9 - ‘Out of darkness into light’: the importance of faith

Summary

In July 1897, 60-year-old Margaret Anne Kilpatrick recalled that she had been 22 years of age ‘when God called me out of darkness into light, in the midst of the great revival of 1859’. The event, she recollected vividly, took place on 5 July 1859 in the first Presbyterian church at Keady, County Armagh, under Dr Carson's ministry. ‘I was trying to lead some to God’, Margaret later wrote, ‘when an old woman came & put her hand on my shoulder & said to me have you found Christ, yourself?’ At that point, Margaret claimed to have heard Christ's voice and ‘I cried for mercie & the first thing I knew was I was standing on my feet singing the 103 Ps.’ Inspired and exhilarated, Margaret ‘became fearless, & I spoke to everyone about their souls, & held prayer meettings every where’. Two of her brothers were also converted that day, following two others who had already met spiritual salvation. Given the extent of this unbridled evangelical revival in the Reid household it was no surprise that ‘dear Mother was rejoycing in God with all her house’. The Reids were just one of many Protestant families in Ulster who experienced a religious frenzy during the ‘Ulster revival’ of 1859, when a wave of fervent evangelicalism swept the country.

Margaret Anne Kilpatrick was born in 1837, the eighth child of Balleer schoolmaster Robert Reid who died suddenly the year after Margaret's birth. A notation in the family Bible recorded, ‘He lived respected and died lamented by all who knew him, having discharged the arduous task of instructing youth for the space of nineteen years in the Balleer School with great efficiency. His motto was the end of all education is to be wiser and better. Religious instruction was his principle [sic] aim.’ Some time after Robert Reid's death his family changed their allegiance from the Church of Ireland to Presbyterianism, possibly during the Great Revival.

Seemingly, David Kilpatrick, Margaret's husband, did not share the religious fervour of Margaret and her companions. As Margaret's brother Joseph Reid requested of her in 1880, ‘Let me know in your next if David has yet accepted Gods greatest Gift.