THE REVIVAL IN IRELAND.
By Editor
THE following sentences we clip from an article in the New York Independent, headed, "Disgraceful Scene in the General Assembly of Ireland." "It is with deep mortification and regret, but from a high sense of duty, that we lay before our readers an account of a scene of disorder in the session of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, held at Belfast at the close of September. We take the account from a full and impartial report in the Belfast News-Letter of September 30th. On the evening of Thursday, the 29th, a scene transpired which painfully reminds one of the doings of the Tract Management and their abettors at Layfaette-place church and the Academy of Music." The report of the scene of confusion we need not give. It is well summed up in the following comment thereupon, from the same source. "Here in this venerable body of ministers and elders, we find two ministers openly giving each other the lie, and the whole General Assembly turned into a scene of confusion bordering upon riot. Trans-atlantic Christians found it hard to reconcile the riotous proceedings of the Tract Management in New York, with the glowing reports of the revival here; and so Christians upon this side of the water will be perplexed to understand how, at the very time when a delegation from the General Assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church are giving us thrilling accounts of the revival in that country, that General Assembly, meeting in the very seat of the revival, could exhibit such a scene of unchristian commotion." We present these extracts as calculated to throw light upon the character of the revival movement which swept over this country and is now working in Ireland. When we consider the scene which took place in the Tract Society in the midst of the revival here, and bear in mind the fact that prayer for the enslaved must not be tolerated in its union prayer-meetings, and now behold the scene that has taken place in the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, how can we be otherwise than suspicious of the character of that movement? We are not alone in this. Many eyes are open to the fact that a genuine work of the Spirit of God does not operate in this manner.