Alexander Dallas and founding of the ICM

Why did he found it?  What were the motivations of Dallas?  He himself in a letter to a friend in 1850, a year after ICM had been founded, said that he aimed at ‘nothing less than the Protestantizing of Ireland’ [1]  What did he mean by that?

Some have linked the early nineteenth century evangelical crusade in Ireland, known as the Second Reformation, to the need of the Protestant Ascendancy to maintain its political control over the Roman Catholics of Ireland.[2]  In the Reports of ICM and in the speeches at the Annual Exeter Hall rallies, occasional references can certainly be found to show that the perceived success of the work was of importance to ‘the safety, peace and prosperity of the British Empire..’[3]  But as a primary motivation for the work of ICM I would suggest that this never was the case, even if it may have been considered a welcome result.[4]
 

e.g.  In 1855, some of the Society’s Scripture Readers were being recruited by the Dublin branch of the Orange Order and openly associating themselves with it.  The Committee took steps to warn them about mixing politics and religion, so much so that these Orange Order members resigned and the Orange Order complained publicly that ICM had hounded them out.  ICM reminded its members in its magazine, The Banner of the Truth in Ireland’, of article 5 of the Principles and Arrangements of the Society ie.  ‘The Society is formed exclusively for a religious object, and in no way whatever connects itself with any thing political.  This is to be very distinctly kept in mind at all times, and under all circumstances;  and the Committee will never sanction any act, or course of action, which involves political advocacy or party distinctions.’[5]  Whilst not proscribing the political views of any of its workers, nevertheless, in the strongest possible terms, it called on its agents ‘to abstain from mixing political influence or opinions in any way with the exercise of the duties they undertake to fulfil as agents of the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics.  However great the importance of civil relations in advancing the political interests of the Protestant cause in Ireland, the importance of obtaining a spiritual influence over the minds and feelings of the Roman Catholics is greater, and is besides the peculiar object which this Society is formed to promote.’[6]
 

Others have suggested that the chief motivation of Dallas in forming the ICM was his desire to begin a Protestant counter-offensive against the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian movement, which he and many English Evangelicals, regarded as the dark clouds of the Papacy rolling back over England.[7]   Certainly, Dallas was an active opponent of the Tractarian movement and instrumental in organizing a letter of protest with two days of prayer in 1844/45 against its influence in England.[8]  He also remained a lifelong opponent.  But, like the previous accusation of being motivated by political interests, this particular motivation, plausible as it may sound, just doesn’t feature in Dallas’ own explanation of his determination to ‘Protestantize’ Ireland.
 

After the Napoleonic wars, when Dallas had been a member of the Commissariat in the Duke of Wellington’s army in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, he was persuaded by a Clergyman to become a Church of England minister.  It was during his first curacies and under the influence of Charles Sumner, a personal friend and later his Bishop in Winchester Diocese as well as a keen supporter of ICM, that Dallas was converted.[9]   Like many converts late in life, Dallas was absorbed with a missionary zeal, and it was this missionary zeal that formed the primary motivation for his evangelical campaign in Ireland from 1843 to his death at the age of 80 in 1869.

e.g.  In a sermon preached in May 1851 in the church of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West, London, on the occasion of the second annual meeting of ICM, Dallas not only clearly set out his own  missionary vision for Ireland, but also the missionary imperative for all Evangelical Protestants.  Basing his sermon on Proverbs 24:11-12, he said that Evangelicals were without excuse if they did not ensure the Reformation doctrines of grace were preached in Ireland.   Calvinist in his theology, he said, “We do not know how many thousands and millions there may be in Ireland whose names may be written in that free pardon, that we, having received, have received it with a charge to convey it to those who are  ‘drawn unto death’  and ‘ready to be slain’.  ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.’”[10]  As far as he was concerned, the doctrines of the Church of Rome had both blinded Irish Roman Catholics to the Gospel of free salvation in Christ alone, and was unable to bring them into a state of salvation.  Thus, he goes on; “The Society for Irish Church Missions, for which I stand here tonight, is one instrumentality, capable, through the help and blessing of God, of carrying the Gospel to every part of Ireland.”[11]   This is what he meant when he later described his work as the Protestantization of Ireland.

From the beginning of his attempts to Protestantize Ireland, the whole endeavour was surrounded in an atmosphere of controversy.  This was a deliberate strategy on the part of Dallas.  His experience in preaching in the cottages of French Roman Catholics around Le Havre in the early 1830’s convinced him that to reach Roman Catholic minds with the doctrines of the Reformation, both a plain statement of the Gospel and a corresponding highlighting of the errors of Trent were necessary.[12] This is what he meant by controversy.  Both proclamation  and opposition to error.

