The Year of Grace

Rev. William Gibson

For years there was a certain quarter in Belfast, which had attained an unenviable notoriety. As the Twelfth of July drew near, it had been customary to reinforce the military and police, that they might keep the peace, if possible, between the turbulent inhabitants of Sandy Row and the “Ribbonmen” who occupied a neighbouring district. Not only had the ordinary street missiles been flung in plentiful profusion on the scene of conflict, but also deadly collisions had taken place, shots had been fired, and blood had run upon the streets. For weeks the magistrates and military were nightly on patrol. The strong arm of the executive had at length to interfere by martial law and by a disarming of the parties who had shown that they were wholly unfit to be entrusted with arms.

“When, however, the revival was at its height,” writes the Librarian of the Belfast Society, “Sandy Row was visited by persons from all parts of the country— indeed, of the kingdom. Clergymen and pious laymen were constantly holding open-air meetings; and it was on the evening of the Twelfth that I first took part in one of these. In former years it would have been no ordinary feat to have passed through some of the most intensely Popish and Orange districts of the city; but I had no fears now. There were no breaking of lamps and constables’ heads—no flinging of paving stones. The streets were crowded with the young of both sexes, but the 23rd Psalm was falling in sweet cadence on the gale; and none of the usual emblems of the Twelfth appeared, —no orange garlands, no arches flung over the streets. There was no military or semi-military parade; the only peace-preserver was the usual night constable.”

Visiting, in company with a friend, a short time afterwards, in a row inhabited exclusively by mill hands, and meeting a number of girls who had been brought under the influence of the revival, they all exclaimed, referring to the late anniversary, “It was another sort of Twelfth than the one before it. None of us would have wrought a turn on that day; but now we were all at our work as usual. You would not have known it was the Twelfth at all.” “You may well say that,” remarked one of their number, who had been, till a few weeks before, a Roman Catholic. “Don’t you remember how you chased me, and others of my sort, through the country for hours that day, till you nearly frightened us out of our wits? But now we are all like sisters of one family, and the head of it is Christ.”

The same testimony has been borne from other noted Orange districts, such as Lurgan, Lisburn, Dundrod, and counties Tyrone, Armagh, Derry, and Monaghan.

We do not wonder, after such records as these, that Chief Baron Pigott, himself a Roman Catholic, should have taken occasion, when sitting on the bench in County Down, a few days after the great Orange anniversary, to refer, in the language of the reporters, “to the religious movement in the north as having extinguished all party animosities, and produced the most wholesome moral results upon the community at large;” and that he should have “expressed a hope that it would extend over the whole country, and influence society to its lowest depths.”