poor Roman Catholics’ of Ireland. Gideon Ouseley ended his career as a member of the Orange Order.²²

In the mission field in Ireland, meanwhile, the Methodist missionaries gradually began to lose their unique character as evangelical pioneers as the major Bible and Sunday school societies founded between 1806 and 1825 began to operate. This may be one reason why so little was heard of them in denunciations from the Catholic quarter, which tended to focus on the Established Church as the main perpetrator of the anti-Catholic activity that caused such uproar in the 1820s.

THE CHALLENGE OF DISSENT:

THE LONDON HIBERNIAN AND BAPTIST SOCIETIES

The Methodist missionary initiative had an important influence on the reform wing of the Church of Ireland, which between 1806 and 1818 took a decisive lead in the moral crusade to rescue Catholics from ignorance and spiritual slavery. The leading national organizations in which Church of Ireland personnel were involved included those run exclusively according to their own principles, such as the ADV and the Sunday School Society, as well as those described as interdenominational, such as the HBS, the Religious Tract and Book Society, and the KPS. To these must be added the Irish Society for the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language (1818), and the Scripture Readers’ Society (1822), which, as their names suggest, were aimed particularly at the Irish-speaking peasantry. Before the growth and influence of the Church of Ireland affiliates can be properly discussed, however, it is necessary to assess the work of two Independent evangelical organizations that were also involved in the mission to the Catholic Irish. These were the London Hibernian Society for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge in Ireland, founded by Congregationalists in 1806, and the Baptist Society for Promoting the Gospel in Ireland, founded in 1814.

Although neither the Congregationalists nor the Baptists were well represented in Ireland, these two British evangelical societies were influential in cultivating the denominational rivalry that brought the evangelical wing of the Church of England into the race to set up missionary enterprises at home and abroad. Both groups had already launched missions to India, Africa and the South Seas, and they were the originators of the policy of translating the scriptures into vernacular languages, which more than any other factor accounted for the global spread of the Protestant missionary movement in the nineteenth century. An additional characteristic shared by these two societies was a strong Scottish influence among the directors. The London Missionary Society was largely a Scottish organization, and the LHS, to a significant degree, was its Irish offshoot. Similarly, the Baptists were heavily involved in the evangelization of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, and their organization in Ireland borrowed heavily from the experience gained in Scotland.

Some additional characteristics common to both the London Hibernian and Baptist societies are worthy of comment. The first is the goodwill that existed between them and the other societies mentioned above. This was demonstrated by the provision of tracts and bibles by the HBS and the Religious Tract and Book Society, and even more remarkably by the channelling of government funds to the LHS by the ostensibly nonsectarian KPS—all of which corroborates Peter Roe’s claim made as early as 1802 about the ‘union of spirit prevailing among those who are professedly travelling the same road’.²³ The second is the unequivocal way in which they proclaimed and pursued their objectives. Their statements and reports were generally more candid than those of the Irish-based societies, which were obliged to keep a guarded eye on episcopal censure from within their own ranks as well as on Catholic public opinion.

Were a gold medal for candour to be awarded to one of the innumerable commentaries on the influence of popery in Ireland that began to flow from the printing presses early in the nineteenth century, it would surely go to a study conducted for the LHS in 1807/8. This Society was a natural outgrowth of the mutual interests of evangelicals of the Independent churches on both sides of the Irish Sea. Albert Blest of Sligo was the moving force behind the initiative in Ireland, and his British connections included English, Scottish and Welsh evangelicals with substantial experience in missionary activity at home and abroad. The deputation who visited Ireland on behalf of the Society in 1807 included the Rev. David Bogue of Gosport and Samuel Mills of Finsbury Place, London, both of whom were leading figures in the London Missionary Society. Even more significant was the presence of two Welshmen, Rev. Thomas Charles and Rev. Thomas Hughes, both of whom had an impressive record of involvement in the home mission among the native-speaking population in Wales.²⁴

In keeping with the quantitative approach that was the hallmark of the Scottish Enlightenment, the LHS deputation launched the most thorough investigative effort that had yet been attempted to determine the possibilities for a campaign of evangelization among the Catholic Irish. A complete appraisal was made of all the elements that could be turned to advantage, such as the support of the gentry and the desire of the people for education. This was balanced by a sober consideration of the enormous obstacles represented above all by the power of the Catholic clergy, and to a lesser degree by the existence of a language barrier. The deputies pointed to the existence of hedge schools run by Protestants, to which Catholic parents often entrusted their children purely for the benefit of the education provided. Because of this trust the schoolmasters allegedly refrained from condemning the Catholic faith, a precaution the deputies thought fit to be adopted once their own system was in operation. But they also remarked:

There will be frequent opportunities for disclosing to the Catholic youth the systems of both churches in their amplest extent. And may it not be hoped, with the divine blessing, the clear avowal of inspired doctrine, in opposition to the traditions of men, will induce some who are not as confirmed by Jesuitical sophisms to examine the faith of their forefathers and thus lead them to detect its falsehood and folly.²⁵

The newly awakened political consciousness of the Catholic population was appraised in ominous terms:

The public events of the last twenty years have resulted, it is thought, in arraying them [the Catholics] with fresh consequence. Nor is it merely what may be called political success that has promoted the cause of the Catholics; even failure, by reminding them that they are oppressed, rouses them and unites them to each other with a firmer cement. Local oppression, too, and misguided zeal produce dangerous irritation among a people fond of representing themselves as a persecuted majority.²⁶

The influence of the priests was singled out as the greatest obstacle in the path of evangelization, and the Irish were considered the dupes of their clerical leaders: ‘Ignorance is the mother of their devotion, and they are the blind followers of those whom it requires a stretch of the imagination to pronounce merely blind.’²⁷ Besides the power of the priests and the ignorance of their followers, the deputies were concerned about the rate at which the Catholic population was increasing:

On the whole, popery appears to be exhibited and inculcated there … with such a decided partiality in favour of its most fantastic and anti-Christian features—the manoeuvres of its priests are so various, so subtle, and alas so efficient—that the moral aspect from these and other causes is so discouraging that the deputation, confining themselves to this view of Ireland, see nothing but formidable barriers erected against every attempt to bless her inhabitants with the light of life; nor must it be concealed that the numerical predominance of the Roman Catholics is itself a prolific seed of disunion. The hope, therefore, that the Irish will ever be a tranquil and loyal people must be built on the anticipated reduction of popery. [my emphasis]²⁸

The optimism with which the LHS set about its appointed task in Ireland was rooted in the successful evangelization of Wales and the Scottish Highlands. In the eighteenth century the Welsh-speaking areas of Wales had been thoroughly evangelized through a combination of itinerant preaching, tract distribution, and an innovative system of ‘circulating’ or’ ‘ambulatory’ schools (an improvised system not altogether different from the hedge schools of Ireland) in which children and adults were taught to read in their own language.²⁹ By the early years of the nineteenth century this process was being repeated in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland.³⁰

Of the elements common to the movement in both areas, by far the most significant was the most basic principle of the Protestant faith, i.e. the insistence on the right, indeed the necessity, for individuals to read and interpret the scriptures for themselves. This immediately raised the question of literacy in the native languages, a challenge that up to this time had never been addressed with any real effectiveness in either Wales or Ireland, and with only limited success in Scotland. The Anglican hierarchy of Wales and Ireland and the Presbyterian Kirk, the State Church of Scotland, were hostile to the idea of catering to the educational needs of native speakers in the vernacular languages. Because of the threat from Catholic missionaries in the Highlands and islands during the years of the Jacobite danger, however, the Scottish Kirk was forced to educate Gaelic-speaking ministers and to provide religious literature in the vernacular. When it came to education, however, the Kirk showed its ambivalence by insisting on English as the medium of instruction in the charity schools. The result was that while Gaelic retained its hold as the ‘spiritual’ language of prayer and religious literature, English became the language of ‘improvement’ or practical affairs.³¹

The main consequence of the failure of Church establishments to cater to the linguistic particularities of the Celtic fringe was that the field was left open to the Independent churches, particularly the Congregationalists and also the Calvinistic Methodists of Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion. These groups had also acted as magnets for the more committed and missionary-minded elements of the mainstream establishments, such as the Rev. Thomas Charles, who broke ranks and joined the Calvinistic Methodists because his ambitions to evangelize in the Welsh language could not be accommodated by the Church of England. A similar frustration drove the famous Edinburgh philanthropists James and Robert Haldane into an intensive drive to evangelize the Highlands after their ambition to launch a mission to India under the auspices of the Congregationalist Church had been effectively blocked by the East India Company.³²

The personnel associated with the launching of the LHS were heavily involved with the evangelization of the native-speaking districts of Wales and Scotland. Albert Blest of Sligo was a well-known personality in these circles, and Sligo a familiar preaching venue for itinerant preachers dispatched by the Haldanes as well as Lady Huntingdon.³³ The community of evangelical Dissent in Ireland at this time consisted of small but active groups in Belfast and Dublin who had come together in the aftermath of the 1798 Rebellion to form the General Evangelical Society. In Dublin the activity of these groups centred on the York Street Chapel, which had been built under the sponsorship of Alderman Henry Hutton and was opened by the famous itinerant preacher Rowland Hill.³⁴ It was at the home of Alderman Hutton that Albert Blest met the LHS delegation in 1807. Two years later, in 1809, he was formally appointed as the Irish agent of the Society and immediately set about establishing Sligo as their Irish headquarters.³⁵

The initial plan was to launch what amounted to an evangelistic blitzkrieg whereby itinerant missionaries through preaching and tract distribution would whet the appetites of their hearers for religious material in print. The desire to read such material would provide the incentive necessary to get adults as well as children into schools where literacy skills would be developed through the medium of religious literature. Literacy in the native language was seen as a natural spur to literacy in English and, it was hoped, the cultivation of closer ties with the laws and institutions of the English world. This was the working model of evangelization that had been developed in Wales and Scotland and it made perfect sense to attempt to repeat it in Ireland.

