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NON-SUBSCRIBING PRESBYTERIAN

The meeting house at First Presbyterian Rosemary Lane, Belfast, Drennan’s birthplace, was the very cradle of non-subscribing Presbyterianism. In 1720, at the installation of the Reverend Samuel Haliday (1685–1739), the new minister refused to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith leading to what has been described as the first subscription crisis. Haliday was supported in his stance by other ministers and congregation elders including Reverend Thomas Drennan, Reverend John Abernethy, Reverend James Duchal, Francis Hutcheson and William Bruce, all of whom Drennan was to mention in his proposed defence when he stood trial accused of sedition in 1794.

Abernethy had founded his Belfast Society in 1703 of which A.T.Q. Stewart had this to say:

Orthodox Presbyterian historians have little good to say about it. While reluctantly recognizing the intellectual abilities of its members, they have deplored their ecclesiastical indiscipline and accused them of opening the door to Schism and heresy. Undoubtedly it created the nucleus of ministers who would come to be called ‘New Light’ and through them it precipitated the great storm over doctrine which would soon break over the Synod.1

It is perhaps of some significance that Haliday’s ‘unusual early career had taken him well outside the bounds of provincial Presbyterianism, and he studied theology at the university of Leyden in the Netherlands’.2 He was licensed at Rotterdam in 1706 and subsequently ordained at Geneva.3 Haliday’s stance at Rosemary Lane was not just another local schism over obscure points of doctrine to which all shades of Ulster Presbyterianism are so prone. Though the controversy had been in gestation in Ireland from nearly twenty years earlier, the issue at stake had been fought over in England in the previous decade from the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The conflict had, in a sense, been imported into England from the Netherlands and had been promoted by two philosophers both of whom had spent time in the Netherlands. The towering figure in the controversy was the philosopher John Locke whom William Drennan often claimed as the inspiration for his political ideas. The other philosopher involved was the flamboyant, irreverent and enigmatic young Irishman John Toland (1670–1722).

Locke had been in exile in Holland in the wake of the Rye House Plot of 1683 which was an attempt to overthrow Charles II and assassinate his brother, the avowed Roman Catholic James Duke of York. Holland was a staunchly Protestant State but probably the only place in Europe where the different sects were free to worship as they pleased and propagate their opinions. Locke’s time there was a period of great intellectual upheaval. Christopher Walker has described what was happening. Essentially, hard-line Calvinism was crumbling as post Calvinists began abandoning the severity and intolerance of the Genevan master and discovering different types of Protestantism in the more humane, tolerant and rational versions of Arminianism and Socinianism.4

The heresy that Reverends Haliday, Abernethy, Drennan and their friends were suspected of was Socinianism. To understand the world view of the non-subscribers, one needs to know a little of the nature of this heresy. Faustus Socinus was born in Sienna in 1539. He was a wandering scholar who had been profoundly influenced by the Humanism of Erasmus. When he arrived in Krakow in the ‘tolerant Kingdom of Poland’ in 1580 he encountered a growing anti-Trinitarian movement styling itself the Minor Reformed Church.5 Though he never joined this sect, he soon became its spiritual leader. The sect eventually moved to the town of Rakow where it flourished for more than thirty years. They established an academy there whose pupils, at one point, numbered one thousand.6

The Socinians believed in a ‘scrupulous and vigorous Biblicism and the right to reason in religion’.7 As there is no reference to the Blessed or Holy Trinity in the Scriptures, Socinians believed in only one God and did not regard Jesus as God but as a moral, human, teacher. They refused to believe in anything they could not understand. Socinus wrote in favour of the separation of Church and State and declared himself against civil punishment of heretics by exile, prison or execution. He was writing at a time when many of the states of Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike, used the stake, the executioner’s block, inquisitions, torture and forced mass exile of populations to punish such crimes as believing in, or refusing to believe in, transubstantiation.

