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For all the emotion, this was an overwhelmingly a Presbyterian phenomenon. The Presbyterian General Assembly had earlier sent ministers to report on a revival already underway in the United States, and a number of Presbyterian ministers had been, for many years, preaching about the need for a similar revival in Ireland. One of the ministers who reported on the New York revival was the Rev William Gibson, a future moderator of the General Assembly, who later wrote a book defending the revival. His book had the title, But not everyone believed this religious phenomonen was a work of God. Another Presbyterian minister wrote a reponse to Gibson's which carried the title, The Year of Delusion.

When I spoke to Ian Paisley about , which was first published fifty years ago, he told me the revival, more than anything else, explains the conservative religious culture that persists in today's Northern Ireland. If you want to understand why Ulster Protestants tend to be more conservative on moral and religious issues than Protestants elsewhere in the UK or Europe, you need to appreciate the cultural legacy of the 1859 revival. Ian Paisley's history of the revival has recently been .

The first documentary, The '59 Revival: The Outpouring, is still available on the iPlayer here, told the story of the revival, from its birthplace in a small schoolhouse in Kells (pictured), to the meetings attended by more than 20,000 people in Coleraine, Belfast and elsewhere.

During the making of this documentary, I visited all the key sites associated with the revival in the very agreeable company of Stanley Barnes, a Free Presbyterian minister and the author of a . Stanley has also compiled a 7-volume collection of source documents related to the revival. I'm very grateful to Stanley for the personal tour he gave me, and producer Bert Tosh, which took us from Connor, Kells and Ahoghill to Belfast.

The second documentary, broadcast today at 1.30 pm on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio Ulster (repeated on Thursday at 7.30 pm), is titled The '59 Revival: The Debate, and examines some of the controversies that accompanied this remarkable chapter in Ireland's history. How do sociologists, historians and psychologists try to make sense of what happened in 1859, and why did the revival divide prominent evangelical leaders at the time?

closely associated with the '59 Revival marking the anniversary of the revival and noting key events taking place during this commemoration year. Connor Presbyterian Church, often described as the "Seat of the 1859 Revival", held a celebration service to mark the 150th anniversary of the revival on 1 February. You can also listen to that service in full (each part of the service is neatly audio-chunked for ease of access).