The original plan of the LHS directors was a three-point offensive based on itinerant preaching, tract distribution, and education.³⁶ After the first four years, however, they were obliged to admit that little was to be expected from itinerancy: ‘So deeply rooted, so habitually prevalent, were the prejudices of the people in general that very few would attend upon the preaching of any individual who came in the character of a Protestant missionary.’³⁷ In consequence, it was decided to concentrate resources on the education of the young, and the development of a system of day schools became the principal objective, with the society changing its name accordingly to the Hibernian Society for Establishing Schools and Circulating the Holy Scriptures in Ireland.

Despite its avowed aim of securing the conversion of Catholic children to the reformed faith, the LHS did not hesitate to appeal to the needs and sympathies of the Catholic Irish in order to attract their children into its schools. Almost from the beginning the committee adopted a policy of employing Catholic schoolmasters, preferably local people who would be known and respected by the parents.³⁸ They also worked with Catholic priests who did not feel threatened by their activities and in many cases allowed them to act as managers in the schools. In at least one case where the education of the district was already in the hands of the Carmelite order, they provided free spelling books and testaments.³⁹ The backbone of the system, however, was the support of the Protestant land-owning class, to whom LHS appealed for the provision of sites, schoolhouses and masters’ dwellings. With the cost of the teacher’s salary and the teaching materials provided by the Society, a landlord could participate in the fashionable trend for improvement at very little cost.

The directors of the LHS were clearly willing to co-opt hedge-school teachers by providing them with a settled living in the form of a decent salary and a cottage with a plot of land for a garden and a cow. They were also willing to cater to the demand for the teaching of ‘useful subjects’ as opposed to the strict concentration on scriptural material.⁴⁰ The most innovative and controversial of their policies, however, was the use of the Irish language as a medium of instruction. This was copied directly from the experience of evangelical missionaries in Wales and Scotland. The same conditions did not apply in Ireland, however, and the application of the policy involved an altogether more complicated path, with some curious and unanticipated consequences.

The obstacles that confronted the promoters of the scheme to evangelize and educate Irish-speaking Catholics in their native language were enormous. In the first instance there was the fear and prejudice of the landlord class concerning a process over which they would have little or no control. These fears were not without substance, as evidence surfaced repeatedly in the Society’s reports that their schools fared much better, and enjoyed much more support from the local Catholic clergy, in areas where there was no resident landlord.⁴¹ To placate landlords’ fear that the language might be restored because of its efforts, the Society placed great emphasis on an observation that was now commonplace in the Highlands and islands of Scotland. In brief, this was that literacy in the native language was prized and sought after precisely because it quickly opened the door to literacy in English and all that this implied—not only the ability to read tracts and testaments (a far greater variety of which were naturally available in English) but also to participate in the anglophone economy through the use of paper money to buy and sell in the marketplace, to travel to English-speaking regions in search of work, and above all to have access to the knowledge of economic improvement that was available only in English. Albert Blest took great pains to reassure Charles King O’Hara, on whose estate in County Sligo the LHS commenced its operations, about the policy that the Society had developed regarding the teaching of Irish:

With respect to the Irish, our object in instructing our pupils to read it being only to qualify them for reading the Scriptures in that language for the benefit of their parents or the adults in their neighbourhood who may not be capable of understanding a narration or continued discourse in the English. Our process is very simple and requires neither grammar nor elementary book of any kind. We instruct none but such as speak the Irish and can read English, and these, with the help of the English Testament and the master’s instructions, make a considerable progress in a few months. In this way your postillion can immediately commence the office of preceptor to his young fellow servants, and indeed to any of your domestics who can read English and speak Irish, and I will have great pleasure in sending you as many Irish testaments as they require.⁴²

The reluctance of landlords to sponsor education in Irish was matched by that of the Church of Ireland clergy. Even a professedly sympathetic and enlightened figure like John Jebb shared the opinion dominant among the upper classes that Irish was a barbarous language, and welcomed its demise:

For English order, habit, and language now universally obtain amongst us; it is scarcely imaginable that this country can again relapse into her ancient barbarism … There is now manifestly no manner of necessity for looking exclusively to the clergy as agents of popular instruction. Teachers skilled in the English language abound; they are daily multiplying and will continue to multiply with the increasing demand; for after all, the grand security which places the permanent anglicization of this country beyond all reasonable doubt is the anxiety to hear their children instructed which pervades the very lowest of our peasantry. [my emphasis]⁴³

In this last observation Jebb had underlined a far greater obstacle in the path of the education-in-Irish enthusiasts than either the hostility of landlords or the indifference of the Church of Ireland. The evidence of practically every commentator who investigated and reported on the state of the Irish language during this period, especially on its use as a medium of instruction, suggests that Irish-speakers were willing to bypass literacy in their native language altogether in their drive for education and economic opportunity. Indeed, so frequently did supporters and opponents alike comment upon this phenomenon that it strongly suggests that the very idea of literacy in the native language was a concept that country people were unable to grasp. For whatever sociocultural or psychological reasons, reading and writing were with few exceptions seen as skills that could only be acquired through English.⁴⁴

Not the least of the challenges undertaken by the LHS was to study the structure of the Irish language in order to produce schoolbooks for instruction in grammar and syntax, a task that demanded the skill of teachers fluent in English and Irish, with some knowledge of linguistics and a willingness to put their services at the society’s disposal. Incredibly, during the first decade of its existence the Society was able to show progress in the face of all these difficulties, to such a degree that its example was an immediate influence behind the founding of the Baptist Society in 1814. Together these two organizations placed the issue of education-in-Irish solidly on the evangelical agenda. By 1820 the cause had been taken up by the KPS and the Sunday School Society, and the Irish Society for the Instruction of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language had been established under the auspices of the Church of Ireland to cater exclusively for the subject.

Much of the credit for the momentum that sustained the LHS in its formative years must go to the energetic and imaginative leadership of men who were already well known for their missionary work in Wales and Scotland. The Rev. Thomas Charles of Bala, for example, was known throughout Britain as the inspiration behind the BFBS and its famous motto on translating the scriptures into vernacular languages: ‘If for Wales, why not for the world?’⁴⁵ Charles was the driving force behind the LHS’s policy on the Irish language. Even when the Society’s representatives in Ireland could not reach a consensus regarding the capacity in which the language might be employed for educational purposes, Charles went ahead and ordered the BFBS to publish testaments in Irish.⁴⁶ More significant for the growth of literacy in Irish, however, was the influence of two Scottish clergymen associated with the evangelical mission in the Highlands; they visited Ireland between 1810 and 1815 and published their observations in works that were really impassioned appeals on behalf of the Irish language and those who spoke it, and which reportedly drew attention to the subject from all parts of the kingdom. The first to appear was the Rev. Daniel Dewar’s Observations on the Character, Customs, and Superstitions of the Irish and on Some of the Causes Which Have Retarded the Moral and Political Improvement of Ireland (1812); this was followed by Dr Christopher Anderson’s Memorial on Behalf of the Native Irish with a View to Their Improvement in Moral and Religious Knowledge through the Medium of Their Own Language (1815).⁴⁷

The strongest point made by both authors was that Irish-speakers were much more numerous than was commonly supposed. Anderson made a valuable and detailed survey of the state of the language in all four provinces, asserting that except for the counties of Dublin, Kildare and Wicklow in the east, and Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down and Fermanagh in the north, Irish was the everyday language of the majority of the common people. This was true, he claimed, even of urban areas such as Cork city and Youghal. Connaught was reputedly the most thoroughly Irish-speaking of the provinces, where even the resident gentry were obliged to use Irish in conducting business with the lower orders. The contemporary belief that Irish was losing ground as the use of English increased was contradicted; instead, Anderson asserted, the rapid rise in population in Irish-speaking areas was serving to offset numerically any increase in the numbers who spoke English.⁴⁸ As to the threat that education through Irish might pose to the English language and culture, Anderson and Dewar both strongly underlined the connection, by now well established in the Highlands, of literacy in Gaelic and the acquisition of English.

