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Trying the Spirits: Irvingite Signs and the Test of Doctrine
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge read Edward Irving’s sermon in 1825 on the apostolic missionary ideal, he was disappointed that Irving had not met at the outset what would be the main objection of his more cautious antagonists. The absence in modern times of the miraculous gifts of the apostolic missionaries was a problem that, Coleridge felt, hung
like a dead weight around the neck of his [Irving’s] Reasoning. They say to themselves To whom Christ commended a supernatural independence of human means and aids, to them in the same commission he delegated superhuman powers … conferred for their performances. This argument Mr Irving should have met at the outset: for the Removal of this obstacle is as the foundation of all he would build up; inasmuch as not being removed it prevents the foundation from being laid.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005
References
1 Edward Irving, For Missionaries after the Apostolical School: a Series of Orations (London, 1825), presented ‘To his dear friend and kind instructor’, BL, MS C.61. c.8. Manuscript comments are on pp. 151–2. For background details see Sheridan Gilley, ‘Edward Irving: Prophet of the Millennium’, in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew, eds, Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London and Rio Grande, OH, 1993), 95–110, 98; Timothy C. F. Stunt, From Awakening to Secession: Radical Evangelicals in Switzerland and Britain, 1815–35 (Edinburgh, 2000), 98–101 and passim.
2 Cardale, John Bate, ‘On the Extraordinary Manifestations in Port-Glasgow’, Morning Watch [hereafter: MW] 2 (Dec. 1830), 869–72 Google Scholar.
3 Edward Irving, ‘Facts Connected with Recent Manifestations of Spiritual Gifts’, a series of articles in Frase’s Magazine 4 (1832), and Robert Norton, Neglected and controverted Scripture Truths; with an Historical Review of Miraculous Manifestations in the Church of Christ; and an Account of their late Revival in the West of Scotland (London, 1839); idem, Memoirs of James and George Macdonald, of Port-Glasgow (London, 1840); and idem, The Restoration of Apostles and Prophets, in the Catholic Apostolic Church (London, 1861). The more critical Robert Herbert Story, author of Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Robert Story... (Cambridge, 1862), was the son of a close associate of the participants. See also Andrew Landale Drummond, Edward Irving and his Circle: Including some Consideration of the Tongues’ Movement in the Light of Modem Psychology (London, n. d. [1937]), 136–51; C. Gordon Strachan, The Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving (London, 1973), 62–75; Stunt, Awakening, 228–36. Other primary sources relating to subsequent developments in Port Glasgow have been used in Tim Grass, ‘“The Taming of the Prophets”: Bringing prophecy under control in the Catholic Apostolic Church’. Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 16 (1996), 58–70.
4 Henry Drummond, later an Apostle in the Irvingite Church, urged Thomas Chalmers to read Eliza Fancourt’s account as Chalmers had recently opined that ‘there was too much of seriousness about the accounts from Port Glasgow [for them] to be treated in the loose offhand manner that they had been by some’, Stunt, Awakening, 249, n. 40.
5 For fuller details of this and the following paragraph, see Stunt, Awakening, 260–2, 268–9.
6 Ibid., 250, n. 41.
7 MW 3 (March 1831), 156–7.
8 Grayson Carter, Anglican Evangelicals: Protestant Secessions from the Via Media, c.1800–1850 (Oxford, 2001), 276–8; Tim Grass, ‘“The Restoration of a Congregation of Baptists”: Baptists and Irvingism in Oxfordshire’, Baptist Quarterly 37 (1998), 286–7.
9 Evangelical Magazine NS 9 (Dec. 1831), 522.
10 Noel, Baptist W., Remarks on the Revival of Miraculous Powers in the Church (London, 1831), 28–9 Google Scholar.
11 Stunt, Awakening, 233–4.
12 Record, 21 November 1831.
13 MW 5 (Dec. 1831), 182–3.
14 Thomas Boys, The Christian Dispensation Miraculous (republished from the Jewish Expositor) (2nd edn, London, 1832), 104.
15 Norton, Neglected Truths, 396–7.
16 For a fuller discussion of this episode, see T. C. F. Stunt, ‘“Trying the Spirits”: the Case of the Gloucestershire Clergyman (1831)’, JEH 39 (1988), 95–105.
17 MW 5 (March 1832), 152–4.
18 E. Irving to E. Probyn, 10 Nov. 1831 (Terling, Essex; Strutt Archives). H. Drummond’s letter to J. J. Strutt of the same date is in the same collection. In places it provides specific details, which I have sometimes added in square brackets, but in general Irving’s account is slightly more dispassionate.
19 Drummond’s letter indicates that those present (other than Irving and himself) were Cardale, his wife and sister, William and Mary [née Campbell] Caird, Miss Hall, Taplin, Tudor and Armstrong [future apostles], Dr J. Thompson, D. Brown [Irving’s assistant minister], and a Mr Barclay.
20 E. Irving to E. Probyn, 10 Nov. 1831 (Terling, Essex; Strutt Archives), n.p.
21 Ibid.
22 The Shepherd of Hermas, Book II (Mandates) 11, 1–3, see The Apostolic Fathers, ed. Kirsopp Lake, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (London, 1917–19), 2: III; but Cardale would only have been familiar with the text in William Wake, The Genuine Epistles of the Apostolic Fathers (1693), based on Latin manuscripts. For this passage, see J. Reiling, Hermas and Christian Prophecy: a Study of the Eleventh Mandate (Leiden, 1973).
23 E. Irving to E. Probyn, 10 Nov. 1831 (Terling, Essex; Strutt Archives), n.p.
24 Partly quoted in Stunt, ‘Gloucestershire Clergyman’, 103, but the recipient of Drummond’s letter [Strutt] is wrongly given as Probyn.
25 For an extract of Bulteel’s disillusioned letter to Baxter, see Carter, Anglican Evangelicals, 279–80; cf. Stunt, From Awakening, 269, 271.
26 Robert Baxter, Narrative of the Facts characterizing the spiritual manifestations in Mr Irving’s congregation... (2nd edn, London, 1833), 131–2. Drummond claimed that Baxter’s information ‘was imperfect as to the facts’, but did not take up the question of Irving’s ‘erroneous’ Christology: [H. Drummond], The Spirit in Mr Baxter tried by Scripture (London, 1833), 38.
27 H. McNeile, ‘The Nature and Design of Miracles’, The Preacher 3 (Dec. 1831), 237, 244–5.
28 Noel, Remarks, 29.