sub-Article to Chapter 17
A Light on Biblical Fundamentalism
Catholic Answers to "Bible" Christians
by Fr. Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph.D.
THE PIONEER OF "PENTECOSTALISM"
Edward lrving, 1792-1834 "To speak speak with tongues you had never learned was, and is, a recognized symptom in cases of alleged diabolical possession. What does not appear is that it was ever claimed, at least on a large scale, as a symptom of divine inspiration, until the end of the seventeenth century. Then you find it cropping up in two separate movements, among the Huguenots of the Cevennes and among the appellant (but still nominally Catholic) Jansenists. A nine days' wonder in either case, it goes underground again for the next hundred years. In 1830, quite without warning, it begins to be practised by a handful of simple people in the neighbourhood of Port Glasgow.
There was tinder to catch the spark. It would be out of place here to discuss the character of Edward lrving, the friend of Carlyle, the fashionable preacher in whose Presbyterian congregation you mignt find Peel and Coleridge among your fellow worshippers. You might criticize him as a man too wedded to his own opinion, with an over-developed sense of the dramatic, but of his natural gifts there was no question. It was, however, supernatural gifts that he craved; he had been engaged, with a little group of friends, in studying the prophecies, and, like so many others, had fallen under the spell of millenarianism.
The Albury Group (so he and his friends were called) had come to the conclusion that the 1,260 days mentioned in Apoc. xi. 3 represented the years between the appearance of Justinian's Digest and the execution of Louis XVI; evidently (in 1830) the last days were upon them. lrving, like many enthusiasts, was politically of the extreme right; he identified the newly founded University of London as the Synagogue of Satan, and the passing of the Reform Bill must have confirmed his fears and hopes. He prayed openly for the return of the Pentecostal gifts, and the news from Clydeside seemed an evident answer to his prayer. A deputation from London went down to investigate the phenomena and seem to have carried the torch back with them. Glossolaly began in lrving's congregation; and before long, to the scandal of many but to his own delight, his sermons were interrupted by prophets who rose and uttered their message, sometimes intelligibly, sometimes by the use of 'tongues'."
— Monsignor Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm, pp.551-552
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