The key element in the usefulness of the scheme for educating through Irish—a point emphasized especially by Dewar, who had travelled extensively in Irish-speaking areas and conversed freely with the inhabitants—was the remarkable cultural affinity of the people for their native language. Dewar was keenly aware of the political and cultural divisions in Irish society, maintained by the boundaries of religion:

A religious designation is here the name of a political party as well as of a religious body; and it is no unusual thing to meet with a ruffian who would fight for that sect whose name he bears whilst he is totally ignorant of the tenets of every sect.⁴⁹

What he was shrewd enough and sympathetic enough to realize, however, was that the quickest way to win the affections of the native Irish was to assume a friendly disposition towards their language:

So fond are they of their native country and of everything connected with it that he who will talk to them in the tongue of their fathers, which they regard as sacred, and who seems not displeased with their customs, will be considered as their countryman and friend.⁵⁰

What Dewar, Anderson and Charles all shared was a deep and passionate appreciation for the indigenous language and culture of their Celtic homelands, underpinned by a Christian humanism strongly tempered by the Romantic.⁵¹ They were at one with Irish evangelicals like Whitley Stokes, who tended to put the welfare of their native land, particularly its most neglected inhabitants, before everything else, and to look to religion to inspire people to work for the common good. The LHS was to some degree influenced by this mentality. No matter what abuse its agents levelled against Catholic priests, they were seldom disrespectful of the ordinary people. They also had to walk a tightrope between pandering to the prejudices of those who wanted to see the language die out, and the sympathies of the directors and their supporters (especially in Edinburgh and London) who had come to look upon it as a primary instrument for making common cause with the peasantry.

The Irish agents of the LHS were also more familiar than visiting deputies with the real situation concerning the state of the language. There is a certain poignant honesty in the following account submitted by an agent shortly after the appearance of the works by Dewar and Anderson:

While I acknowledge with you the great importance of attending to the Irish language, I am happy that the Committee are convinced that I have never lost sight of promoting the reading of it in our schools, or of taking advantage of it to communicate the knowledge of divine truth, where it appeared necessary from ignorance of the English language or the early prejudices of the people. The Irish language of this country is rapidly on the decline. The extension of commerce, and the great demand for the produce of the most remote districts of the country, which the late long-continued war occasioned, did more for the cultivation of the English language and its introduction into every part of the land than the exertions of government for centuries. Exaggerated statements have been given of the proportion of the population of the country who cannot speak or understand English, but truth would reduce these calculations, even as they respect the adults, more than three-fourths, and would exclude, with very little reductions, the rising generation altogether; nevertheless, while districts or individuals can be found to whom the Scriptures in Irish may be serviceable or more acceptable than in English, it is a duty to teach it in our schools and to send it to every place where it may be useful and acceptable.⁵²

It is doubtful whether the contribution of the LHS did much to hold back this swelling tide of English. What cannot be denied, however, is the Society’s role in having introduced to Ireland the dynamic that bound religious revivalism to the development of popular literacy in Wales and the Scottish highlands, and that ensured the survival of Welsh and Gaelic as living languages into the twentieth century. In Ireland this impulse found concrete expression in the production of the first textbooks and primers exclusively for the use of Irish speakers. The LHS was the first organization to produce schoolbooks in Irish for instruction in spelling and grammar, and this measure in itself represented a turning point in the fortunes of the Irish language.

What was of infinitely greater significance, though, was the opening up of the debate over the utility of vernacular Irish in the modern world. The question of how the language and culture of the native Irish might be employed in the creation of a coherent national identity had been around for many decades, but there were few, if any, among its admirers at the upper levels of society who wished to see it rehabilitated and accommodated to the modern world. With the example of what had been accomplished in Scotland by the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society, and with talented men like Thomas Charles and Christopher Anderson making the case for its preservation, the debate over the utility of the Irish language took on an entirely new character from this point onwards.

Even more than the LHS, the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland embraced the Irish language as an instrument of evangelization. This was a direct consequence of the influence of Scottish Baptists, who by now were leading the drive to evangelize the Highlands through the Edinburgh Gaelic School Society. Christopher Anderson had been a founding member of that organization and what he had witnessed of conditions in Ireland during his tour of 1813–14 convinced him of the possibilities that existed for an Irish agency based on similar principles. On his return to Edinburgh in August 1814 he persuaded a number of his colleagues, principally the Rev. Andrew Fuller, to undertake the challenge and the Baptist Society came into being.⁵³

From the beginning the Baptist Society consciously sought to imitate the model of evangelization developed in the Highlands and so concentrated their resources on itinerant preaching and ‘ambulatory’ schools. In doing this the directors hoped not only to keep out of the way of other organizations, but also to elicit their cooperation and goodwill. In the first report Christopher Anderson spoke highly of the work currently being accomplished by the Sunday School Society and the KPS, and expressed the hope that these societies would also see the benefit of taking on the Irish language challenge.⁵⁴ Because the schools of the LHS were concentrated in Sligo and the counties immediately to the north and east, the Baptists targeted the western parts of Mayo and Clare as a base to begin operations.

More than any of the other agencies involved in the evangelical mission to the Catholic Irish, the Baptist Society was remarkable for the goodwill that characterized its relations with the Catholic population. Intimacy based on knowledge of the native language and sympathy for the desperate poverty of the Irish poor became the hallmarks of the Baptist mission. These virtues would appear to have been returned in kind by the people among whom the itinerant preachers moved. The Rev. Edmund Rogers, a Welshman who had been appointed minister at the Baptist meeting house in Portarlington, along with his fellow itinerant, the Rev. Isaac McCarthy, repeatedly spoke of the goodwill of the Catholic population. In 1816, Rogers gave an account of his recent itineraries:

In my late journey I was greatly pleased with the disposition of the Irish: they are a generous and hospitable people; and many of them very desirous of hearing the Gospel, even in the rebellious county of Tipperary, where I preached in several of the most popish towns, and to my great astonishment was not once insulted or disturbed, which should be told much to the honour of the Irish nation.⁵⁵

One year later, despite worsening economic conditions, McCarthy had much the same story to tell:

I must say, to the honour of the Irish Catholics, that although I have preached out of doors often and baptized people so frequently in our public way, I cannot remember one single rude offence given me at any time. I may say more; I have travelled night and day through the country and have not received any insult from them.⁵⁶

Practical innovations such as the use of ‘scripture readers’ were also characteristic of the Baptist mission. Scripture readers were local men selected for their ability to move among the peasantry without arousing suspicion. Naturally, they were to have a ready command of Irish and an ability to read but, as a contemporary directive stated, ‘they must not be learned or refined, nor must they be ministers’, and ‘their language, their manners, their customs, and (where they are known) their object will ensure them the warmest corner, the pipe, and the potato’.⁵⁷ Another innovative policy of the Baptist Society was the custom of having their schools in Ireland twinned or ‘adopted’ by Baptist congregations in England, in the hope that ‘the criminal alienation of affection which has too long subsisted between the people of the two countries, will be progressively removed and suspicion and apathy ultimately cease’.⁵⁸ In 1820 there were twelve such schools in the west of Ireland—because of their associations known as ‘Norwich Schools’, ‘Hammersmith Schools’, and so on—located mostly in counties Mayo, Sligo and Clare.⁵⁹

Overall, the scope of the Baptist Society’s educational activities was never as broad as that of other agencies in the field, particularly those that had access to public funds. In 1820 the Society reported sixty schools in Connaught catering to 5000 children and 150 adults, and a further ten in County Clare with 880 pupils.⁶⁰ Besides founding schools and employing scripture readers, the Baptist Society sponsored the labours of seven itinerant ministers from England and Wales whose circuits covered the central Midlands area, north as far as Newry in County Armagh and west as far as Sligo and Ballina in County Mayo.⁶¹ They do not appear to have had any more success than the Methodists and Congregationalists in winning converts from Catholicism; by their own account the improvement of the character of Catholic children, as opposed to conversion, was the sole purpose of their schools.⁶²

Much of the hostility aroused by the work of the LHS was a consequence of its being the recipient of public funds. Although it started out as a voluntary agency, the Society was enormously successful in acquiring government funds, some of which were channelled through the KPS. Other monies, such as the £19,000 awarded from the Lord Lieutenant’s Fund in 1819, were given with open state approval. By 1820, as a result, the schools of the LHS could be found in all four provinces. The heavy concentration in the west and north-west is probably a reflection of the numerical strength of Protestants in the Sligo–Roscommon area.⁶³

DISTRIBUTION OF LHS SCHOOLS IN 1818⁶⁴

In 1822 the Christian Observer reported that the total number of schools had increased to 624 and furnished a breakdown of the religious and social backgrounds of those employed as supervisors:

OCCUPATIONS OF LHS SCHOOL SUPERVISORS, 1822⁶⁵

The prominence of Church of Ireland clergy, noblemen and ladies is not surprising, but the scarcity of Dissenting ministers raises some questions since the LHS was a Nonconformist organization. It is possible that Irish Dissenters objected to the interdenominational activity of the Society, but it is more likely that Presbyterians, who constituted the largest Dissenting body in Ireland, were at this time still influenced by the Unitarian beliefs that had been influential in their community during the eighteenth century. In general, Irish Presbyterians did not succumb to evangelical influences until the 1830s and 1840s, a trend strongly associated with the ascendancy of the Rev. Henry Cooke. Up until the late 1820s even the most committed of the Presbyterian evangelicals favoured Emancipation in the belief that Catholics, once ‘emancipated’ in politics would seek freedom in religious affairs as well.