Socinus died in 1604 and thirty-four years later, in 1638, the Socinians were forced to leave Poland or to conform to Roman Catholicism. Many fled to Transylvania, East Prussia and the Palatinate, while others found asylum in Holland, in Amsterdam and Leyden. Their printing press moved to Holland and an imposing series of volumes containing all the main Socinian writings was printed in Amsterdam in 1665–6.8

The lapse of the Licensing Laws in England in 1695 gave Locke and Toland the opportunity to publish their controversial views. Locke published The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures and Toland published his Christianity not Mysterious. Both books promoted similar ideas though they were written in somewhat different styles. Locke was careful and prudent whereas Toland loved to provoke. Both works were an explicit attack on orthodox Christian priest-craft and advocated a return to a simple moral Christianity. Each Christian should be free to come to their own views without persecution by Church or State. Locke denounced those who would try to enforce religious orthodoxy: the Protestant Reformation challenged not only Roman orthodoxy but also the very idea of orthodoxy. From its beginning, the principal goal was to transform Christianity from a religion of priestly orthodoxy to one of freedom of conscience.9

Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Government in 1690. He had published his Letter on Toleration the previous year. In his Letter he said: ‘The heads and leaders of the Church, moved by avarice and an insatiable desire for dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and animated them against those that dissent from themselves, by preaching … that schismatics and heretics … are to be destroyed.’10

Orthodox churchmen grasped instinctively that many of Locke’s ideas were Socinian. Locke denied this, declaring that there was ‘not one word of Socinianism in his work’.11 Yet this did not cut much ice with his contemporaries, some of whom argued that Locke ‘might pass for the Socinus of his age or that he was Socinianized all over’.12 One modern historian has taken his cue from Locke’s detractors and branded him with the title ‘the Socinian John Locke’.13 Whether this is fair or not, it was grossly unfair for Locke’s contemporary Edward Stillingfleet, the bishop of Worchester, to attack Locke for what John Toland had written. The bishop alleged that Locke held Unitarian views because he believed him to be the source of the ideas expressed in Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious.

Toland was born in Donegal in 1670. He was probably the son of a Roman Catholic priest and his first language was Gaelic. In his early years, he became a Presbyterian and was educated at Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leyden and Utrecht.14 His education in Holland was paid for by Reverend Daniel Williams (1643–1716) who, for twenty years, ministered to the Dublin Wood Street congregation, until 1687.

During his studies and travels Toland acquired nine languages. He was a strident spokesperson for republican virtue and, in his lifetime, he published over one hundred books.15 Christianity not Mysterious was published between December 1695 and June 1696. Draft papers for the work ‘had possibly been sent to John Locke in late March 1695’.16 In Christianity not Mysterious Toland: ‘applied the Lockean theory of the meaning of religious mystery, arguing that since mysteries such as the Holy Trinity do not stand for distinct ideas, Christianity must either employ meaningless doctrines, or else be non-mysterious … for’, writes Toland, ‘if we have no idea of a thing, it is … lost labour for us to trouble ourselves about it’.17

Shortly after his book was published, Toland arrived in Dublin to find that a great clamour had been raised against him and it. He was attacked from the pulpits and in the press. His book was arraigned by a Dublin Grand Jury none of whom had read one word of his work. Finally, it was declared heretical by the Irish House of Commons. It was to be burnt twice (once before Parliament and once before the civic buildings).18 Toland claimed that one member of Parliament suggested that the author should be burnt along with his book.19 This was no small matter as Thomas Akenhead, an eighteen-year-old student at Toland’s alma mater at Edinburgh had been hanged the previous January for mocking the doctrine of the Trinity. Akenhead had retracted but to no avail. All copies of Toland’s book were seized and further imports banned. Toland fled Dublin to avoid arrest and was never to return to his native land.

