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.
3
DRENNAN’S RELIGIOUS OUTLOOK
William Drennan was only fourteen years old when his father died but he would have been familiar with the non-subscription controversy and his father’s Unitarian theology. In his later life, Drennan claimed that he was always ‘rigid rather than loose in that persuasion’.1 It is likely that the Drennan family library would have held copies of John Locke’s work as well as Abernethy’s sermons and Hutcheson’s works published by William Bruce. When Drennan senior’s generation had passed on, the mantle of the intellectual leadership of Protestant Dissent devolved to England, to figures such as Dr Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and John Jebb.
Price, Priestley and Jebb were greatly admired by William Drennan and many Irish Protestant Dissenters, particularly the Non-subscribers. They were regarded by their contemporaries as Socinians. Because Unitarianism was illegal and because Socinian had become a pejorative term, Price, Priestley and Jebb described themselves as Rational Dissenters. On occasion, the Northern Dissenters wrote to Dr Price for advice on political matters. He advised the Belfast committee of the Volunteer movement in 1783 that they should seek to extend the franchise to ‘Papists of Property’ and argued that any danger from Catholics was more likely to be the result of alienating penal laws rather than religion.2 We have seen previously that Price and Priestley had written in support of the American Revolution and been attacked savagely for their support for the French Revolution.
It may be presumed that, as the son of a clergyman, Drennan, when a child, was in the habit of attending Sunday services. In adulthood, he was asked to be an elder of the Newry congregation due to his punctual attendance at public worship there.3 In his Dublin years, he served as an elder at Great Strand Street and took a deep interest in the affairs of the Presbyterian Synod.
His sister Martha was impressed when, in early 1796, she read Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. She thought Paine ‘a smart, impudent imposing writer who ought not to be despised’. Most of what Paine had said on the Old Testament had been Martha’s thoughts in childhood and what he said ‘on the New could not stagger any rational Christian’. Martha’s use of the qualification ‘rational’ is important. The Age of Reason, most of which Paine ‘had composed in the shadow of the guillotine in Paris in 1793 was a sustained invective against State religion and all forms of priest-craft’4 and had indeed staggered many orthodox Christians. Many Roman Catholics and Anglicans were enraged but E.P. Thompson has observed that ‘for all the brash provocations of its tone, Paine’s work contained little that would have surprised the eighteenth-century Deist or advanced Unitarian’.5
Although impressed by Paine, Martha saw an opportunity for her brother to gain some public credit by publishing a response to him. She saw weaknesses in Paine’s polemic particularly in relation to his dealing with the New Testament. ‘He appeared to hurry over his subject as if predetermined to laugh at it rather than confute it.’ She suggested to her brother that he could answer Paine ‘well with wit and humour – the only way that would secure readers’. She had enlisted a Biblical scholar, Reverend William Bryson (1730–1815), who was prepared to help with dates, proof, authors etc. and though she invited her brother to laugh at her suggestion, she felt he ‘could clear his character and do himself honor by enlisting early as the religious adversary of T[om] Paine’.6
Drennan said he would be glad to see what he called the Presbyterian Patriarchs7 answer to Paine but he did not trouble his heart and his head much about the question. When he went into detail about his own religious sentiments, he was at least partly in sympathy with Paine:
The Romish church are consistently politic in … denouncing knowledge, and debate, and disquisition, for the restless power of reason once introduced brings in doubt and is apt to beget incredulity in the place of that serene and all confiding faith which makes everyone a Christian in the same degree, and thus preserves the unity and the peace of the church universal. Trust like a Papist for if you doubt as a dissenter the same restless faculty that rejects the Athanasian creed … will begin to nibble at the incarnation, the miraculous conception etc., and thus Priestley lifts the latch for Paine to enter.
I like the morality of the gospel so well that I have not the least occasion for the supplementary proof of miracle: perhaps the ignorant and stupid may be alarmed into belief and chilled into conviction, and for this purpose perhaps they were from time to time invented.8
For Drennan, miracle in the proper sense of the word was God contradicting himself and he agreed with Isaac Newton and Priestley after him, that it was ‘necessary for the scythe of infidelity to clear off the weeds of superstition to prepare the soil for the growth of new Christianity’.9 He thought his own sect of Protestant Dissenters was the best acquainted with the principles of religion but the Quakers were the best practitioners, in their simplicity, their fraternity, their equality and their charity to each other.
In 1799, Drennan made a comprehensive declaration of his beliefs in relation to the Christian religion as follows:
It is a pure system of morality not beyond man to discover or enounce, not so much beyond man as the discoveries of Newton appear to be, particularly when very pure systems of morals had gone before in almost all nations and I believe Christianity properly called has scarcely appeared on this earth since the death of Christ, and that the very first and noblest principle of religion the unity of God, has been scarcely ever generally and never nationally acknowledged by Christians, though the foundation article of the Mahometan religion. I believe the priesthood in all ages has been the curse of Christianity, and I believe there will never be happiness or virtue on the face of the earth until that order of man be abolished and until there be a greater equality of property which may deliver the rich and the poor from the vices incident to their conditions.10
He had friends in the Presbyterian ministry but even they were not spared his strident anti-clericalism. Drennan was always opposed in principle to the Regium Donum, the royal bounty bestowed on the Presbyterian clergy by the government. He once described it as slow poison pouring into the Protestant Dissenting church. He told Martha:
In our churches I always considered the increases of the Regium Donum as hush money, a bounty to be quiet and to have very tolerably answered its end. I think them [the Presbyterian clergy] nothing more or less than pensioners of government, these once formidable puritans in name and nature, these upright independents now depend and bow in exact ratio which the bounty bears to the sum of their income.11
In 1792, Reverend Robert