The most surprising feature of all is the presence of eighty-five Catholic priests, especially since the Society’s reports consistently referred to priestly opposition. On the other hand, the prominence of priests as school supervisors does validate claims made by other societies during the early years of the evangelical crusade that the Catholic clergy had sometimes been willing to cooperate with the evangelicals, particularly in matters having to do with education. In the case of the LHS, the principle of non-interference with a pupil’s religion was apparently written into the rules, though its due observance depended on the vigilance of the school supervisor. In this way a priest could avail of the funds offered by the Society and conduct a school perfectly acceptable to the Catholic community, while an evangelical minister could use funds from the same source to pursue the ultimate conversion of his pupils. Also, until the early 1820s, the Catholic hierarchy’s attitudes towards the evangelical crusade were inconsistent and not clearly defined. The arguments used against the movement were based not on charges of proselytism but on the perceived dangers of unrestricted Bible distribution among an ignorant populace.

This attitude changed dramatically between 1820 and 1824, however, and it is surely significant that by 1825 the number of priests acting as supervisors in LHS schools had dropped to twenty-five.⁶⁶ During the first half of 1824 the Catholic clergy launched a united effort to have Catholic children withdrawn from the LHS’s schools, as a result of which the Society experienced a sharp drop in both teachers and pupils. By 1826 many of the schools had been incorporated into the Kildare Place system, mainly because this body had more funds at its disposal. This reversal of fortune undoubtedly stemmed from Catholic opposition, but the LHS was also discredited by a condemnation issued against it by the commission of inquiry for education of 1825–7. When interviewed before the commission in 1825, the Society’s representatives freely admitted that their objectives involved a change of religious allegiance, and they stoutly defended their position while at the same time denying allegations of proselytism. What the Society sought, claimed those who were interviewed, was ‘a religious and moral transformation’, as opposed to

exchanging the mere ceremonial of one church for that of another. Instances of such conversion [would always] be found to be a consequence of the unrestricted use of the scriptures; as they owe their reality to the divine efficacy of that word, so will the society be indebted for their number to the extent of its full circulation. Such conversions as these the committee unequivocally associate with the plan and design of the society, and if the question should be asked, as it not infrequently is, whether such conversions involve an abandonment of the Roman Catholic church, the committee, in speaking from experience, will candidly avow their conviction that they do. [my emphasis]⁶⁷

In the light of this comment it is small wonder that the LHS was considered the most actively proselytizing of all the evangelical educational agencies.⁶⁸

After 1825 the Society became involved in the notorious activities taking place on the Farnham Estate in County Cavan, in connection with which the term ‘Second Reformation’ first entered into common usage. On the national scene, however, the LHS schools met the same fate as those of the KPS and the ADV. Very little was heard of them after the setting up of the National Board of Education in 1831 and it appears that many of their more successful schools simply applied for funding to the board and were thus integrated into the national system.

THE ‘QUIET PROGRESS’ OF THE CHURCH OF IRELAND

The response of the Church of Ireland to the energy and commitment of the Methodists and Nonconformists in pioneering the cause of evangelical religion in Ireland was ambivalent. While some clergymen of the Established Church welcomed the spirit of interdenominational cooperation, others feared that the spread of Bible societies and the accommodation of itinerant preachers would inevitably pose a threat to ecclesiastical authority. A sense of denominational and even national rivalry sometimes provoked otherwise complacent churchmen into tightening the ranks against outside competition. The archbishop of Armagh, William Stewart, captured this spirit perfectly when he expressed his desire to set up a branch of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in his diocese ‘as the clergy cannot become members of the London [Hibernian] Society and we now want something to unite them and to strengthen ourselves against these various associations formed by laymen and conducted by Methodists and Englishmen’ [my emphasis].⁶⁹

With regard to the mission to the Catholic population, the Established Church was initially content to pursue moral reform through the more gradual means of education and popular literature. With the appearance of the Religious Tract and Book Society (1807), the Sunday School Society (1809), and the KPS (1811), in addition to the ADV and the HBS, there was no shortage of outlets for members of the Church establishment, either lay or clerical, to express their commitment to the cause. The objective of effecting a wholesale change in the religious allegiance of Catholics was seldom voiced, however, and the general attitude was one of paternalism, benevolence and quiet expectation.⁷⁰

Nevertheless, the sense that battle would inevitably be joined with the Catholic clergy was there from the beginning. As early as 1803 John Jebb had drawn up a list of books concerned with the ‘Romish Controversy’ that he recommended for distribution among the members of the ADV (see appendix A). Several years would pass, however, before the Church of Ireland would raise the banner of reformation on a national scale. In the meantime the committed advocates of evangelical religion and moral reform within its ranks would pursue an extraordinarily successful campaign to win support for their cause.

Among the first of the voluntary agencies to win widespread popular support among the clergy and laity of the Church of Ireland was the Hibernian Sunday School Society, founded after a meeting at the La Touche bank in Dublin in 1809. Alone among the educational agencies begun during this period, it could justify its existence without recourse to the Catholic population. It was founded by and for Protestants, and while this did not preclude the acceptance, or indeed the active recruitment, of Catholic children, nevertheless it was not dependent on their presence. During the first decade or so Catholic children did attend the Society’s schools, and occasionally priests applied to the Society for funds to set up their own Sunday schools on principles approved by the organizing committee.

Whatever good feeling may earlier have existed between the parties, however, disappeared during the general sectarian animosity of the early 1820s, and the Sunday school movement throughout the remainder of the century may be said to have been a purely Protestant concern. The movement made rapid progress in Ulster, where the effects of the recent Rebellion were still in evidence and ‘infidelity’ continued to exercise a strong hold on the popular classes, as the following commentary suggests:

In the year 1810, when I became a Sunday-school teacher, a dark cloud hung over Belfast. The rebellion of 1798, following up the French revolution, opened the floodgates of infidelity, and a number of Deistical characters actually commenced a Sunday school about 1808–9 to inculcate their pernicious views and to ridicule the Bible. This gave the alarm to the Christian community and hence the opening of the Smithfield Sunday School … From the very first the Sunday School Society for Ireland gave us help.⁷¹

Within twenty years of the Society’s foundation the overwhelming majority of Sunday schools were in Ulster. This was so despite the fact that Presbyterians were in the majority in the province, while the directors and patrons of the Society belonged to the landed and business elites of Dublin and the provinces and were mostly affiliated with the Church of Ireland. This feature was one of the first indications of a trend that was later to characterize the Irish evangelical movement, in which the Protestant upper classes provided the leadership and ideology necessary to weld their own interest to that of the Protestant rank and file. Among the patrons of the Society were the earls of Meath and Bandon, Count de Salis, Bishop Thomas Elrington of Ferns and Leighlin, and the countesses of Bandon, Charleville, Kingston, Meath, Portarlington, and Powerscourt.⁷² According to one contemporary source, the schools were popular among the largely Protestant ‘middle ranks and strong farmers’.⁷³ The number of schools increased dramatically between 1816 and 1819:

GROWTH OF SUNDAY SCHOOLS, 1809–19⁷⁴

NUMBER OF SUNDAY SCHOOLS IN PROPORTION TO POPULATION, 1821⁷⁵

This pattern reinforces other evidence showing that most of the schools were located in Ulster. The two areas in the south (outside of Dublin) where they were said to flourish were Powerscourt, County Wicklow, where the resident clergy were in the front ranks of the evangelical movement, and Youghal, County Cork, a traditional Protestant stronghold.⁷⁶

Like the LHS, the Sunday School Society reported a decline in enrolment for the year 1824/5. This it attributed to the establishment of Sunday schools at Catholic chapels, where religious education was now being provided for children who had formerly attended the Protestant schools. This development, however, does not appear to have seriously affected the system, which had a total of 202,000 pupils in attendance in 1831, as compared with 157,000 in 1824.⁷⁷ The commission of 1825 praised the work being done in the Sunday schools, which were run on a completely voluntary basis. Teachers gave their services gratuitously, and bibles and tracts were made available by the various evangelical agencies on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Much of the success of the Sunday School Society during its formative years was attributed to the commitment and energy of James Digges La Touche, who acted as secretary until his untimely death in 1827. La Touche was a conduit through which the radical and innovative ideas pioneered by Methodists and Independent evangelicals made their way into the Established Church. Around the time he undertook to make the Sunday school movement his personal crusade, his colleague Henry Monck Mason began to heed the appeals on behalf of the Bible in Irish that were issuing from the Independent evangelicals. Monck Mason had arrived at his vocation through a literary route. He had been a friend of the poet Thomas Moore at Trinity in the 1790s and a founding member of the Iberno-Celtic Society, a short-lived organization founded in Dublin in 1809 to promote the literature of Gaelic Ireland. More than any of his contemporaries, he was responsible for the Church of Ireland’s espousal of the policy of using the Irish language for missionary purposes. The results of this were twofold.

