Conclusion

A distinctive Irish experience of ministerial education and the commitment of Presbyterians in Ireland to the Union with Great Britain shaped a conservative response to modern criticism. There were a small number of ‘believing critics’ who sought accommodation with aspects of modern criticism, though they maintained their evangelical identity and there was no sustained opposition to them before 1914. Conservatism was also a product of transatlantic evangelicalism, and the significance of this tradition contributed to the exoneration of the ‘modernist’ Davey in 1927. All involved in the trial placed great emphasis on personal religious experience, though they understood experience in different ways. It is suggested that by the end of the century the confessional element in Irish Presbyterianism had been subsumed by non-denominational evangelical religion, the religious equivalent of the submergence of a distinctive Presbyterian politics into a general unionism.