The Dublin congregation – past, present and future. Today is a historic occasion on two counts. We are following history, and at the same time making it. Since the appointment ten years ago of our minister, Bill Darlison, this congregation has gone from strength to strength. Thanks to the growth that has taken place under his inspiration, we find ourselves today in the happy position of appointing Dublin’s first Assistant Minister for 116 years, and the first woman ever appointed to a Unitarian pulpit in the Republic of Ireland. This congregation has a recorded history of over three hundred and fifty years, and Bridget Spain now takes her place in a line of distinguished and committed ministers who have served this church, and this city, well. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, many of them displayed courage that sometimes had to be physical as well as intellectual. In those years it was not easy to think independently in public, and those who did so often suffered for it. In 1665 the Irish Act of Uniformity was passed, making it compulsory to use the Book of Common Prayer in public worship. Two Dublin clergy of the established church refused to do this because they could not, and would not, subscribe to a set creed. They were Samuel Winter and Samuel Mather, both also senior academics of Trinity College. As a result they forfeited their livings, and, with their congregations, went out on their own. The new independent congregation they established later moved to Eustace Street, and found its final home in this church in Stephens Green. If we were tempted to argue that these well-connected men were already established intellectual figures in the city and that while they might lose their livings their persons were not too much at risk, we might consider another case, that of Thomas Emlyn, a young junior minister in the Dissenting congregation in Wood Street, the congregation from which this one is even more directly descended. In 1702 he published his book A Humble Inquiry into the Scripture Account of Jesus Christ in which he described and explained his personal inability to believe the doctrine of the Trinity. He refused to retract and was tried for blasphemy, found guilty, and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of £1,000. He couldn’t afford to pay, and had to spend a second year in prison, in conditions of extreme discomfort. However, he was allowed to preach to the other prisoners on Sundays, and his faithful Wood Street congregation used to go along to hear him. Another of our ministers who was at what we might call the cutting edge of independent theological thought was John Abernethy, in Antrim. Radical and liberal, he was one of the Ulster Presbyterian ministers who in 1726 refused to sign – or subscribe to – the Westminster Confession of Faith which demanded adherence to the rigid doctrines of Calvinism. Abernethy was one of the original ‘non-subscribers’, and thus a founder-member of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church to which our own congregations in Dublin and Cork belong. Most interestingly from our historical perspective, John Abernethy afterwards became minister in Dublin, coming to Emlyn’s former congregation in Wood Street, and thereby laying the foundations of what was to become a time-honoured interchange of ministers, ideas and support that has existed ever since between our sister churches North and South. John Abernethy’s intellectual independence and his hatred of bigotry in both religion and politics was echoed in the 19th century by another of our outstanding ministers, James Martineau, an Englishman, who was appointed to Dublin’s Eustace Street congregation in 1828. He became eligible for an annual grant paid directly by Parliament. Because he felt so strongly about the systematic oppression of Catholicism in this country, he couldn’t accept the grant, and his principled refusal of it led to his having to leave Dublin after only four years. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries women began to be admitted to the Unitarian ministry, and courage of a different order was demanded of many of them. They had to struggle against huge odds, working against a background of deep-rooted prejudice against the education of women at all, let alone the appointment of women to positions traditionally held only by men. To give just one example – Gertrude von Petzold, the first woman to be appointed to the Unitarian ministry in England in 1904, studied in Manchester College Oxford, and initially her fellow students, who were of course all male, refused to have her sitting at the same refectory table with them. She later wrote these words: ‘The early [Christian] church put women on the same spiritual level with men, but asceticism and priest-craft reduced them to quasi-bondage, silenced their prophecy and decried their service. Let the church of the twentieth century return them their right to prophesy and minister’. Well, twentieth century Unitarianism has achieved that. Thanks to the courage of those women and the people who supported them, gender equilibrium has been achieved and is quite simply no longer an issue for us. Our denomination is in the happy position of taking it absolutely for granted that ministers can be either women or men. Gertrude von Petzold and her successors have demonstrated how the ministry of women can complement the ministry of men to the extent that the denomination as a whole has benefited immeasurably. So, then, all in the garden is rosy, you might say. Bridget is unlikely to forfeit her livelihood, or face imprisonment, if she takes an unorthodox stand in theological or political or social opinion. We won’t have to go to prison to hear her preach. She won’t be expected to sit at a separate table from the men. But there’s no room for complacency. The challenges to our rational liberal tolerant religious viewpoint aren’t over; the twenty-first century is just applying pressures of a different kind. To maintain a liberal religious viewpoint would seem on the face of it to be straightforward enough in today’s world. But liberal attitudes are under fire – how often do we hear the scornful words ‘wishy-washy’ liberalism – and at worst they are in some quarters held responsible for the breakdown of society. And it doesn’t help that many people, both individuals and groups, who claim to have liberal views are showing disturbing signs of intolerance towards those who disagree with them. We take freedom of thought for granted now. But how long will we be able to go on doing this? The rise of extremist religious views both in Islam and in the Christian Right is becoming so marked, and seems so implacable, that the time may be coming when we may have to claim freedom of thought for ourselves all over again. We have established that reason is the lynch-pin of our denomination. Or have we? In the 18th and 19th centuries it seemed that all problems could be solved by reason and that society could be improved, indeed perfected, by a combination of intelligence and logical thinking. That touching trust in reason no longer holds; the range and scale of disasters in the 20th century (and followed up so far in this one) caused by both human folly and viciousness have meant that reason has a lot of ground to make up. And what about our touchstone, tolerance? How do we stand with that one? The demands made on tolerance are increasing daily, to the extent that its very value is being called into question. Against today’s background of permissiveness and moral indecision, we have to decide where tolerance lapses into mere indifference and where – and how - we draw the line. We have to decide what we do when we offer tolerance to others and our tolerance is taken as weakness and exploited. How do we handle that? Are there even circumstances – and in today’s world we surely have to ask ourselves such questions – in which fostering a climate of tolerance could actually contribute to extremism by allowing it space to flourish? These are among the present and future challenges that our ministers are facing. Bridget and her fellow-ministers need our prayers and our wholehearted support. But churches are made up of congregations too. And, speaking on behalf of this historic congregation of Dublin which has survived the vicissitudes of three and a half centuries, I know that throughout the months and years of her ministry among us Bridget can count on our prayers, our commitment, our support and our love. Jennifer Flegg 10th February 2007 Dublin Unitarian Church Cover