First, it placed before the clergy of the Church of Ireland the challenge of acquiring the knowledge to speak and teach Irish, a necessity that forced them to employ the services of native scholars educated to the degree that they could produce dictionaries, grammar books and primers for use in schools. In terms of establishing links between the cultures of colonist and colonized, this was of far greater significance than the earlier attempts of the scholars of the first Celtic revival in the 1780s or the less well-known efforts of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. Its importance became evident when, via German Romanticism, the concept of the national language as the soul of a nation’s identity became dominant around the middle decades of the century.⁷⁸

This process was anticipated and even predicted by some of the individuals who promoted the Irish language for the purposes of furthering the cause of reformation. Certainly, there was no mistaking the tone of Christopher Anderson’s address to Monck Mason and his friends when they solicited his advice on the question of whether the Gaelic or Roman character should be used for publications in Irish. Anderson was strongly in favour of the Gaelic character because native speakers preferred it, but he added:

The question … with respect to the letter is of small account, when compared with that of the necessity of teaching the language itself. And knowing that I am now addressing a committee with reference to their own countrymen, I would earnestly entreat their continued zealous attention to that object—teaching the native Irish to read their own language. Well assured as I am that whatever may be advanced at present against this,—the day will come when those who have taken up this object and prosecuted it will be regarded as the best benefactors of their country.⁷⁹

Monck Mason’s chief supporter in his crusade on behalf of the native language was the Rev. Robert Daly, rector of Powerscourt. Others included Thomas Lefroy, Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, Isaac D’Olier and Charles Edward Orpen. Together, this group represented the radical wing of episcopal evangelicalism that desired a much more open and active commitment of the Church of Ireland to the cause of a national reformation. They also represented a remarkably diverse range of opinions, which serves to illustrate the complex relationship between the legacy of Enlightenment idealism as expressed through religious revivalism and the polarities of the contemporary political world.

Initially, Monck Mason and the Rev. Daly attempted to work through the ADV by suggesting that it support the work of the LHS among the Irish-speaking population. But this proposal met with such opposition from the committee that they withdrew and began to lay plans for a separate organization, one that would be in more strict accordance with the religious principles of the Church of Ireland. These plans came to fruition with the founding of the Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language in 1818. In the two years prior to its creation some of the chief supporters of the project had been engaged in the preparation of a historical defence of their objectives. Their findings were published by William Sankey in 1818 in A Brief Sketch of the Various Attempts Which Have Been Made to Diffuse a Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures through the Medium of the Irish Language. Except for its insistence that the work be undertaken and supported by the Established Church, this publication actually added little to the arguments of Anderson and Dewar, and in many instances merely repeated their proposals. According to one authority, however, the Brief Sketch ‘had the immediate effect of removing much prejudice and of attracting many friends to a cause which it now appeared had the direct sanction of regal authority and of the convocation of the Church of Ireland held under Primate Ussher, A.D. 1664’.⁸⁰

It certainly prompted the KPS to consider whether the native language should be incorporated into their educational policies. A subcommittee appointed in 1819 produced a lengthy report on the subject and concluded that the Society should become directly involved, particularly in the production of teaching materials:

We conceive that the institution of an Irish school should not be compelled to languish for want of fundamental materials to set to work with. We have read several petitions concerning the establishment of schools in the south-west which state that nothing is wanting but elementary books in the Irish language to undertake forthwith the instruction of hundreds, and we have also seen several schools that were once established [that] have died away for want of such assistance … Our society is the proper one for people to look to for providing such materials and we ought perhaps long ago to have turned our attention to the subject.⁸¹

The Sunday School Society also began to look favourably at the prospect of teaching through Irish wherever it was necessary, and reported applications for schools in remote Irish-speaking areas in 1818–19.⁸² The Irish Society also reported substantial support, both financial and through donations of tracts and bibles, from several organizations in England and Scotland. A Scottish organization that called itself the Edinburgh Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in Ireland sent documents of the work being done by Gaelic-speaking missionaries in the Highlands, and inevitably decided to transfer its support from the KPS, in the belief that

there are advantages in the formation of separate and individual and, if you will, exclusive societies which may meet the various principles and even prejudices of those who wish well to the general cause, as a number of smaller streams flowing in many channels may do more to fertilize an extensive country than a torrent formed by a confluence of all their waters.⁸³

In London a sister society was established in 1821 following a substantial gift from Sir Thomas Baring; William Wilberforce agreed to accept the office of vice-president and the patronage of Lord Teignmouth, president of the BFBS, was successfully solicited.⁸⁴

Despite the ample discussion that had proceeded the founding of the Irish Society and the considerable publicity that attended the launching of its work, progress was initially quite modest. By 1825 the Society had in its employment seven schoolteachers who circulated among the 140 or so schools conducted by the Society, the majority of which were located in Connaught and Munster.⁸⁵ Payment from the Society was tied to the number of pupils who could prove their ability to read the scriptures to an inspector, who made a quarterly visit. The figures of those who could read proficiently were duly relayed to the Dublin headquarters of the Society for publication in the annual reports. The schools catered for adults as well as children, and in 1822 their work began to be supplemented by itinerant readers paid by the Scripture Readers’ Society, founded in that year with a donation of £1000 from Thomas Lefroy, which was doubled by his friend Lord Powerscourt.⁸⁶

The founding of the Irish Society heralded, if not the full commitment of the Church of Ireland to the cause of reformation among the Catholic population, then certainly the inability of its bishops to prevent the evangelical wing from having its own way. The trend terrified the Rev. Charles Forster (another of John Jebb’s correspondents), who had always been sceptical of the involvement of laymen in religious affairs, and particularly of the influence of Bible societies. ‘Have I not often been saying what penny-a-week Bible societies would lead to,’ he lamented during the crisis precipitated by the papal directive of Cardinal Fontana warning Catholics against the reading of the Protestant Bible in the autumn of 1818.⁸⁷ Two years later, the attempts of the bishop of Killaloe, Dr Mant, to employ ‘misdirected zeal’ in promoting the Protestant religion among Catholic pupils in attendance at schools run by the ADV was more than enough to arouse the consternation of John Jebb. ‘Such activities as those of the good bishop are precisely those which the hierarchy and priesthood on the popish side would wish to contend with,’ he warned, ‘and unless I am altogether in error, they will gain a temporary victory.’⁸⁸ Jebb’s predictions were only too accurate. While it may have been politically judicious for Catholic authorities to ignore the efforts of Methodists and Independent evangelicals to influence the predilections of their flocks, it was an entirely different matter once high-ranking ecclesiastics and prominent laymen of the Church of Ireland started to involve themselves in the education and moral improvement of the Catholic population. This element could call upon the power of landlords and tithe-collectors and also, through the influence of supportive politicians, control the distribution of public funds allocated for educational needs.

None of the evangelical societies penetrated the upper echelons of the Church of Ireland quite as thoroughly as the Irish Society. Already by 1818 it could boast of the archbishop of Tuam, Dr Power le Poer Trench, as its president, and such prominent landowners as 1st Viscount Lorton and Viscount Jocelyn (the future Lord Roden) as vice-presidents. Among the committee were to be found the names of Robert Daly, Thomas Lefroy, William Smyth Guinness, Joseph D’Arcy Sirr and Charles Edward Orpen.⁸⁹ All of these men were committed evangelicals, but their opinions on the objective of the Irish Society, or indeed on the larger question of the social and economic condition of the Catholic Irish, were by no means unanimous. Robert Daly and Thomas Lefroy were known as two of the most bitter anti-Catholics in the country, whereas Archbishop Trench had already won a reputation as a sympathizer and a defender of the rights of the Catholic poor. Charles Edward Orpen’s pronouncements on social and economic issues and defence of the language and culture of the native Irish, meanwhile, were directly in the tradition of the Christian humanism of Whitley Stokes and dangerously close to the radical republicanism of the 1790s.

