Anglican critiques of revivalism: An Irish Anglican on the "wretched excitement" of the 1859 Revival
McIlwaine - a member of the Evangelical Alliance - might have been expected to join those Episcopalian clergy who endorsed the revivalists. Instead he provided a sustained critique of the 'revival', echoing traditional Anglican concerns concerning revivalism. A 2014 paper in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History by Daniel Ritchie - 'William McIlwaine and the 1859 Revival in Ulster: A Study of Anglican and Evangelical Identities' - has provided an excellent insight into the critique offered by McIlwaine. This post consists of extracts from Ritchie's paper.
As with previous Anglican critiques of revivalism, McIlwaine highlighted how the instantaneous conversions, physical manifestations, and less than sober declarations of faith could not be regarded as the fruits of the Spirit:
For McIlwaine, all this was evidence that revivalism was not of the Holy Spirit, as it was not the Spirit’s work to deprive people of their mental faculties. In light of this, one can see why Janice Holmes concludes that revivalism ‘gloried in the abandonment of rationality’ and why McIlwaine viewed the decline of reason with genuine alarm ... McIlwaine believed that revivalism was fostering pride among its supposed converts. He was especially appalled by the sight of converts performing private devotions in public. As this indicated an ostentation which was inconsistent with Christian humility, he complained that such things ‘are not the fruits I should expect to see resulting from the good Spirit’s work’ ...
Writing in July, after the excitement of the previous year had died down, McIlwaine argued that many of the converts had returned to their old sins. He rebuked the revivalist leaders who had failed to take heed of his warnings relating to the role of young converts when the revival was at its height. Even at the time McIlwaine had feared that many so-called converts were credulous and self-deceived, and subsequent events had only served to confirm his diagnosis. Moreover, he had observed that revivalists, particularly the revival-supporting press, had a tendency grossly to exaggerate the revival’s positive effects ...
Despite the testimony of the occasional judge or magistrate to the beneficial social effects of revivalism, he had concluded that the end of the movement was in the best interests of Belfast’s moral well-being. This primary evidence lends weight to Hill’s conclusion that ‘[t]he conversion of prostitutes, drunks and gamblers received a degree of attention out of proportion to their actual number’, and that while the revival movement ‘may have had an immediate impact in some localties, long term behavioural trends do not seem to have been affected’.
Rash claims for 1859 - much like the claims for the supposed 'Second Great Awakening' in the United States (which, as McIlwaine noted, failed to confront the abiding national sin of slavery) - did not bear scrutiny:
McIlwaine called for the results of 1859 to be brought to the bar of Scripture, reason, history and experience. Having preached the Gospel for nearly a quarter of a century at St George’s, McIlwaine had ‘seen the fruits’ of his preaching, but was cautious ‘not to boast of what God has wrought’ lest he judge prematurely. In light of this, McIlwaine cautioned against rashly declaring 1859 to be wholly a good thing. Despite the generally moderate nature of his critique, McIlwaine sent a chilling warning to Evangelicals by highlighting that the long-term fruit of earlier revival movements, on both sides of the Atlantic, had often been in heresy and worldliness. Hence they should not be surprised if the Ulster revival turned out to be a similar failure. Certainly by October 1860 McIlwaine believed that he had adequate grounds to question the genuineness of much of what had gone on the previous year. Along with Nelson, he was highly critical of Gibson’s official account of 1859, The year of grace, declaring it to be ‘unscripturally chronicled’. He argued that the revivalists who appealed to the ‘assize calendars and petty sessions lists’ for 1859 no longer made the same appeals in 1860, the reason being that a vast proportion of the crime that had emerged in Ulster society was ‘directly traceable to that wretched excitement which lately passed under the name of religion’.
At the heart of McIlwaine's critique was his very Anglican understanding of conversion as a process, not an instantaneous event, where the apologists for 1859 gloried in deeply suspect accounts of instantaneous conversion:
Related to this was his critique of the revivalist doctrine of conversion. As with many Evangelicals, McIlwaine believed that conversion was gradual and that its reality was to be tested by its fruits. Revivalism, especially as exemplified by Gibson’s accounts of supposed conversions in The year of Grace, had practically denied both of these points by giving the impression that conversion was nearly always instantaneous and declared people to be saved prior to any evidence that they had repented. Specifically, McIlwaine took issue with John Baillie’s account of the conversion of numerous schoolboys. According to Baillie dozens of boys went out of a school-room, fell on their knees, and cried to God for mercy. However, McIlwaine accused him of confusing these religious impressions with genuine conversion to Christ, and reminded him that he should now enquire as to what ultimate effect these emotional manifestations had actually had on the children in question before declaring them to be converts. McIlwaine issued this warning because he knew of a girls’ school where similar manifestations had taken place, yet the mistress had informed him that there was not ‘the slightest improvement in conduct in the case of a single girl’ that had been subject to physical manifestations. His implication was that the delusive views of conversion fostered by revivalism had resulted in many apparent conversions which quickly proved to be false. For this reason McIlwaine was deeply suspicious of any alleged conversions which might have arisen out of the excitement related to physical prostrations. Thus he urged that such converts should not be paraded as trophies, but be treated with extreme caution. All this caused McIlwaine to be thankful [for] the balanced doctrine of the established Church ... McIlwaine was arguing that the moderate Augustinianism of the Church of Ireland and its Thirty-Nine Articles avoided not only the high Calvinist errors concerning the impossibility of gaining a full assurance of one’s salvation, but also the Arminian error that one must possess full assurance of salvation in order to be saved.
Ritchie's emphasis on how McIlwaine responded to 1859 with gratitude for the sober doctrine and piety of Anglicanism again reflects long-standing Anglican critiques of revivalism:
McIlwaine believed that the moderation of Anglican doctrine had been a crucial component in saving the Church of Ireland from much of the fanaticism that was on display in other communions during 1859.
It was the Enthusiasm of 1859 which led McIlwaine the Evangelical Alliance member to become McIlwaine the Old High Churchman. Indeed, Ritchie's description of McIlwaine post-1859 could be regarded as summarising key aspects of the Old High tradition:
He now appeared keen to identify himself simply as an Anglican, and sought to reconcile differences among the Low and High Church parties. The tendency of other denominations to revivalist credulity made McIlwaine more zealous to promote Anglicanism as a via media between Romish and sectarian excesses. Since he regarded Methodists and Presbyterians as chiefly implicated in revivalism, it is not surprising that he wished to distance himself from them in the years following 1859 ...
McIlwaine’s disgruntlement with revivalism and interdenominational Evangelicalism perhaps explains why he seems to have moved in a more High Church direction. This can be seen in his opposition to prayer-book revision and his defence of the Athanasian Creed from attacks made by both Unitarians and Anglicans in the 1870s. McIlwaine’s defence here included an assertion that the Church of Ireland’s retention of the document in its formularies ‘may have been a means owned by God in preserving our communion so entirely free as it has remained until this day from the taint of Arianism’. His expressions of regret for the Westminster Confession’s failure to follow the Thirty-Nine Articles in explicitly endorsing the Athanasian Creed implied that Presbyterians were more prone to Socinianism than Anglicans. Although emphasising the catholic nature of Anglicanism, he still identified with the English Reformation and strongly rejected popery. Yet he also sought to distance himself from some of the opinions of the Calvinistic Reformers on the continent and from English Puritanism, something which his earlier High Church opponents had been keen to do as well.
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