History of the Irish Church from James II. to Emigration of Presbyterians to America, 1725 (4)

From Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil by Rev. J. G. Craighead

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CHAPTER VIII.continued

The absence of an act of toleration was at this period no great grievance to Presbyterians. Their loyalty was well known, and their recent valuable services in behalf of civil and religious freedom were still so fresh in the remembrance of the government and of the people that public opinion and the favor of the civil magistrates supplied the place of a legislative enactment. To nearly the close of King William’s reign the isolated cases of attempted persecution, or of hardship suffered by them, could be readily brought before the agents of the government and prompt justice obtained. The failure of the attempts that were made to molest them in the enjoyment of their religious rights discouraged those who, moved by jealousy in seeing their prosperity and rapid increase in numbers, would have been pleased to obstruct their public ministry. Causes of irritation, however, were not wanting, occasioned by attacks made upon the worship and discipline in use among Presbyterians. One of the most noted of these was by Bishop King, of Derry.

This High Church bishop, in 1693, published an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Discourse Concerning the Inventions of Men in the Worship of God, which contained very many unworthy insinuations and unfounded charges against Presbyterians. The tractate was written in a spirit of affected friendship for those whom it attacked, and with the design to show that their modes of worship were not only very defective, but were without any warrant from Scripture. The writer claimed to have been moved to his work by his concern “for a well-meaning people so strangely misled as to content themselves to meet together for years with a design to worship God, and yet hardly ever see or hear anything of God’s immediate appointment in their meetings.” He charged that Presbyterians, as a rule, were very inadequately instructed by their ministers in the principles of religion; that the Bible was rarely read in their religious assemblies; that few of them attended public worship; and that the Lord’s Supper was undervalued and neglected, being celebrated only at very distant intervals.

The Rev. Robert Boyse of Dublin, and afterward the Rev. Robert Craighead of Derry, replied to the bishop’s accusations, exposing the inaccuracy of his statements and refuting the reasoning based on the false charges. Not content with producing unimpeachable testimony expressly contradicting the bishop’s alleged facts relative to the religious ignorance of Presbyterians, their disuse of the Scriptures in divine service and their neglect of the Lord’s Supper, they proceeded to discuss the subject of church government, and called in question, in their turn, the divine authority of many of the rites and ceremonies in the Established Church. This opened wide the field of controversy, which continued for many years and called forth many publications.

By the able discussion which these subjects received, Presbyterians were more fully convinced than ever that their simple forms of worship were more in accordance with the word of God than those of the Episcopal Church. This in itself was a good, but the controversy was not without attendant evils. It excited animosities among Protestants when they should have stood shoulder to shoulder in resisting their common enemy. It led the ministers of the Establishment to preach frequently against the sin of schism, and those of the Presbyterian Church to defend their position as nonconformists and make prominent their objections to Episcopacy. Without doubt it embittered the clergy of the Established Church against all dissenters and had a great influence with other bishops, besides King, of Derry, to cause them to resist every measure of toleration which the liberal monarch and his ministry were anxious to grant. They began at this period to exhibit their unfriendly feelings toward the laity as well as the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. In some parts of Ulster the people were not permitted to bury their dead, as formerly, unless an Episcopalian officiated at the funeral and read the burial-service of his Church; in other places they were compelled to hold the office of churchwarden and take certain official oaths which were opposed to their consciences; in some instances they were prohibited from having their families instructed by tutors of their own religious faith, all teachers being required to conform to the Established Church; and strenuous efforts were made to prohibit Presbyterian ministers from celebrating marriages even among their own people.[7]

These efforts to annoy and harass Nonconformists continued through succeeding years, until, on the accession of a Tory ministry in England and the ascendency of the High Church party, a bill was passed requiring “all persons in office, civil, military or ecclesiastical, to take the oath of abjuration.” And in 1704 the Irish bibhops succeeded in having the sacramental test imposed, by which Presbyterians were deprived of all public offices and places of trust which they then held, and were rendered incapable of ever afterward being appointed to similar offices. Thus was a most flagrant act of injustice finally consummated through the influence of the bishops and the High Church party. To carry their end in Parliament, and to obtain votes for its passage, they promised to pass an act of toleration giving the same legal security to the Presbyterian Church in Ireland that was by law allowed Protestant dissenters in England. But all such promises were forgotten when their main object had been obtained, and the Irish Presbyterians were left in a much worse position than their English brethren.

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NOTES

[7] After speaking of the persecutions of nonconformists subsequent to the Restoration, Mr. Froude states “that the full and free equality of privilege which they (nonconformists) had honorably earned, it was William’s desire to secure to them by law. But in this he was prevented by the ‘Irish Established clergy, the Irish peers and the great landowners, who were ardent High Churchmen,’ and who were but a third of the nominal Protestants. In the opposition the bishops took the most prominent part, and were most vindictive and unrelenting.”—Froude, vol. i., p. 237.