Orpen’s opinions are particularly revealing of the complexities of the evangelical mindset. His indignation at the political and economic degradation of the native Irish was matched by his anger over the low esteem accorded to their language and culture. The particular object of his anger was William Shaw Mason, who had suggested that the poverty of the Irish was a direct consequence of the ‘barbarous’ character of their native language: ‘The common Irish are naturally shrewd but very ignorant and deficient in mental culture, from the barbarous tongue in which they converse, which operates as an effectual bar to any kind of literary attainment …’. ‘Whose fault is this’, replied Orpen, ‘but theirs who have hitherto refused to give them education in this language’ and he went on to claim the number of Irish writers listed by the Iberno-Celtic Society and the manuscripts in Oxford and other great European universities as evidence of Irish literary and cultural achievement.⁹⁰

There is some reason to believe that, like his predecessor Charlotte Brooke, Orpen was spurred into action by the movement gathering momentum in Scotland whereby the Gaelic culture of the Highlands was being pressed into service to provide a national identity as the country began to recover from the divisive trauma of the Jacobite rebellion. Since Gaelic Scotland had never been other than an ‘overflow’ or ‘cultural colony’ of Ireland, this ‘invention of tradition’ demanded some radical rearrangements, including, in the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘the usurpation of Irish culture and the rewriting of early Scottish history, culminating in the insolent claim that Scotland— Celtic Scotland—was the mother nation and Ireland the cultural dependency’.⁹¹ This attitude inevitably found its way across the Irish Sea and made its appearance in a statistical survey of County Kildare, where an account was given of the discovery by the Glengarry Regiment of Scotch Fencibles that they could communicate in Irish with the local peasantry. The incident itself was of no great consequence. It was the attitude of the author T.J. Rawson that was pounced upon by Orpen, who unflinchingly charged him with either ignorance or prejudice:

The Scotch are mentioned as, speaking with correctness, the ‘ancient Celtic’ while the language of the Irish is called ‘the corrupt Irish spoken by the natives’. How came the Gaelic, notoriously a minor dialect, to be more correct Celtic than the Irish, which all scholars allow to be the most pure?⁹²

Orpen was a fellow traveller of Christopher Anderson and Whitley Stokes and a clear partisan of preserving Irish as the national language. To the smug conclusion of Shaw Mason that the spread of English was an indication of the acceptance of English law and civilization, he drew a distinction between language and religion: ‘Thank God, say I, British policy is a distinct thing from the extension of the English language, and best advanced by diffusing Christian knowledge among all the tongues of this vast empire …’⁹³ In Orpen’s ideal world Ireland’s route to progress and a place among the nations would best be secured through the maintenance of the native language and the adoption of the Protestant faith.

Such views, in the short term at any rate, were drowned out by the sloganeering of polemicists like Robert Daly who dominated the public debate throughout the 1820s. But this is not to dismiss the influence of Orpen, or of Whitley Stokes. The ease with which the convictions inspired by religious feeling could be invested with equal passion in the worship of the nation was to become a common phenomenon in Victorian Ireland. Disillusioned or frustrated by the attempts to effect a religious reformation among the Catholic population, or simply with the rigidity and philistinism that had come to characterize the movement generally, many evangelicals transferred their passions to the study of language, antiquities and music. This movement would break into an open political expression at the end of the century when, shorn of its religious dimension, evangelical passion would find expression in Celtic revivalism.⁹⁴

If the stated objectives of the Irish Society are any indication, however, the sympathies of Orpen were not shared by his colleagues. On the contrary, the committee repeatedly expressed its commitment to accommodate the prejudices of those who wanted to make the language an instrument of anglicization and Protestantization. At a meeting in October 1818 it was resolved to adopt as a standing rule:

that the exclusive object of this society is to instruct the native Irish, who still use their vernacular language, how to employ it as a means for obtaining an accurate knowledge of English, and for this end, as also for their moral amelioration, to distribute among them the Irish version of the Scriptures … and such other works as may be necessary for schoolbooks, disclaiming at the same time all intention of making the Irish language a vehicle for the communication of general knowledge.⁹⁵

The use of this double standard notwithstanding, the fact remains that those who would promote the use of Irish for the purposes of evangelization were still obliged (to some degree) to enter into the linguistic and cultural world of the native Irish. The consequences of this could hardly be predicted. Consider the case of Henry Monck Mason, whose hatred of Catholicism was visceral but who nevertheless strove for much of his life to establish a chair of Irish in Trinity College and finally succeeded in 1844. Or take that of Canon James Goodman, the evangelical clergyman and Irish-speaking native of West Kerry, whose collection of traditional airs and dance tunes ranks as one of the four most important repositories of such material for the entire nineteenth century.⁹⁶

The link between the worlds of Monck Mason, Canon Goodman, and the nationalist revival was a direct one. When the young John Millington Synge (in his own words) ‘relinquished the kingdom of God’ and ‘discovered the kingdom of Ireland’, his interest in the Irish language took him to the aged Canon Goodman, who had won the first Bedell scholarship to study Irish at Trinity in 1844 and who now occupied the chair established by Monck Mason.⁹⁷ Terence Brown has pointed out the need for an appraisal of the contribution of the evangelical movement to the cultural history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. Such an appraisal will undoubtedly foster a new understanding of the intersecting links between religion, culture and politics, and establish the place of the evangelical movement in the tangled genealogy of Irish nationalism. Of more immediate concern to our understanding of its impact on contemporary social and political affairs, however, is the reception of its promoters and agents among the Catholic poor, who were now confronted with an entirely new and unfamiliar invasion of the traditional sphere of their morality and religion.

THE POPULAR RESPONSE TO THE EVANGELICAL MISSION

That the aim of the evangelical crusade was to effect a moral reformation in the minds and hearts of the Irish peasantry was never in dispute. In the words of Thomas Lefroy, the idea was to educate them ‘not by letters alone, but really to educate them by influencing their minds, moulding their habits, forming their principles, and training their faculties’.⁹⁸ Any attempt to assess objectively the degree of success enjoyed by the early phase of the evangelical mission is a potential minefield, particularly because the evangelical mission in later decades was tarnished by the accusation of wholesale bribery and coercion in the drive to make converts. The record of the first two decades of the century, however, at least up to the early 1820s when Catholic leaders launched a full-scale offensive against the movement at every level, suggests that ground was being won, particularly in the area of education.

Much of the evidence from the early years of the evangelical mission suggests that the common people simply did not know in what context or category they should place the itinerant Methodists, Baptist schoolteachers, Gaelic-speaking Scottish ministers and others who were loosed on the Irish countryside to distribute tracts and bibles and urge Catholic children to attend their schools. Their purpose was not at all clear to unlettered country people whose knowledge of the Protestant world did not extend much beyond what to them was the haughtily superior and tithe-exacting Church of Ireland. One of the most popular suspicions to circulate in connection with the schools of the Independent evangelicals was that Catholic children were to be taken for the army of the king of England, and that they would end up as ‘sure soldiers’—no doubt a popular twist on the commonly invoked term employed by biblical enthusiasts to make people ‘soldiers of Christ’.⁹⁹ On the other hand, the appearance of kindly Baptist missionaries in County Mayo, willing to establish schools and to educate children without charge, caused people to question whether the opposition of the priest was justified: they turned up to check it out for themselves, and when they found that they were not agents of the devil, they went against the wishes of the priest. Other instances surfaced where the situation was reversed: when the people of a County Sligo village refused to send their children to a school recently opened by the Baptists, ‘fearing that the government would claim them’, the local priest recommended from the altar that they attend and learn to read the scriptures.¹⁰⁰

The characteristic evangelical method of infiltrating popular culture through subversive channels like popular reading material and substituting the reading of the scriptures for the seanchaí tradition of telling heroic tales around the fireside were apparently quite successful. Travelling evangelists frequently commented on the joy with which illiterate peasants heard passages from the Bible in their native language. Christopher Anderson recorded:

Last summer the writer, in passing through a part of Connaught, found a schoolmaster teaching a school on his own account, who for several months had been in the habit of reading the Irish New Testament to his neighbours, and as a proof that his labour was not lost on those poor people, one of them brought a candle alternately, or at least they furnished light, while he read to them the Irish scriptures. On reading the affecting parable of the rich man and Lazarus, he said, they called out to him ‘Read it again—read it again,’ and they also had their favourite passages in consequence of this exercise.¹⁰¹

The testimony of his colleague Daniel Dewar was even more striking:

Whenever it was announced that the scriptures would be read in the Irish language, crowds of Catholics came to hear, who never till then heard a Protestant read the bible; and I shall ever recollect the manifest pleasure with which they seemed to receive instruction.¹⁰²

The great stumbling block, however, was the traditional association between the Protestant religion and the foreign oppressor, and this was always below the surface even when the overtures of the missionaries were made through the pleasing medium of Irish. When Gideon Ouseley visited the famous penitential shrine at Lough Derg (a bastion of what evangelicals considered the worst forms of Catholic superstition), a highly revealing exchange took place when he began to criticize the practice of purchasing penances:

I expressed my unbelief [sic] with regard to a system so preposterous and unchristian: and to add to the absurdity, where the principal actor [the guide], himself a profane wretch, could perform works of merit and supererogation for the good of the souls of others. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, ‘you are not Irish’. ‘Indeed I am’, was the reply: ‘I have never been in England’. ‘If you are not English’, he retorted, ‘you belong to them, so you do’. I then administered some suitable admonition and retired from the scene of moral degradation with sorrow and disgust.¹⁰³

Once the education and school societies began to operate, however, such prejudice might be suppressed in favour of the educational and often the material benefits that stood to be gained. Writing from a remote part of Ulster in 1810, a teacher in the pay of the LHS complained of having lost pupils because of the opposition of the priest, and also of the dreadful poverty of the area where children barely had clothing and no shoes or stockings in the depth of winter:

To see them come a mile or two in this condition, at this season of the year, is truly distressing. This is a country where one has an opportunity of clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, if he had but the ability. I wonder how many poor, naked creatures here will be able to get through the winter; and had I but a very few pounds to spare, I could lay them out in a very useful way; and a very few pounds laid out in this manner would procure me plenty both of hearers and scholars.¹⁰⁴

The use of material incentives was not as yet associated with the opprobrium that was to accrue in later years when charges of wholesale bribery and outright coercion were levelled at evangelical missionaries. In one of his many epistolary discussions about moral reform with his archbishop, John Jebb described how a Sunday school run by the Church of Ireland had prospered in a part of Ulster where it was flanked by two opposing creeds:

About seventeen years since, the bishop of Dromore established Sunday schools in his neighbourhood, which have since continued in a flourishing condition. The numbers at present are about 200, who, without distinction of religious tenets, are all taught the church catechism, and all attend the church service. Opposition was at one time experienced, both from popish bigotry and Presbyterian pride, but all opposition was rendered fruitless by the simple measure of giving each child a halfpenny for every Sunday’s diligent attendance. Ever since the adoption of that plan the numbers have been progressively increasing and the good effects are fully ascertained by the civility and honesty of the children. [my emphasis]¹⁰⁵

The people most likely to take advantage of the material benefits offered by educational societies were schoolteachers, for whom the salaries of £25 and £30 a year and a decent schoolhouse were quite an improvement on the hedge schools. Hedge-school masters were quickly co-opted by the KPS, and also by the London Hibernian and Irish societies. Shortly after it began operations in Sligo, the LHS set up an academy to train young men as schoolteachers. Another institution, which professed itself a nondenominational body but appears to have had some connection with the ADV, was set up at Kildimo in County Limerick to train teachers for schools in which the scriptures were the basis of instruction.¹⁰⁶ It was the opinion of John Jebb that teachers who could make their way by their own abilities were far preferable to those paid by endowments ‘because people think that there is a plot afoot to proselytize them. When the teacher is allowed to make his own way by the weight of his own attainments … the people pride themselves on their good judgement’.¹⁰⁷ In spite of Jebb’s expectations, however, the Kildimo Seminary was a constant source of controversy in the area, so much so that the Rev. William Maunsell of Limerick was obliged to advise the Commissioners of Education who were about to set up an investigative inquiry in 1817 to select superintendents ‘free from local prejudice … as it would be difficult to find anyone in this neighbourhood who had not formed a very unfavourable opinion of the seminary’.¹⁰⁸

The attempts of the evangelical missionaries to make common cause with the native Irish led to some curious partnerships, but none was more remarkable than that of Thaddeus (or Thady) Connellan with the LHS, and later with the Irish Society. Born a Catholic in about 1780, Connellan was a native of Skreen in County Sligo and became one of the outstanding Irish scholars of his day. His career as a ‘poor scholar’ in the hedge schools of Connaught and Munster was recounted to Lady Morgan, who published an account of it in her Patriotic Sketches (1807). It bears a striking resemblance to that of the young William Carleton, especially because of the services rendered by both men to the cause of the evangelical moral crusade. Around 1807 Connellan came into contact with Albert Blest and the LHS, and either chose or was persuaded to link his cause with theirs. It is not clear at what point he converted to Protestantism, but the shift had certainly occurred by the time he took up employment to train Irish-speaking schoolmasters for the LHS in 1810. His conversion appears to have been a sincere one, and he remained a Protestant until his death in 1854.¹⁰⁹ His interest in education was nonetheless deeply and consciously motivated by a genuine desire to improve the condition of his countrymen:

My own mind has long been most forcibly impressed, from a thorough knowledge of the character of my countrymen, their feelings, and their prejudices … especially that large body of them who reside in the more distant part of the kingdom and among whom the Irish language universally prevails … that the only effective way to soften their passions was to cause their very prejudices to become an engine of good, and through their enthusiastic and natural love of their own language … to lead them to a train of right thinking; and by opening to their minds the excellence of religion, to subdue their frightful disposition to anarchy, disloyalty, and confusion, and to render them loyal, industrious and happy.¹¹⁰

Connellan’s faith in the reverence for learning to be found among the native Irish was such that he assured Lady Morgan that ‘the labourer who earned but sixpence a day would sooner live upon potatoes and salt than refuse a little learning to his child’.¹¹¹ His estimation of their native language was hardly less restrained: ‘The Irish is the first and loftiest tongue in the world: the English can never come near it, and the Greek alone is worthy of being compared to it.’¹¹² The possessor of such passionate convictions was unlikely to turn down any scheme designed to promote education through Irish. Predictably, one of the major tasks assigned to him by the LHS was the compilation of Irish textbooks and spelling books and the translation of the scriptures into Irish. Shortly after the founding of the Irish Society, Connellan was approached to work on an English–Irish dictionary and to help with the production of Irish grammars for use in the Society’s schools. He was well informed about the progress that was being made in literacy in the native languages of Wales and Scotland:

I believe the Highland Gaelic Society may help me in this object of printing useful works on husbandry such as they have in their Gaelic. They are long before us in very useful publications, and even the Welsh have many hundreds of new books in the vernacular language of the country and all the Scriptures these many years besides …¹¹³

Useful works on husbandry, however, were precisely what Monck Mason and his colleagues wished to keep out of the hands of the Irish-speaking peasantry. The reformation they desired was to be confined to the realm of the spiritual, and Connellan’s emphasis on the material was altogether at odds with the attitudes of those in control of the Irish Society.

Despite the consensus that existed between the various denominations on the desirability of effecting a change in the religious allegiance of the Catholic Irish, during the first twenty years of the evangelical crusade open conversion was considered less important than setting up an educational foundation on which a genuine reformation based on literacy and a knowledge of the scriptures might be advanced. Even under the best of circumstances it is doubtful whether this could have been accomplished, and the period that followed the ending of the Napoleonic Wars was far from providing the best of circumstances. Between 1815 and 1823 a deepening economic depression produced explosive developments in the political arena. It was against this background that evangelicals, driven by their faith in the Protestant Bible as the supreme source of moral authority, became identified in the popular mind with an unbending resistance to any measure that threatened Protestant hegemony. And the measure to which resistance was most fierce was precisely that in which the Catholics had come to invest all their hopes of salvation and deliverance, namely, Catholic Emancipation.

Notes

1. An Address to the British Public on the Moral and Religious State of Ireland (London 1805), p. 15.

2. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 6 Oct. 1820 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/7).

3. Clarke H. Irwin, Famous Irish Preachers (Dublin 1889), p. 28.

4. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, p. 121.

5. Ibid. p. 120.

6. Charles Graham to Thomas Coke, 11 Sept. 1802 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

7. Quoted in W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London 1972), p. 118.

8. William Cornwall to the secretary of the Methodist Missionary Society, 26 Dec. 1817 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

9. James Bell to Joseph Taylor, 29 Sept. 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

10. William Cornwall to Joseph Taylor, 6 Oct. 1818 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1818–20, box 74).

11. William Cornwall to Joseph Taylor, 25 Sept. 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1818–20, box 74).

12. Charles Graham to Thomas Coke, 25 Jan. 1806; William Peacock and John Hamilton to Thomas Coke, 24 March 1806; R. Wilson to J. Taylor, 29 March 1819 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

13. Mathias Joyce to Thomas Coke, 21 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

14. The family of the duke of Wellington, for example, changed its name from Wesley to Wellesley to avoid association with the great Methodist leader. See R.B. McDowell, Social Life in Ireland, 1800-45 (Dublin 1957), p. 35.

15. Lawrence Kean to Thomas Coke, 28 Oct. 1802 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

16. William Hamilton to Adam Averell, July 1806 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

17. James Bell and William Hamilton to Thomas Coke, 31 Aug. 1804 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–17, box 74).

18. This growth is illustrated in Hempton, ‘Methodism in Irish society’, 117–42.

19. William Parnell, An Historical Apology for the Irish Catholics (Dublin 1807), p. 129.

20. Draft on Irish Missions for the Report of 1806 (SOAS/MMSA [Ireland] 1802–25, box 74).

21. Hempton, Methodism and Politics, pp. 125–42.

22. Ibid. p. 127.

23. Madden, Peter Roe, p. 127.

24. Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 183; Killen, Ecclesiastical History, vol. I, p. 392.

25. Report of a Deputation of the London Hibernian Society (1808), p. 46.

26. Ibid. p. 20.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid. p.26.

29. Victor Edward Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of Linguistic and Cultural Conflict in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh 1983), pp. 82–5.

30. Ibid. pp. 96–153.

31. Charles W.J. Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a Cultural Region (London and New York 1988), pp. 151–2.

32. Alexander Haldane, The Lives of Robert Haldane of Airthrey, and his brother, James Alexander Haldane (Edinburgh 1855), pp. 104–23.

33. James Godkin, The Religious History of Ireland, Primitive, Papal, and Protestant, Including the Evangelical Missions, Catholic Agitations, and Church Progress of the Last Half-Century (London 1873), pp. 233.