Consequently, when he began his own private venture in 1846, backed by the financial resources of a wealthy English businessman, Mr. Edward Durant, he sent two controversial pieces of writing by means of the penny-post to over 20, 000 Roman Catholic householders.

In the first of these letters, ‘A Voice from Heaven’,  he called upon Irish Roman Catholic priests to do what English Roman Catholic priests had done in the 16th Century in England and lead their people in an Irish Reformation.  Interestingly, whilst he called Irish Roman Catholic people to leave the Church of Rome, he did not call them to join the Established church, but to establish a separate indigenous  Irish Church that was protestant in doctrine:  “There is no need to check this bursting effort after spiritual liberty, by imagining that the only way of escape is to join the ancient Protestants.   England has had her own reformation, and failed in conveying it to Ireland; and now the days of the Irish Reformation may be come.  Who will join in forming the Irish Catholic Church…”[13]

In his second letter, entitled ‘A Look out of Ireland into Germany’, he advocated that such an Irish Catholic Church might emulate the establishment in 1844 of the German Catholic Church, formed by some priests and Roman Catholic communities in protest at the exploitation of German peasants by the Bishop of Trier, and whose protestant doctrines, formulated in its Synod in Leipzig in 1845, he outlined in the letter.  Despite the letters and the sending of his own messengers in 1846 to preach the doctrines of the Reformation faith throughout Ireland, no such response was forth-coming and the only feasible option to pursue his vision to Protestantize Ireland would have to be through the Established Church and other bodies such as the Irish Society.
 

The first steps in co-operation with the Established Church to join with them in the Protestantization of Ireland came in 1847 in Castlekerke.  As a result of his own itinerant missionary labours there in 1846 and 1847, helping the local Protestant Rector and Schoolmistress, the numbers of both adults and children attending his preaching in the school house encouraged him to approach the Bishop of Tuam, Thomas Plunkett, who readily agreed to ordain a missionary clergyman for Castlekerke in 1848. Dallas was later to write, ‘this was the turning point in the history of the movement.  It settled its ecclesiastical character.  It engaged the Bishop of that vast Diocese in its operations; and it became an intercourse between his Lordship and myself, which deepened in interest and ripened in affection until the day of his lamented death eighteen years afterwards.’[14]   With the enthusiastic help of the Bishop and the keen support of Hyacinth D’Arcy of Clifden, missionary schools began to spread, supported by the money raised by ‘The Special Fund for the Spiritual Exigencies of Ireland’, which Dallas and another English Clergyman, Edward Bickersteth, had established on the basis of an appeal to the English nation in 1846/47.
 

With the Irish Society hesitant to adopt the more aggressive missionary approach advocated by Dallas, it was mutually agreed that a new society needed to be established to progress the work of the Second Reformation.  Thus, in March 1849, The Society for the Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics was founded.  In a statement laid before the first public meeting of the Society in May 1849, Dallas recounted the enthusiastic reception of the Irish Clergy for the new Society, relating that upwards of 200 of them signed a resolution of support at the annual gathering of the Missionary Societies in April of that year.[15]  And although the subsequent controversies caused some clergy to seek to distance themselves from the work of ICM[16], from its inception, Bishops and Archbishops of the Irish Church were constantly patrons of the Society up until 1984.
 

Having set the new society on a deliberately aggressive evangelistic campaign, Dallas gave specific instructions to the Local Mission Committees on how to advance the Protestantization of Ireland via the means of controversy.  In his memoranda to the Local Committees for Missions to the Roman Catholics, he advocated two means which were to interact with each other.  Local clergy who gave time to the work of ICM were to preach the Gospel in simple terms in cottages throughout local districts to those whom Scripture Readers and visitors were to invite.  They were not to engage in any points of controversy.  Instead, those who wanted to hear the differences between the teaching of the Reformation and the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, were to be encouraged to attend fortnightly ‘Controversial Lectures’.  These lectures covered points of disputed doctrine, such as the Rule of Faith, Penance, Extreme Unction, Justification by faith only, Transubstantiation, Sacrifice of the Mass, Purgatory, Worship of the Virgin Mary and the Saints, Indulgences, Image Worship, Doctrine of Intention, Supremacy of the Pope, Idolatry of the Church of Rome, Fallibility of the Church of Rome, and Apostasy of the Church of Rome.[17]
 