Toland rescued the works of the English Commonwealth republicans such as John Milton, Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney and James Harrington and ‘fashioned them so they would be acceptable to a later generation’.20 The first edition of Harrington’s republican classic Oceana was published in 1656 and dedicated by the author to Oliver Cromwell. Toland republished it in 1702 with an account of Harrington’s life. Harrington was always a great favourite of Francis Hutcheson who, in his lectures to students, endorsed many of Harrington’s suggestions. When William Bruce was preparing a reprint of Toland’s Life of Harrington in Dublin in 1737, he wrote to Reverend Thomas Drennan: ‘Our subscription to Harrington goes on apace. It will be the prettiest and cheapest book that will be printed in Ireland.’21 When the book appeared, the subscription list included the names of Reverend Haliday, Reverend Abernethy and Professor Francis Hutcheson.

The prosecution of Thomas Emlyn

In June 1702, less than four years after Toland left Dublin, Reverend Joseph Boyse, who was then the Minister in charge at Wood Street, with one of the elders, approached his assistant minister Thomas Emlyn at his home. Although Emlyn had never expressed any anti-Trinitarian views, the elder was correct in suspecting that his friend had indeed lost his belief in the Trinity. When Emlyn confirmed the suspicion, he offered to leave the congregation, which he had served for eleven years, for the sake of peace. He was forced to leave for England but while there, he heard that he was being denounced from the same pulpits which had attacked Toland a few years previously. He published a defence of his position which left him vulnerable to charges of blasphemy. He returned to Dublin to settle his affairs and was promptly arrested.

His trial began on 10 June 1703 and before the court sat, Emlyn claimed that he had been ‘informed by an eminent gentleman of the Long Robe’ that he would not be permitted to speak freely but it was designed to run him down like a wolf without law or game.22 That was how the trial was conducted. There were seven or eight bishops present of whom two, Dublin and Armagh, took the bench. Emlyn observed that a jury of tradesmen was being asked to decide on ‘abstruse points of divinity of which there were many disputes among the learned of the age’. The Queen’s Counsel behaved with ‘great heat and fury’ and when he made the ludicrous assertion that ‘presumption is as good as evidence he was seconded in this by the Chief Justice’. Emlyn’s Counsels were intimidated and were ‘interrupted, contradicted and so brow beaten that they eventually withdrew’.23 When Emlyn tried to speak for himself, the Chief Justice cried ‘speak by your Counsel’ even though by this time he had none. The Chief Justice warned the jury that if they were of a mind to acquit the defendant ‘my Lord bishops are here’.24

After his inevitable conviction, Emlyn was asked to retract his opinions and when he refused, he was sentenced to a year in prison and a £2,000 fine. This was so beyond Emlyn’s means that it amounted to an indefinite prison sentence. Emlyn was to spend two years and one month in the common gaol and in all that time, none of the bishops who had taken such an interest in him came to see him to rescue him from his error.25

Boyse began to regret his role in the affair and worked for Emlyn’s release, finally achieving it in late 1705. Emlyn left Ireland never to return. In a caustic review of the affair, the Whig bishop Benjamin Hoadley concluded: ‘The non-conformist accused him, the conformist condemned him, the secular power was called in and the cause ended in an imprisonment and a very great fine, two methods of conviction about which the Gospel is silent.’26

Two matters relating to the persecution of Thomas Emlyn contributed to the schism which would reveal itself at Reverend Haliday’s installation at Rosemary Lane nearly two decades later. Firstly, the Synod of Ulster, running scared of further accusations of heresy, imposed acceptance of the Westminster Confession on all newly ordained ministers. It was probably in reaction to the Synod’s decree that Abernethy founded his Belfast Society. He and his fellow Society members would never accept the Westminster Confession or indeed any other man-made confession of faith. Many orthodox Presbyterians suspected that this was because Chapter II of the Confession restates the traditional doctrine of the Trinity and three persons in one God. However, Abernethy’s view was that all confessions of faith are man-made and therefore might contain human error. For him, it is the duty of every Christian to seek truth in the Scripture and not allow one’s conscience to be bound by what others have decided is truth.

Abernethy, Haliday, Drennan senior and their fellow non-subscribers recognised no earthly authority in religious matters and believed no one should suffer penalties for holding particular religious opinions. The latter point goes a long way towards explaining why many non-subscribers, including William Drennan himself, were opposed to the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics.