A Century at Home and Abroad

Abstract

Tension between the Church of Ireland and the other Protestant churches did not disappear in January 1871; as we have seen, it took decades, perhaps longer, for the ‘establishment’ mentality to depart from the Church of Ireland, and for Presbyterians (in particular) to rid themselves of a feeling of second-class citizenship. Disestablishment had done much to rally the two churches to make common cause for the defence of Protestantism, when it had been the Roman Catholics who ‘were siding, both theoretically and in practice, with the English Radicals and Dissenters’.2 Those unlikely alliances, of Anglicans and Presbyterians on the one hand, and of Roman Catholics with English radicals and dissenters on the other, were cast into even starker relief by the home rule issue which, as we have seen, forced the Protestant churches to work together as never before. The Methodist newspaper noted in 1886 that their relations with each other ‘were never so sympathetic as at present.

Well may the leaders and members of the Church reflect on the awful seriousness of the simple fact that opportunities pass. It must use them or lose them. It cannot play with them or procrastinate to debate whether or not to improve them. Doors open and doors shut again. Time presses. ‘The living, the living, he shall praise Thee’. It is the day of God’s power. Shall His people be willing?

World Missionary Conference, 19101