Not surprisingly, with ICM missionaries and Scripture Readers, as well as the clergy of its local mission committees, advancing the cause of the Second Reformation with such tactics, there was a vigorous counter – reformation, the violent results of which are well documented.  By 1860, at the annual meeting of the ICM, Dallas’ long-standing friend and supporter, Charles Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester, defended the use of controversial lectures as a means of advancing the Second Reformation:
 

“The word controversy has a somewhat uncongenial sound to English ears, and it is not always understood.  I confess that I participated to a considerable degree in the dislike which is entertained of the words aggression or controversy; and yet what is aggression?  The whole Bible is aggressive! Every word of our Lord’s discourse is aggression!  The whole of the Apostolic Epistles are aggressive; and what is it that gives aggression its valuable character?  Every aggressive word is clothed in the language of love – every aggressive word leads from sin, and therefore from danger; to holiness and therefore to safety.  And therefore if the Roman Catholic Missions are aggressive, they are only aggressive in the spirit of the Gospel, in the spirit of love, in endeavouring to make an impression on the heart of corrupt and superstitious men.  And so with respect to controversy.  What is the Gospel but a controversy against sin – against the human heart?  And the Irish Church Missionary must carry out this controversy.  He must first show, and he can only do this by means of controversy – the danger of the antagonists to whom he is opposed, by pointing out to them in the most distinct terms, their danger, so long as they remain in Rome.  But then this controversy must be carried out in the spirit of love…’[18]    Such high ideals were the aim but they weren’t always carried out, so much so that in a letter to the Missionaries, attached to the Minutes of Feb. 1857, Dallas had to encourage them to keep an ‘anxious and affectionate watchfulness…over the conduct of the agents.’[19]
 

Nevertheless the sentiments expressed by the Bishop of Winchester reflected Dallas’ own view on what the nature of the controversy was all about and how he expected the missionaries and agents to behave.  In his second letter to the Morning Herald on December 11th 1846, he revealed his own personal approach, which was one of not seeking to hurt the feelings of those with whom he conversed[20].  In personal danger such as confronted by an angry crowd at Rooveagh in 1848, he sought to apply the biblical teaching from Proverbs ‘that a soft answer turneth away wrath’[21].  In his instruction to the messengers whom he sent out in 1846, he told them that when speaking in hostile circumstances, they should be ‘exceedingly quiet,’ facing such times with quiet courage.[22]  And in 1855, he wrote to the Mayor of Kilkenny, complaining of the unjust treatment of some of his Agents whom he felt had been unfairly accused.  He stressed that his agents ‘have been strictly charged to use no language which can justly offend any individual...to force themselves into no house, to offer no resistance to unkindly treatment, and to manifest a christian temper and forbearance towards all who may oppose them.’[23]   Whilst some of its agents certainly didn’t live up to these ideals, nevertheless this was the Spirit in which Dallas intended the controversy to be carried out.  In his estimation, it was a controversy of love, a battle for the souls of people, which could only be won by the presentation of the truth through a distinctive christian character.
 

Of course, for many people the most controversial and unloving aspect of the work of ICM was in the words of one scholar, 'the primacy of proselytism over benevolence,'[24] during the period of the Great Irish Famine from 1845-1850.  It is well documented that the policy of the ICM in its progression of the work of Protestantizing Ireland was not to raise money for temporal relief but solely for the purposes of supporting its agents to advance the Second Reformation.  Minute 202, in response to the charge of bribing people to become converts through offering temporal relief, asserts: 'That the committee take this opportunity of recording upon their minutes, that it is one of the fundamental principles of this Society, upon which it has acted from its formation, and will continue to act, never to employ any of the funds entrusted to its administration for the purposes of temporal relief, to any persons who are the objects of their missionary labours.'[25]    Dallas himself, has been the subject of scholarly disapprobation for his supposed 'remarkable lack of concern' for the welfare of those to whom he preached.[26]  But this is too simplistic and doesn't take into account a number of factors.  Firstly in the incident quoted to show Dallas' supposed lack of concern, he was preaching to people who were waiting for the Relieving Officer to come.[27]  Secondly, in his appeal to the British public in his letters to the Morning Herald in the autumn and winter of 1846 for the Special Exigencies Fund, it is obvious that he anticipated large governmental assistance to Ireland.  He was calling upon English Christians to ensure that they would be just as concerned to provide for the spiritual needs of Ireland.[28]  In 1846/47, he himself helped organise the twinning of English parishes with suffering Irish parishes to bring temporal relief, his own parish of Wonston linking up with Castlekerke.  His widow wrote that in the winter of 1846, he had 'the great comfort of carrying the offerings of love from his own people to the poor starving converts.'[29]  In the book entitled 'Records of the Connemara Orphans' Nursery', printed in 1876, the author recounts how it came into existence.  Dallas, on one of his travels in Connemara in 1849 rescued a small child from being devoured by a pig.  In a letter to his niece, he recalls how he could not sleep because of this scene and the discovery of the plight of over 250 orphaned children in the area, and so he resolved with John Gregg of Trinity Church, Dublin to set up an orphanage, financed by private funds.[30]  The records of the early editions of the Banner of Truth also record appeals being made for this orphanage and temporal relief of many in its congregations.[31]  Certainly, whilst the official policy of ICM was to raise and use funds only for its evangelistic campaign, there is clear evidence to show that it manifestly encouraged private benevolence by its supporters and its own agents.

