[10] Conclusion

The path from the origins of pietism and revivalism among the displaced and persecuted Protestant minorities in central Europe in the early eighteenth century to evangelical Protestantism in late nineteenth-century Ulster is full of twists and turns, but it is still recognizable as a path. From Wesley’s early contacts with Moravians and Bohemians to those sober Wesleyan gentlemen who stood silently in mass protest against Home Rule in Belfast in 1886 there is a century and a half of turbulent history. The part played by evangelical religion in cementing a provincial identity substantially different from the rest of Ireland is really a story within a story. The original plot has to do with the settlement patterns and religious conflicts stirred up by the Reformation and the complex political and social relationship between Britain and Ireland. Not only was Ulster different in important respects from other parts of Ireland before the mideighteenth century, but early evangelicals could not have foreseen the way in which their religious enthusiasm was to be confined, more or less, to the northern part of the island. The original intentions of Wesley and Cennick, the voluntary religious societies and the ‘second Reformation’ were to take the gospel to the whole country and, as time went on, to work for the conversion of Catholic Ireland. Demographic realities and increased religious conflict determined otherwise. By the mid-nineteenth century only the most optimistic evangelicals considered the conversion of Ireland to be a realistic proposition. As missionary objectives became circumscribed by realism, evangelical Protestants began to fear that history was working against them. Not only was Catholic Ireland unconverted, but it dared press for an apparently inexhaustible set of political and religious concessions, including self-government and the repeal of the Union. Politics offered little hope of a final defence, because those with the power did not have to live with the problem. Religion fared no better. When at last the great

revival came, it awakened the Protestant faithful and bypassed the Catholic population altogether. If God was not going to deliver the enemy into their hands, Ulster Protestants felt they at least had the right to defend their own small corner. Slowly but inexorably a garrison mentality began to replace the old conversionist activism. An evangelical defensive mentality, which is noticeable in the southern counties of Ulster in the 1780s and 1790s, came more into view in the decades following Catholic Emancipation. Peel’s first great concession was indicative of the fact that English statesmen, however tardily and inconsistently, could no longer govern Ireland on principles enshrined in the Protestant Constitution.