34. Ibid. p. 83.

35. Ibid. p. 195.

36. Ibid. p. 182–3.

37. Sixth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1812), p. 4.

38. Webster, London Hibernian Society, pp. 15–16; Motherwell, Albert Blest, p. 225.

39. Ninth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1815), p. 5.

40. Motherwell, Albert Blest, pp. 245–51.

41. The following observation was made in the annual report of the LHS for 1816: ‘It is a remarkable instance of the divine favour that the priests who have been tolerant and friendly towards the society are situated in places where their power is absolute, and where the society has not a single friend to counteract their influence if it had been hostile.’ Tenth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1816), p. 10.

42. Albert Blest to Charles King O’Hara, 27 Sept. 1814 (NLI, Charles King O’Hara Papers, MS 20,285).

43. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 12 March 1814 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/3).

44. For a more in-depth discussion of this subject see Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, pp. 154–7.

45. John Owen, History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, pp. 9–10.

46. Durcacz, Decline, p. 119.

47. Christopher Anderson of Edinburgh was a disciple of the Haldane brothers and a prominent member of the Baptist Missionary Society. Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1992 (Edinburgh 1992), p. 20.

48. Christopher Anderson, Memorial on Behalf of the Native Irish with a View to Their Improvement in Moral and Religious Knowledge through the Medium of Their Own Language (London 1815), pp. 28–34.

49. Daniel Dewar, Observations on the Character, Customs, and Superstitions of the Irish and on Some of the Causes Which Have Retarded the Moral and Political Improvement of Ireland (London 1812), p. 25.

50. Ibid. p. 34.

51. Ian Douglas Maxwell, ‘Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish debate on mission methods, 1750–1835’ in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment (Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge 2001), pp. 123–40.

52. Tenth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1816), pp. 34–5.

53. First Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1815), p. 10.

54. Ibid. p. 37.

55. Second Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1816),

p. 18.

56. Fourth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1818), pp. 37–8.

57. Joseph Belcher, The Baptist Irish Society: Its Origin, History, and Prospects (London 1845), pp. 25–6.

58. Sixth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1820), p. 8.

59. Seventh Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1821), pp. 101–12.

60. Sixth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1820), pp. 4–8.

61. Fourth Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1818), pp. 11–13.

62. FirstReport of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , XII, p. 736.

63. As L.M. Cullen has pointed out, the Sligo–Roscommon area, like Carlow and Wexford in the south-east, was a ‘shifting frontier’ characterized by heavy Protestant settlement. Between about 1780 and 1830 estate owners in this area followed a policy of introducing Protestant tenants, leading to a sharp increase in the Protestant population, and an accompanying rise in agrarian and sectarian outrages. See Cullen, Modern Ireland, p. 208.

64. Christian Observer (Feb. 1818), 172.

65. Christian Observer (1822), appendix, 846.

66. Christian Observer (May 1825), 330.

67. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), 400, XII, p. 70.

68. Akenson, Irish Education Experiment, p. 82.

69. William Stewart to Charles Brodrick, 1815 or 1816 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8869/8).

70. John Jebb believed emphatically that the benevolence of the Church of Ireland clergy was the most effective instrument of moral reform: ‘were the clergy placed, not on weaker but on stronger grounds … their benevolence would have a free and unimpeded channel in which to flow … and they could be more popular than any other class of society, from the contrast between their generosity, and the hard dealings of lay proprietors, who are too seldom, in an equal degree, liberalized by education and softened by religion. The truth is, I cannot conceive a measure which would be more likely, eventually, to bring over the Roman Catholics to our reformed faith, than strengthening the hands of the clergy. Were this effectively done, could any measure be devised which would make it the interest of the people to settle quietly, the clergyman, instead of waging defensive warfare to protect his rights, would be at full liberty to bend all his power towards conciliation: and it cannot be doubted that conciliation is the best, as it is the only legitimate origin of conversion.’ John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 14 May 1815 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/3).

71. Quoted in Urwick, James Digges La Touche, pp. 411–12.

72. Christian Observer (Dec. 1814), 845.

73. Robert Daly, A Sermon Preached at St. Anne’s Church in Aid of the Funds of the Sunday Schools Society for Ireland, on Sunday the 28th of February 1819 (Dublin 1819), p. 30.

74. Tenth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1821), p. 11.

75. Tenth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1821), appendix.

76. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), pp. 62–3.

77. Sullivan, ‘Education of Irish Catholics’, p. 285.

78. Eva Stoter, ‘“Grimmige Zeiten”: The Influence of Lessing, Herder and the Grimm Brothers on the nationalism of the young Irelanders’ in Tadhg Foley and Seán Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin 1998).

79. Christopher Anderson to the committee of the Irish Society, 6 Nov. 1818 (TCD, Irish Society Proceedings, MS 7644/5). For a discussion of the use of Gaelic script see Ó Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture, pp. 160–2.

80. Tomás Ó hÁilín, ‘The Irish Society agus Tadhg Ó Coinnialláin’, Studia Hibernica, 8 (1968), 68–9.

81. Irish Society Proceedings, 16 Sept. 1819 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 30.

82. Ninth Report of the Sunday School Society for Ireland (1819), p. 17.

83. Irish Society Proceedings, 17 March 1819 (TCD, MS 7644), pp. 17–18.

84. Irish Society Proceedings, 23 June 1821 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 85.

85. First Report of the Commissioners of Irish Education Inquiry (1825), , p. 84.

86. Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Lefroy, pp. 89–92.

87. Charles Forster to John Jebb, 9 Oct. 1818 (TCD, John Jebb Papers, MS 6396–7/70).

88. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, Oct. 1820 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/7).

89. Irish Society Proceedings, 23 June 1818 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 1.

90. Charles Edward Orpen, The Claims of Millions of Our Fellow Countrymen to Be Taught in Their Own and Only Language—the Irish (Dublin 1821), pp. 21–3.

91. Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The invention of tradition: The Highland tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1984), p. 16.

92. Orpen, Claims of Millions, p. 9.

93. Ibid. p. 11.

94. W.J. McCormack has drawn attention to the similarities between the experiences of religious and national awakening. In raising the question as to why the Irish Literary Revival was called a ‘revival’, he speculates, ‘Is it not in several of its personalities, Yeats, Synge … O’Grady, and in a varied form, Lady Gregory, the achievement of displaced Irish evangelicals?’ See McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, p. 231. For a further analysis, see Vivien Mercier, ‘Victorian evangelicalism and the Anglo–Irish Literary Revival’ in Peter Connolly (ed.), Literature and the Changing Ireland (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire 1980), pp. 59–101; and Terence Brown, ‘The Church of Ireland and the climax of the ages’ in Terence Brown (ed.), Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar and Totowa, New Jersey 1988), pp. 49–64.

95. Irish Society Proceedings, 22 Oct. 1818 (TCD, MS 7644), p. 3.

96. An account of the career and work of Canon Goodman is provided in an article by Breandán Breathnach, ‘Séamus Goodman (1828–96): Bailitheoir cheoil’ (James Goodman [1828–96]: Music collector), Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society, VI, (1973), 152–71.

97. David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J.M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York 1989), pp. 28–30.

98. Lefroy, Memoir of Chief Justice Lefroy, p. 83.

99. Fifth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1811), appendix, p. 26; First Annual Report of the Baptist Irish Society (1815), appendix, p. 45; Motherwell, Albert Blest, pp. 215–16.

100. First Annual Report of the Baptist Society for the Promotion of the Gospel in Ireland (1815), appendix, p. 54.

101. Anderson, Memorial, pp. 64–6.

102. Dewar, Observations, p. 122.

103. Quoted in Reilly, Gideon Ouseley, pp. 203–4.

104. Fourth Annual Report of the London Hibernian Society (1810), pp. 17–19.

105. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 23 Nov. 1803 (NLI, Brodrick Papers, MS 8866/1).

106. The first mention of this institution occurred in 1809 at the annual meeting of the LHS. It was described as having been established by a Mr Jones and not exclusively connected with any one denomination. Young men were admitted at the age of eighteen and later recommended for situations; in 1809 the LHS undertook to sponsor four candidates whom it later expected to employ as teachers. Report of the Committee of the Hibernian Society at the Annual Meeting, 12 May 1809, pp. 4–5.

107. John Jebb to Charles Brodrick, 23 Oct. 1814 (Brodrick Papers, NLI, MS 8866/3)

108. William Maunsell to William Walker, secretary to the Board of Education, 24 July 1817 (NLI, Dr Michael Quane Papers, MS 17,945).

109. Ó hÁilín, ‘The Irish Society agus Tadhg Ó Coinnialláin’, pp. 60–78.

110. Quoted in ibid. p. 63.

111. Quoted in Sydney Owenson [Lady Morgan], Patriotic Sketches of Ireland Written in Connaught, vol. II (Baltimore, Maryland 1809), p. 211.

112. Quoted in ibid. p. 206.

113. Thaddeus Connnellan to Charles King O’Hara, 7 July 1834 (NLI, Charles King O’Hara Papers, MS 20,324).