Because temporal relief was something that was given by private donations of its members, it's easy to see how the charge of 'Souperism' i.e. buying converts with a bowl of soup, was levelled.  Whether or not individual incidences of bribery did occur, it was, as minute 202 makes clear, most vigorously refuted that bribery formed any part of ICM policy.   When in 1852, the Rev. Henry Wilberforce, the Secretary of the newly formed 'Catholic Defence Association', publicly asserted in Dublin that bribery and intimidation were the means employed to make converts, Dallas at once called for proof and suggested a public enquiry, but Wilberforce refused and the charge was never substantiated.[32]  Dallas himself was certainly aware that mixed motives were involved in the profession of some of the converts and warned them in no uncertain terms against false professions.  As he saw it, the salvation of souls from hell for heaven was the single most important factor in his ministry and that of ICM, and this could never be achieved by underhand methods.

Let me finish by saying the story of Dallas and the story of the Irish Church Missions has never been fully examined or written.  The ICM building in Dublin is furnished with an extensive record of the Mission's history and for a truer and better understanding of its part in the Second Reformation in 19th Century Ireland, they need to be closely researched.  It is my hope that we can make that contribution to a better scholarly understanding of this most fascinating and emotive period in Irish history.

[1] Pg. 395, Life of the Reverend Alexander Dallas, London 1872

[2] ‘The Politics of Conversion in Ireland’,  Third Way, Feb. 1991, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp 13-15, Joseph Liechty

[3] Report of the ‘Special Fund for Church Missions to the Roman Catholics of Ireland’, 1848, p.6;  Dallas and Bickersteth

[4]  The Story of the Irish Church Missions to 1869, London, 1876, pg. 255

[5] The Banner of Truth, 1855, pp 37-40

[6] ibid, p. 39

[7] Souperism, Myth or Reality, Mercier Press, 1970, pg. 129; Desmond Bowen

[8] Life of Dallas, pp. 323-326

[9] Life of Dallas, pp. 196ff.

[10] Irish Church Mission Book of Reports 1849-53; Reports of the Second Annual Meeting, pg. 6

[11] ibid, pg. 15

[12] Life of Dallas, pp. 271ff.

[13] quoted in ‘The  Point of Hope in Ireland’s Present Crisis’, 1849, London, pp.39-40

[14] The Story of the Irish Church Missions, Part I, London, 1875, pg. 40

[15] Appendix to the First Report, pg 35;cf., Marrable’s history, pg 16 in the Book of Reports.

[16] Souperism, pg 146ff.

[17] See Memoranda, pg. 41 in appendix to First Annual Meeting in Book of Reports.

[18] Life of Dallas, pg. 460

[19] Irish Church Missions Minute book, 5th February, 1857

[20] The Real State of Ireland, Letter II, pg. 14, December 11th 1846

[21] History, Pt.I, pg 66-67

[22] ibid, pp. 26-27

[23] Banner of Truth, 1856, pg. 10

[24] The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion, Basingstoke, Palgrove, 2002, pp. 156-168; Christine Kinealy

[25] Quoted in Marrable's Sketch of History of ICM, 1853, p. 41, Book of Reports

[26] Souperism, pg. 134

[27] Life of Dallas, pg. 367

[28] Real State of Ireland, pp. 9-10, 16

[29] Life of Dallas, pg. 348

[30] Records of the Connemara Orphan Nursery, 1876, p.40 cf History, pp. 81-82

[31] Banner of Truth, 1851, pg, 228

[32] The Story of the Irish Church Missions, pp. 108-109